• A major Western drone firm says working in Ukraine is key to getting gear to the standard NATO needs.
• ORQA is partnering with Ukraine's industry to co-produce drone systems, including for the NATO market.
• Its CEO said Ukraine has battlefield experience and operational excellence that can shape gear for NATO.

A Western company developing drone technology for NATO militaries says that working in Ukraine is the best way to ensure its gear meets the alliance's needs for a future fight.

ORQA, a Croatian company that makes drones and drone technology, including controllers, receivers, goggles, video equipment, and flight simulators, already supplies parts and systems to two dozen NATO allies. But it wants to draw on Ukraine's battlefield experience to improve its products.

Working in Ukraine "creates an opportunity to really channel this sort of operational expertise to shape these products. And then these products can be made to a standard that NATO demands," CEO Srđan Kovačević told Business Insider.

ORQA produces components used by Ukrainian defense tech company General Cherry and is partnering with the firm to jointly make drone systems and spread Ukraine's drone expertise.

The war in Ukraine is the most intense drone war ever fought, and getting feedback from the battlefield provides critical insight into what soldiers need most.

"If I'm being blunt, there are only a few parts of the world where you can actively shoot down these unmanned aerial threats in a real-world environment," Kovačević told Business Insider.

That same drive has prompted Western defense companies, ranging from small start-ups to major primes, to set up manufacturing facilities, repair hubs, and offices in Ukraine, seeking battlefield feedback to improve their technology faster.

ORQA is also seeking to better understand how Ukraine's defense industry scales, moves quickly, and works in wartime.

Ukrainian defense firms are producing drones and other weapons at a much faster rate than many of their Western counterparts.

Kovačević said that "the West has a tremendous amount to learn from Ukraine," saying that the "operational excellence that Ukrainian defense forces have developed is unparalleled in the Western world."

He said that while the West "has a very deep technology expertise," it lacks "this lived experience of taking that technology and applying it to the operational reality of the 21st-century warfare."

"Now," he said, "it's time to merge the two and emerge better off on both sides of this partnership."

General Cherry is one of Ukraine's biggest drone companies and has announced partnerships with other Western defense tech companies.

ORQA and General Cherry intend to manufacture in both countries, supplying NATO and its allies with Ukrainian-developed counter-drone technology while expanding domestic production of drone components in Ukraine.

Kovačević said Ukrainian companies like General Cherry have "immensely valuable lived experience of building and scaling under fire," something that is often "neglected by Western companies," but they can learn.

The significant "volumes that Ukrainian drone companies are able to produce really dwarf anything that's happening in the West right now," he added.

Western leaders are encouraging industrial collaboration, and NATO has launched programs to bring Ukrainian and allied defense companies together.

ORQA isn't alone in looking to Ukraine's extensive battlefield experience to develop better weapons for NATO. Latvia-based Origin Robotics, for example, makes BLAZE interceptor drones purchased by several NATO militaries and BEAK, a drone-launched precision-guided weapon used by Ukrainian forces.

Its CEO, Agris Kipurs, previously told Business Insider that the company takes lessons from its work in Ukraine, "but we adapt those weapons systems specifically to be used in a NATO country. And NATO countries and the armies of NATO countries are our customers. That is the user we build for."

Kovačević said Ukrainian technology can't simply be transplanted into NATO militaries. Ukraine has had to develop weapons at breakneck speed and make do with what's available.

NATO, however, has time to take operational knowledge, contextualize it for alliance forces, and build these products to the necessary standards using Western technology, he said.

Kovačević said the goal of these industrial partnerships is to supply NATO without undermining Ukraine's ability to meet its own wartime needs.

ORQA also aims to boost Ukraine's domestic production of drone components and reduce its reliance on foreign suppliers.

Ukraine is "relying heavily on non-Ukrainian and non-European supply chains," Kovačević said, adding that reducing that dependence is strategically important. ORQA says it manufactures key components in-house and avoids Chinese-made parts to strengthen its supply chain.

Sergei Kiriyenko, first deputy chief of staff of the Russian Presidential Administration, set the goals for the Ukraine strand of the operation, launched in early 2023 under the codename "Uganda." Alexander Kharichev, now head of the Kremlin's Directorate for Monitoring and Analysis of Social Processes, oversaw it, according to hacked correspondence published by The Insider on 21 October.

Doppelgänger disguises Russian narratives as local news through cloned media sites, fake accounts, paid ads, and fabricated videos. The FBI named Kiriyenko among its orchestrators in 2024, and its contractor, the Social Design Agency (SDA), run by Ilya Gambashidze, is still expanding, now targeting AI chatbots. The new files go inside the Ukraine campaign and show the operation reporting even exposed fakes to the Kremlin as achievements.

Telegram channels posing as Ukrainian

An internal briefing on narratives says the project ran its Telegram channels on the principles of agent work and psychological operations, the Russian version of the investigation shows. Early on, the team decided to disguise all its outlets as Ukrainian and to run its campaigns without direct Russian propaganda. Every channel carried Ukrainian news to look unconnected to Russia. Dropping pro-Ukrainian themes, the briefing warned, would eventually expose the client and wreck the whole plan.

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Russia-linked bot networks kept their weekly rhythm after drone strikes on three Yandex data centers—disinformation monitor LetsData

Four goals and a can of stew

Kiriyenko set four goals: discredit Ukraine's military and political leadership, split its elites, demoralize its army, and disorganize its population. The SDA prepared the project's pitch and carried out the work.

Political strategist Alexander Asafov proposed fakes of his own: in May 2023, that soldiers were bribing commanders to avoid the front, and in January 2024, that Ukraine was pulling air defenses back to Kyiv to protect the authorities.

After an Il-76 military transport crashed in Belgorod Oblast on 24 January 2024, Moscow claimed it had been carrying Ukrainian prisoners of war. Kharichev's subordinate Yevgeny Kazakov, chairing a meeting in his place, proposed sending a fake to the widows of Ukrainian soldiers: "They died for an expensive Il-76—the Russians have few of those." The idea was dropped.

The same meeting produced another fake, and three days later the team launched it: that recruitment centers had sent widows a can of stewed meat with a little flag as compensation. The same producers also oversaw letters falsely attributed to Deputy Defense Minister Nataliia Kalmykova, the Russian version says.

Debunks filed as results

The SDA collected coverage of its work in a folder for the Kremlin. It filed the "Zelensky's yacht" story, which JD Vance, then a US senator and now US Vice President, echoed, together with its debunk. The report also included a TikTok campaign about former Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov's family that the BBC had already exposed.

The Insider concludes that the team has had more failures than successes. The US sanctioned Gambashidze and the SDA in March 2024, and the UK followed in October.

• Russia looks to be moving toward 3D printed cruise missiles for its next era of air attacks on Ukraine.
• The threat could be so major, turbojet Shaheds would seem like a small problem, one drone guru said.
• GUR recently posted details of the Filin, a cheap Russian missile reported to fly as fast as 500 mph.

Russia's next big bet in the air war will likely move past jet-powered Shaheds to a deep arsenal of new cruise missiles, two of Ukraine's most prominent drone experts warned on Thursday.

Serhii "Flash" Beskrestnov and Serhii Sternenko wrote separately on their Telegram channels about the Filin, an 11-foot Russian winged cruise missile that Ukraine's military intelligence service recently unveiled.

These cheap weapons possess superior capabilities that would easily overshadow the threat posed by the Shahed, according to the pair, both former drone advisors to Ukraine's defense ministry.

"The mass use of this type of aerial attack weapon is what awaits us very soon," wrote Sternenko, who runs a major foundation that crowdfunds for Ukraine's military, in a Telegram post.

"Then we will remember the jet Shaheds only as a small problem compared to this," he added.

Beskrestnov, a drone analyst, said he had "long predicted that our adversary is betting on cheap cruise missiles for the future, not on jet Shaheds."

He wrote on his Telegram channel that the Filin can fly faster, maneuver better, and carry a heavier payload than Russia's current turbojet drones,

"They do not need drone ports, many of them can be launched from helicopters and UAVs. And most importantly, they can be produced from Russian components," Beskrestnov added.

A strike at nearly 500 mph for cheap

On Wednesday, Ukraine's military intelligence agency, GUR, released extensive details on the Filin, which it said Russia had begun deploying at the end of summer 2026.

The Filin, it said, is the "continuation of the trend of the Russian military-industrial complex to develop inexpensive air attack weapons with jet propulsion and ground launch."

The ground-launched missile can carry a 100kg warhead, and Russia has said that it can fly at speeds of almost 500 mph at a range of 745 miles. By comparison, the Kremlin's most advanced jet-powered drone deployed so far, the Geran-5, is known to fly at a maximum speed of 370 mph.

The Filin can also fly at "ultra-low altitudes" and as high as 3.7 miles, GUR said.

Similar to Russia's Shahed drones, the Filin features a carbon and fiberglass fuselage, with some of its parts produced via 3D printing, the intelligence service added.

And as with turbojet Shaheds, GUR also said that the Filin is filled with foreign electronics in its flight controller, inertial navigation system, equipment control unit, and counter-jamming hardware.

The agency listed 35 components from the US, including transistors and converters; 22 from China; and 13 more from Japan, Switzerland, Taiwan, and the Netherlands.

Notably, GUR said the Filin's engine is Russian-made, compared to the Chinese engines used on many of Moscow's turbojet drones. The same engine has been found on other recently unveiled Russian missiles, such as the air-launched Kover and Monochrome.

Much of Russia's ability to reduce the cost of its new cruise missiles is owed to its use of commercial engines and components. Another high-profile Russian missile that also uses civilian tech is the Banderol, which emerged in the spring of 2025 and has been straining Ukraine's air defense networks in the last few months.

The Banderol flies more slowly and has a shorter range than the Filin, but it still reaches a max speed of 435 mph, making it much harder for Ukraine to intercept with drones. Its estimated price is $150,000 per unit — about a sixteenth the cost of a traditional Kh-101 cruise missile — so it's easier to mass-produce.

The frequent use of weapons like the Banderol over the summer has led to fears that Russia will lean into its tactic, often nicknamed "missile spam," to keep pushing Ukrainian air defenses.

"What is the Air Force command doing now to build up countermeasures in advance?" Sternenko wrote on Wednesday about the missile threat.