By Cassell Bryan-Low<\/p>\n
LONDON, July 12 (Reuters) – Germany is funding 50,000 attack drones for Ukraine, a source familiar with the matter said, in an order that \u200cmarks one of the biggest known purchases of drones for Kyiv by a \u200cWestern government.<\/p>\n
Ukraine has relied heavily on a range of unmanned vehicles during the more than four-year-old war against \u200bRussia, and it is producing millions of drones annually as Ukrainian forces conduct thousands of drone strikes each day.<\/p>\n
The attack drone order involves Shrike first-person-view (FPV) drones made by major Ukrainian manufacturer SkyFall and equipped with software from U.S. defence technology firm Auterion designed to autonomously track \u200cand hit moving targets in \u2060the final phase of the flight.<\/p>\n
Auterion CEO Lorenz Meier confirmed the size of the contract, adding that it was worth about \u20ac90 million ($103 million) \u2060and was funded by a European country. Meier told Reuters some of the drones had already been delivered to Ukraine’s government with the rest due for dispatch this year.<\/p>\n
SkyFall confirmed Germany’s involvement, \u200bbut \u200bsaid the company could not comment on the \u200bdetails of the purchase.<\/p>\n
Germany’s Defence Ministry \u200cdeclined to comment, citing operational security.<\/p>\n
Ukraine’s Defence Ministry also declined to comment.<\/p>\n
SHRIKE CATCHES PENTAGON’S EYE<\/p>\n
The Shrike, a low-cost drone that has been deployed in Ukraine since 2023, recently gained prominence overseas.<\/p>\n
A version called Shrike 10-F produced by SkyFall with UK company Skycutter recently topped the leaderboard in the first round of a Pentagon-run competition as part of a $1.1 billion \u200cinitiative to buy hundreds of thousands of one-way attack \u200bdrones. Auterion said its software was being used \u200bin several entries in the competition.<\/p>\n
Meier said \u200bAuterion was helping to supply a total of 100,000 drones for \u200cUkraine this year in partnership with different \u200bhardware makers, funded by \u200bseveral Western governments.<\/p>\n
That also includes a $50 million Pentagon contract to provide 33,000 drones, which he said have been delivered to Ukraine.<\/p>\n
Last month, Britain said it would provide \u200b150,000 drones to Ukraine \u200cthis year as part of a broader \u00a3752 million ($1.01 billion) funding package.<\/p>\n
($1 = 0.8762 euros)<\/p>\n
($1 = \u200b0.7460 pounds)<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Cassell Bryan-Low; Additional reporting by Sabine Siebold in Berlin and \u200bDaniel Flynn in Kyiv;Editing by Helen Popper)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Cassell Bryan-Low LONDON, July 12 (Reuters) – Germany is funding 50,000 attack drones for Ukraine, a source…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15990,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[530,1585,195,6705,1348,26,6704],"class_list":["post-15989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","tag-attack-drones","tag-defence-ministry","tag-germany","tag-shrike","tag-skyfall","tag-ukraine","tag-western-government"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15989"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15989\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15990"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}