Down a stairway and behind an unmarked door, dozens of men toil in a vast basement workshop in Ukraine. Wearing headlamps, they lean over circuit boards as wisps of smoke rise from soldering irons.
A year ago, most Ukrainian defense companies could not produce these boards, which are key ingredients in small exploding drones. But this advance, among others, has helped the country reach a milestone: It can now make drones with no components imported from China.
Ukraine is prioritizing self-sufficiency in the production of drones as they increasingly dominate the battlefield. They now account for more than 90 percent of Russian casualties, according to Maj. Robert Brovdi, commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces.
Drones are also playing a major role in the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran. The Iranian military has attacked countries in the region with hundreds of its Shahed drones, and the United States has used its own version of the Shahed for the first time in combat.
Ukraine will not be mass-producing drones with no Chinese components anytime soon, because it’s still much cheaper to use them. Given China’s dominance of global manufacturing, it is hard to define any drone as truly “China-free.” Many components made outside China still contain Chinese parts or raw materials.
But Ukrainian officials believe it is important to make drones with as few components from China as possible, and to be able to continue making drones if Chinese supplies should be cut off.
Ukraine is one of many nations that have been working to reduce their reliance on Chinese supply chains. The United States has limited the use of Chinese products in military hardware and other critical systems over security concerns. In addition, global shocks in recent years have shown the vulnerabilities that come with making China the single source of any product.
“Given the risks of sourcing components from China, which is unfriendly to us, the main task is to produce them in Ukraine,” Major Brovdi said in an interview. “The strength of the Ukrainian manufacturer lies in the fact that import substitution has already taken place.”
Two companies in Ukraine that have built “China-free” drones were picked to compete for contracts in a Pentagon “drone dominance program” under which the United States plans to buy thousands of low-cost attack drones. One of the companies, Ukrainian Defense Drones Tech Corporation, where the men were soldering circuit boards in the basement workshop, was among 11 in all selected last week for possible American drone orders.
Ukraine Defense Drones makes most of its own components, and European suppliers fill most of the gaps.
That reflects a sea change over the course of the war. In the first year after the Russian invasion in February 2022, nearly all of Ukraine’s drones came from China.
As demand surged, Beijing imposed export restrictions in 2023 and expanded them in 2024. While China is officially neutral in the war, experts say that Beijing has given its partner Russia preferential access to components that can still be exported.
As the rules tightened, Ukraine resorted to middlemen to buy some parts, and Ukrainian companies began to view the Chinese market as increasingly unreliable. Kyiv turned its focus to building its own drones, and eventually to doing so with fewer Chinese components.
By 2024, the vast majority of drones that Ukraine sent to the front were assembled domestically — but still almost entirely with Chinese components. A year later, however, the share of parts from China in Ukraine’s drones had fallen to about 38 percent, according to the Ukrainian Council of Defense Industry and the Snake Island Institute, a think tank in Kyiv.
Ukraine still buys cheaper Chinese components because the Ukrainian military needs huge numbers of drones and has a limited budget to buy them. Drone missions fail at very high rates, another reason that Ukraine tries to keep costs down.
According to a Ukrainian official who asked for anonymity to discuss sensitive procurement issues, Ukrainian and Russian companies often buy parts from the same factories in China. Chinese bosses, the official said, keep a precise schedule at production sites so that Ukrainian and Russian buyers do not cross paths.
Col. Pavlo Palisa, the deputy head of Ukraine’s presidential office and a military adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky, said that Kyiv was scaling up domestic weapons production in part to strengthen its hand in peace negotiations.
“If we import, that means dependency, and any dependency means a weaker position,” he said in an interview.
Expanding the sources of components, Colonel Palisa said, would make China less likely to impose further export restrictions, knowing that they would have a limited effect. “When there are alternatives, they don’t act up as much,” he said.
Ukrainian Defense Drones, under the brand name F-Drones, produces exploding first-person-view quadcopter drones that have been used more than any other drone to destroy Russian heavy equipment.
“The country was saved by $500 drones,” said Hnat Buyakin, the company’s founder, referring to the beginning of the war in 2022, when Ukraine was at a heavy disadvantage to Russia in personnel and ammunition. Soldiers improvised, modifying cheap Chinese drones in makeshift workshops along the front line to drop handmade bombs.
Ukrainian Defense Drones began making drones in 2023. Initially, all of its components were Chinese. Within a year, however, it had localized production of carbon fiber frames and antennas.
It is precision work. “These antennas are a separate kind of magic — a millimeter deviation in the wire and it doesn’t work properly,” Mr. Buyakin said. The company now produces up to 15,000 antennas a day.
By 2025, Ukrainian Defense Drones had expanded to produce flight controllers, speed regulators, radio modems and video transmission systems. Essentially, all its components were made in Ukraine except for the cameras.
The company has since gained technology for cameras, too, which it hopes to produce in Europe. For now, it buys cameras from another Ukrainian company that imports parts from Europe.
Mr. Buyakin described the limits to “China-free” production. While his company makes carbon frames for drones, for example, the carbon itself is imported, usually from China, because that is cheaper.
Batteries that power drones are also still largely produced in China, which dominates supply chains for battery materials like lithium and rare-earth metals.
Ukraine has lithium deposits, but they are undeveloped. Investing in them has been a goal of a Ukrainian agreement with the United States on mineral development.
Ukraine’s goals do not end at producing drones without Chinese components. Designs in Ukraine are updated monthly based on battlefield performance, a contrast with the slow pace of traditional weapons production.
In his company’s move toward China-free manufacturing, Mr. Buyakin said, “We deliberately chose the most difficult path because Ukraine is now fighting for its place in a technological war, and we are gaining this experience with our own blood.”
Nataliia Novosolova contributed reporting.
Maria Varenikova covers Ukraine and its war with Russia.
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