Ukraine Is Fighting Russia With Toy Drones and Duct-Taped Bombs

Thousands of Ukraine’s deadliest weapons were made on the top three floors of a residential high-rise in Kyiv. The space, which used to be an office for an IT company, contained workstations littered with quadcopters in various stages of assembly, accompanied by clusters of electronic components and circuit boards strewn about the desktops. “It was the cheapest space we could find,” Oleksiy Babenko, founder and chief executive officer of Vyriy Drone, said with a shrug.

The only reason Babenko granted Bloomberg Businessweek access to the facility, which churned out more than 6,000 exploding drones a month, was because his company was about to relocate to a larger space that would triple its capacity. The threat of becoming a target for Russian cruise missiles makes most Ukrainian drone producers publicity shy.