Ukraine has turned buying weapons into something closer to online shopping. One in five drones bought by Ukraine's Defense Procurement Agency now reaches troops through DOT-Chain Defence, a state digital marketplace established in 2025 that lets combat units order what they need directly, the Defense Ministry says.

Drone technology changes so fast that a weapon ordered through months of paperwork can be obsolete before it arrives, so Ukraine built a marketplace that puts the choice in the hands of the units that fight. Launched in July 2025, DOT-Chain Defence now serves more than 500 combat units.

Unlike the agency’s other channels, central competitive tenders and fixed procurement lists, the marketplace lets commanders pick from a catalog themselves. The system works like an online store, where the military spends state funds to decide exactly what the state supplies them.

From a catalog to the trenches in eight days

Speed is the point of the model. When an item is in stock, the average time from a unit’s order to shipment is eight days, rising to about a month and a half for pre-orders, the ministry notes.

“Delivery speed is especially important for unmanned systems, because technology in this field develops dynamically,” DOT-Chain Defence chief Artem Romaniukov says.

Also, he states that makers and soldiers constantly rework designs to beat new countermeasures.

The catalog spans the main types of unmanned aerial vehicles, FPV drones, bombers and fixed-wing aircraft, along with their munitions, ground robotic systems and electronic-warfare gear.

Who carries the paperwork now

The shift moves the burden off the fighters. A unit builds its own order in DOT-Chain Defence, and the agency handles the procurement side, signing contracts with manufacturers and making payments. That means that purchases are completed in a few clicks.

In the first nine months of 2026, Ukraine’s troops received more than a million drones and other equipment through this system, part of a drone-buying surge that reached about $8 billion in the first half of the year.

Ukraine’s Defense Procurement Agency has contracted about 5.5 times as many drones of various types in recent months as in the same period of 2025. It is roughly 300% more over the year as a whole, the Defense Ministry said.

Drones are the weapons this war runs on, from short-range strikes to hits deep inside Russia, and Ukraine has raced to build and buy more of them while sparing its troops. The agency contracted for about $8 billion worth of drones in the first half of 2026 alone, double the amount for the same period last year.

The ministry wants to arm the force at every level, Defense Minister Yevhenii Khmara stresses. Deep-strike drones hit targets far inside Russia, while middle-strike drones kill enemy drone crews and burn logistics and command posts, lowering the risk to Ukrainian soldiers.

“Technology and having enough of these systems raise combat effectiveness and at the same time reduce the risks for our soldiers,” Khmara said.

FPV drones lead the surge

The sharpest growth is in FPV drones, the cheap first-person-view quadcopters that do much of the killing on the front. Contracting for them in 2026 already exceeds the total for all of 2025 by 54%, and deliveries have risen almost 3.7 times, the ministry notes.

International support and the scaling of Ukraine’s own defense industry made the jump possible, Khmara adds. Much of the buying now runs through the DOT-Chain Defense marketplace, where units select what they need, and the agency handles contracts and logistics, cutting the average delivery time for in-stock items to 9 days.

Making supply predictable

The ministry is trying to make deliveries steadier, Khmara explains. It is aligning the front’s needs, purchase planning, and the production capacity of the Ukrainian industry, making supply more predictable.

Predictable contracting lets manufacturers build their production lines step by step, plan logistics and order components in advance, he says. The ministry frames the push as a larger order book for the domestic industry and a way to scale the solutions that work in combat.

Ukraine is canceling part of its planned military purchases and moving the money to other priorities. Ukraine's Defense Ministry has announced that it, together with the General Staff and the Logistics Forces Command, will free about $346 million by terminating some weapons contracts and dropping some planned purchases.

What the army planned to buy in 2024 and 2025 may no longer be suitable for the front, the ministry noted, because technology and tactics change quickly. The review comes four days after the Ukrainian government drew about $1.1 billion from the defense reserve to pay soldiers in October amid a looming economic crisis.

The ministry gives five reasons for the review: some weapons no longer match combat tasks, certain suppliers cannot build the planned volume, certain models have not been codified, partners already cover some needs, and cheaper means can perform specific jobs in larger numbers.

"For us, there is one criterion: does the item work for results in combat today. Every hryvnia released from irrelevant contracts must reach the troops as the weapons needed right now and in the right place," Col. Yurii Pohribnyi, commander of the Logistics Forces, says.

The procurement agency calls each producer

The General Staff set the final list of purchases for review, and the ministry forwarded the documents to the Defense Procurement Agency to implement the decision. For specific items, delivery volumes were adjusted rather than canceled, which the contracts allow when needs change.

Affected producers have been informed, and the agency is discussing each item with suppliers based on the status and payments of each contract. Artem Romaniuk, acting director of the agency, has explained that further steps on each contract will depend on the army's current needs and the contract terms. The list of weapons stays secret for security reasons.

Funds freed up by terminating contracts and canceling planned purchases will be redirected to the urgent needs of Ukraine’s Defense Forces.