{"id":211008,"date":"2025-12-02T07:56:10","date_gmt":"2025-12-02T07:56:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/211008\/"},"modified":"2025-12-02T07:56:10","modified_gmt":"2025-12-02T07:56:10","slug":"ukrainian-arms-behemoth-crumbles-as-drone-makers-rise-to-wartime-challenge-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/211008\/","title":{"rendered":"Ukrainian arms behemoth crumbles as drone makers rise to wartime challenge \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cI put my whole life into it,\u201d Viktor Yarovoi (78) says of the Southern Machine Building Factory in Dnipro in eastern Ukraine<\/a>, where he has worked for more than 50 years.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut now so much has been destroyed. Half of one building has been standing <\/b>without a roof for 1\u00bd years since it was hit. People say, \u2018Why rebuild when [the Russians] will just bomb it again?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The plant \u2013 known by the abbreviations Pivdenmash in Ukrainian and Yuzhmash in Russian \u2013 is renowned in both warring countries for having been one of the Soviet Union\u2019s main builders of intercontinental ballistic missiles and space rockets.<\/p>\n

Last year the factory was the first target for Russia\u2019s new Oreshnik ballistic missile, but the choice was probably symbolic \u2013 it is the only Ukrainian defence plant that ordinary Russians would know \u2013 rather than for any vital role that it now plays in Kyiv\u2019s war effort.<\/p>\n

The strike last November did relatively little damage because there were no explosives in the Oreshnik\u2019s warheads, adding to the impression that the attack was above all a propaganda effort, to send a message to incoming US president Donald Trump<\/a> and to give the impression that Russia\u2019s defence industry was thriving while Ukraine\u2019s was on its last legs, and even once mighty giants like the Dnipro plant were now vulnerable.<\/p>\n

\"AA file picture of rockets assembled in the Yuzhmash factory, Dnipro. Photograph: Antoine Gyori\/Sygma\/Getty Images \"UkrainianUkrainian president Leonid Kuchma and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin are guided through Yuzhmash missile factory by company director Yuri Alekseev in 2001. Photograph: AFP via Getty Images <\/p>\n

\u201cWe had 50,000 or 60,000 workers in our heyday. It was a city within a city,\u201d says Yarovoi, who started out as a welder at Pivdenmash in 1969 and worked his way up to being a chief technical specialist in a pipe-building workshop.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf I\u2019d ever gone looking for another job and told them I\u2019d worked at the factory, then anyone would have taken me with pleasure. It was a byword for discipline and quality,\u201d he says. \u201cThere was always a terrible fear that, God forbid, a missile would fail because of some mistake that you had made.\u201d<\/p>\n

The factory was built at the end of the second World War<\/a>, at least in part by German prisoners of war, and its immense scale \u2013 covering 744 hectares \u2013 reflected the military-industrial ambitions of the rising Soviet superpower.<\/p>\n

After starting out as a car factory, Pivdenmash was turned into a missile production facility in the early 1950s and worked closely with the neighbouring Southern Design Bureau on top-secret defence and space projects for the Kremlin, which decreed in 1959 that the city \u2013 then called Dnipropetrovsk \u2013 would be closed to foreign visitors.<\/p>\n

The city reopened to foreigners only in 1987, four years before the Soviet Union collapsed, replacing state control with a chaotic form of capitalism and plunging the industrial behemoths bequeathed to 15 successor states into immediate crisis.<\/p>\n

\"CycloneCyclone and Zenith rockets assembled in the Yuzhmash factory, Dnipro, in the 1990s . Photograph: Antoine Gyori\/Sygma\/Getty Images) <\/p>\n

Pivdenmash has limped along ever since: deals in new markets never matched the vast Soviet subsidies of old and the plant\u2019s deep historical ties with Russian industry have been destroyed by 11 years of conflict \u2013 starting with the Kremlin\u2019s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and escalating into full-scale war in 2022.<\/p>\n

Details about Pivdenmash and Dnipro\u2019s associated design bureau are wartime secrets, but development of a ballistic missile known as Hrim-2 (Thunder-2) is reportedly among the projects of the few thousand workers who are thought to remain.<\/p>\n

Such is the history, secrecy and size of the plant \u2013 and the frequency of Russian drone strikes on its territory \u2013 that rumours swirl about what might be going on in its deepest bunkers, which Russian media claim are repair shops for Ukrainian tanks.<\/p>\n

But just as tanks have been made to look antiquated by drones that can cripple them relatively easily and cheaply, so vast facilities like Pivdenmash seem like dinosaurs beside the low-key but efficient drone workshops that have sprung up all over Ukraine.<\/p>\n

\" Drones built by the Chaklun (Wizard) workshop in Dnipro in eastern Ukraine. Photograph: Courtesy of Chaklun <\/p>\n

\u201cThere were five of us on the project to start with in 2022 and now we have well over 100 workers … and we make thousands of drones a year,\u201d says Dmytro Panchenko, a co-founder of Dnipro-based drone builder Chaklun (Wizard).<\/p>\n

The group makes a range of drones for the Ukrainian military, including surveillance drones and interceptors that can bring down the highly destructive Shahed drones that Russia launches by the hundreds at cities across Ukraine nearly every night.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey have a good success rate,\u201d he says of the Chaklun interceptors.<\/p>\n

\u201cUkraine needs to scale up drone production and the training of pilots. We are intercepting enemy surveillance drones and some Shaheds, but not all of them, because we don\u2019t have enough drone teams on the battlefield.\u201d<\/p>\n

The collapse of Ukraine\u2019s ties with Russia crippled Pivdenmash, but Panchenko doubts that Ukraine\u2019s drone industry would suffer if the volatile Trump suddenly halted weapons supplies to make Kyiv sign an unfavourable peace deal with Russia.<\/p>\n

\u201cWestern technology is too expensive … and in fact many things are now being made in Ukraine that are more interesting than western or Chinese technology,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Panchenko feels no link between the cutting-edge Chaklun and Dnipro\u2019s storied history of arms production at Pivdenmash: \u201cI don\u2019t really see any continuity there. This is a new story, a new page in how war is waged.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cI put my whole life into it,\u201d Viktor Yarovoi (78) says of the Southern Machine Building Factory in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":211009,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[9,10,356,13,14,6,11,12,15,16,5,550,30114,7,8,2264,65,66,67],"class_list":{"0":"post-211008","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"tag-breaking-news","9":"tag-breakingnews","10":"tag-donald-trump","11":"tag-featured-news","12":"tag-featurednews","13":"tag-headlines","14":"tag-latest-news","15":"tag-latestnews","16":"tag-main-news","17":"tag-mainnews","18":"tag-news","19":"tag-russia","20":"tag-second-world-war","21":"tag-top-stories","22":"tag-topstories","23":"tag-ukraine-crisis","24":"tag-world","25":"tag-world-news","26":"tag-worldnews"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115648907700168293","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211008","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=211008"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211008\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/211009"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=211008"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=211008"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=211008"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}