The question is whether European industry can reproduce the model at the scale and range required, on a timeline that closes the gap rather than mirrors it.
Ukraine’s long-range drone industry did not exist before 2022. The campaign that now reaches deep into Russia is the product of forced choices:
The arsenal that emerged from those constraints now operates across four tiers. At tactical depth, Ukraine fields modified commercial drones and FPV systems for strikes up to 50 kilometers. The next tier reaches up to 1,000 kilometers and is built around platforms like the UJ-26 Bober. A more recent addition, the Sichen, was unveiled in April 2026 with a claimed range up to 1,400 kilometers and electronic-warfare resilience optimized for energy-infrastructure strikes. The third tier carries most of the deep-strike campaign. The AN-196 Liutyi, developed as a Ukrainian analog to the Shahed-136, has been used in strikes at distances over 1,700 kilometers from the Ukrainian border. Unit cost is reported at approximately $200,000. The Fire Point FP-1 occupies a similar range bracket at a fraction of the price, with reported unit costs around $55,000 and production runs reaching roughly 100 units per day. The fourth tier blends drones and cruise missiles. The FP-5 Flamingo, unveiled in August 2025, has a range of 3,000 kilometers, a 1,150-kilogram warhead, and a cruise speed of 900 km/h, with production scaling toward 2,500 missiles per year.
The way these systems operate has been refined alongside two years of adapting to Russian electronic warfare. A Ukrainian deep-strike package typically opens with mid-range drones targeting Russian air-defense radars and Pantsir or Tor batteries to degrade the air-defense umbrella along planned ingress corridors. Decoy drones, built from foam, plywood, or fiberglass and equipped with Luneburg lenses to replicate the radar return of a Liutyi or FP-1, follow on to saturate remaining batteries. To counter GPS jamming, navigation of strike drones increasingly relies on onboard machine vision rather than satellite signals.
The end result is a formidable deep strike capability born of necessity, one that is cheaper and less technologically sophisticated than deep strike platforms currently under development in the European Union. Can Brussels perform the same trick that Kyiv did?
What Europe Is Actually Building
European industry produces strike drones, but most existing production sits in the wrong category for plugging a deep-strike gap. The systems already in volume manufacturing are tactical platforms with ranges of 100 kilometers or less. At operational depth, 300 to 600 kilometers, the range relevant to striking rear-area targets, programs exist but are not yet in service. Beyond 1,000 kilometers, only France has a contracted project.
In Germany, Helsing manufactures the HX-2, an AI-guided kamikaze drone with a 100-kilometer range, designed to operate without GPS. The current production rate is 450 units per month.
MBDA received a development and low-rate production contract from the French Procurement agency in January 2026 for the One-Way Effector, a drone with a 500-kilometer range and a 40-kilogram warhead. Initial deliveries are scheduled for mid-2027, with potential scaling to 1,000 units per month at full production.
The multilateral effort under the European Long-Range Strike Approach is further behind. In February 2026, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom signed a Letter of Intent under ELSA to jointly develop the OWE 500 Plus, a 500-kilometer-class one-way strike drone. The programme remains in the concept and feasibility phase, with no industrial contract awarded. NATO launched a parallel effort under its High Visibility Project framework, with a different group of states (Denmark, Estonia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, and Turkey) collaborating on drone-based deep precision strike. Only Poland sits in both consortia, which produces multinational fragmentation at exactly the moment when alignment is most needed.
The United Kingdom is pursuing Project Brakestop, a ground-launched mobile cruise weapon with a 200 to 300 kilogram payload, a range exceeding 500 kilometers. Production contracts are planned for late 2026.
At the strategic deep-strike tier, beyond 1,000 kilometers, France is the only major European state with a contracted indigenous project. Renault and Turgis Gaillard are collaborating to produce the Chorus drone, a Shahed analog with a range exceeding 1,000 kilometers. If trials succeed, the contract could expand to roughly €1 billion over ten years, with delivery beginning in the summer of 2026 for concept validation.
The combined picture is meaningful tactical production paired with a near-empty deep-strike inventory. Operational-tier systems will enter service in 2027 and 2028. Strategic-tier drones are still at the validation stage.
Ukraine’s Role in European Procurement
The fastest available bridge across the European deep-strike gap does not run through indigenous European programs. It runs through Ukrainian systems produced under license within EU member states and is refined by battlefield feedback that no European manufacturer can replicate.
The German government launched the Build With Ukraine initiative, allocating approximately €2 billion for 2026 to subsidize Ukrainian defense manufacturing in Germany and in Ukraine. The first major output is Quantum Frontline Industries, a joint venture between the German firm Quantum Systems and the Ukrainian company Frontline Robotics, which began producing drones on German soil in March 2026. The plant is staffed largely by Ukrainian engineers and plans to scale to roughly 10,000 drones per year. Fire Point, the manufacturer of the FP-1 and FP-5 Flamingo, is establishing production in Denmark under a government-backed scheme to manufacture Ukrainian long-range drones and missiles on EU territory. Ukrspecsystems opened a UK factory to produce reconnaissance and interceptor drones. Romania and Ukraine launched a €200 million joint drone production project under the EU’s SAFE instrument.
Financial commitments to Ukrainian long-range strike production have grown sharply across 2026. At the April 2026 Ramstein meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, Germany pledged €300 million specifically for Ukrainian long-range strike capability with ranges up to 1,500 kilometers, plus an additional $600 million for middle-strike and deep-strike systems. Norway committed $661 million, the Netherlands $293 million, and Belgium $100 million for Ukrainian drone production. The European Commission formalized the approach in early May 2026 by launching the EU-Ukraine Drone Alliance, an industry-led initiative intended to connect European manufacturers and end-users with Ukrainian producers, share lessons from combat operations, and feed into the Member State-led Priority Capability Coalition on drones and counter-drone systems.
The reasoning is procurement timing. European indigenous deep-strike drones will not enter service in operationally relevant numbers before 2027 at the earliest. Ukrainian systems already exist, are combat-validated against the actor Europe is most concerned about, and can be produced at unit costs European industry is only beginning to approach. Producing them inside EU territory addresses the financing constraints European countries face when paying for production inside Ukraine, while compressing the timeline that indigenous programs cannot meet. For now, this is the only path producing meaningful deep-strike drone capacity on European territory before the end of the decade.
What Drones Cannot Do
Even with the licensing model in motion, drones cannot fully bridge the European deep-strike gap. Long-range one-way attack drones are well-suited to saturation campaigns against soft and semi-hardened targets at operational depth, such as oil refineries, fuel depots, airfields, logistics hubs, and ammunition warehouses. Their advantage is cost asymmetry combined with mass strikes. A defender intercepting a $50,000 drone with a $600,000 missile loses the economic exchange even when it wins the tactical one. But for hardened or distant strategic targets, drones remain inferior to cruise and ballistic missiles. Moreover, the payload gap is structural. A Tomahawk Block V carries a 450-kilogram warhead at speeds approaching 900 km/h. A Liutyi carries 75 kilograms, while an FP-1 even less. The Flamingo closes the payload gap on paper, but its accuracy data so far indicates that Fire Point has not yet solved the precision problem for heavy-payload drones.
Speed also constitutes an issue. A Liutyi cruising at around 200 km/h gives a defender enough time to engage with both interceptor drones and conventional air defense. A Tomahawk transiting at 880 km/h does not, and a hypersonic weapon at Mach 5 or higher certainly does not either. The Russian armed forces are now systematically fielding interceptor UAVs against Ukrainian deep-strike systems, and the cost gap that currently favors the attacker will narrow as those interceptors enter mass production. Drones, therefore, plug part of the deep-strike gap. They can credibly substitute for cruise missiles against fixed economic and military infrastructure, which is the bulk of what Ukraine has actually hit. They cannot substitute for cruise and ballistic missiles against the hardest targets, and they do not carry the deterrent weight that high-end strike systems convey to an adversary.
Drones, including Ukrainian-licensed systems produced inside the EU, can fill the operational-depth gap by 2027 and 2028. ELSA, Project Brakestop, and the UK’s Project Nightfall must still deliver to fill the strategic-depth gap by the early 2030s. Europe’s response to the missile gap, therefore, needs to operate on two tracks at once. The first is straightforward and uses tools that already exist: expand Build With Ukraine, accelerate the EU-Ukraine Drone Alliance toward concrete procurement, and convert national pledges into production lines on EU territory. The second is harder and requires what indigenous European deep-strike programs have so far lacked: industrial contracts. Without both tracks running, the next decade will produce a European force capable of harassing Russian rear areas without deterring Russian decision-makers.
