Ukraine plans to sign drone agreements with at least seven NATO countries before the end of 2026, and some signatures could come as soon as this week’s alliance summit in Ankara. Davyd Aloian, deputy secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, set the target in an interview published Monday.

Six countries have already signed: Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Azerbaijan, Latvia, and Lithuania. The agreements carry the name “drone deals,” but drone deliveries are not part of them yet. Kyiv is selling the system around the aircraft: radar coverage, sensor networks, ground stations, and four years of experience shooting down Iranian-designed Shahed attack drones at scale.

DroneXL flagged this export turn months before it reached NATO. We reported in March that the Wild Hornets Sting was the most requested counter-drone weapon in the Gulf while Ukrainian law still blocked its sale, and we covered the April 28 framework from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that first permitted controlled exports of surplus systems. The NATO push is the next stage of that same policy.

The Product Is A System, Not A Drone

Ukraine’s drone deals package expertise and component access rather than finished aircraft: partner countries receive an expert assessment of what a working counter-drone shield requires, including radar coverage and trained crews, while deliveries of Ukrainian-built drones stay off the table for now.

Aloian told the Guardian the initiative covers far more than drones: the knowledge and the access to components that form Ukraine’s defensive system matter more than the airframes. “The interceptor drone is only a drone,” Aloian said. Shooting down a Shahed takes sub-components, sensors, ground stations, and above all radar, plus crews who know how to run them together.

The Guardian describes one Gulf country that bought interceptors from a Western firm which had developed the product with Ukrainian manufacturers. After delivery, requests kept coming back to Kyiv for advice on how to operate the systems. The hardware showed up without the capability.

Mike Kofman, an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told the paper that big-picture integration is where Ukraine is most useful, whether a partner wants to organize air defense or build a strike capability. That matches what Ukraine’s manufacturers have built at home, where firms like MaXon Systems now field interceptors that automate most of the Shahed kill cycle and feed off radar-linked control stations.

Gulf Attacks Made Ukraine’s Sales Pitch For It

The drone diplomacy began in spring, when Iranian Shahed attacks during the US-Israeli war on Iran caught Gulf air defenses unprepared and sent multimillion-dollar Patriot missiles chasing drones that cost tens of thousands of dollars to build, an exchange rate Ukraine had already solved out of necessity.

Iran mostly fired a less sophisticated Shahed variant than the upgraded models Russia launches at Ukrainian cities, and Gulf defenses still struggled. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar signed agreements with Kyiv in the aftermath. Ukraine’s process starts with an expert assessment of the partner’s operational and tactical gaps, delivered as a report. The partner then decides whether to order Ukrainian products later, subject to available production capacity, or buy them elsewhere.

None of this surprised DroneXL readers. We covered the Gulf monarchies and US commanders lining up for Ukraine’s Shahed killers in May, and we broke down the interceptor economics the Gulf was ignoring back in March: interceptors at roughly $2,500 against Patriot rounds that cost millions. Ukraine’s industry produces at least five distinct interceptor models and remains focused on domestic needs, which is why these deals sell knowledge first and hardware maybe later.

Stray Ukrainian Drones Pushed The Baltics To Sign

Latvia and Lithuania became the first NATO members inside the program after both learned firsthand what a stray long-range drone does to national politics: Latvia’s government fell in May over a drone strike on an oil depot, and air raid sirens sounded in Lithuania after a similar incident.

The Guardian reports that two long-range Ukrainian drones, pushed off course by Russian electronic warfare, hit an oil storage facility in Rezekne, Latvia. The political scandal that followed brought down the government in May. Latvia signed its drone deal soon after, and last week announced a joint drone production facility that will open in the country’s east. Lithuania signed as well, after off-course Ukrainian drones entered its airspace under similar circumstances.

Read that sequence again. Both countries signed with the country whose drones caused the incidents. That only sounds backwards until you accept the premise underneath it: nobody else can teach them how to stop this from happening. Alliance members started learning interceptor doctrine from Kyiv in informal settings back in 2025, through Danish intercept demonstrations and UK co-production plans. The Baltic deals turn that learning into signed policy.

Ankara Is The Next Signing Table

Several more NATO countries have already expressed interest, Aloian said, and some agreements may be signed at the NATO summit in Ankara on July 7 and 8, where the alliance’s Defence Industry Forum has a drone-focused session scheduled for the opening morning.

Beyond the drone deals sits a more ambitious and less certain project: a European analogue to the Patriot system capable of stopping Russian ballistic missiles, the weakest point in Ukraine’s air defenses. Zelenskyy has made that missile a top priority, and Aloian said discussions are running at the political level and among major European arms companies.

Alyona Getmanchuk, Ukraine’s ambassador to NATO, told the Guardian that allies who hesitated a year ago at the idea of Ukraine as a security provider now open conversations with that framing themselves.

DroneXL’s Take

The customer list tells this story better than any communiqué. Four years ago, Kyiv spent its diplomatic capital asking allies for Patriot batteries. This week it heads to a NATO summit as the vendor, with Gulf monarchies signed and seven alliance members in the pipeline. The buyer became the supplier because the product, experience under fire, cannot be manufactured anywhere else.

I watched this reversal take physical form on the Düsseldorf show floor in March, where Ukrainian firms marketed Shahed interceptors to European buyers with combat footage running on loop. The airframes were the least interesting thing on those tables. Every booth was really selling the system behind the aircraft: the radar feed and the operator pipeline. Aloian just confirmed that sales strategy is now national policy.

When we published “Ukraine’s $2,500 Interceptor Drones Are Rewriting Air Defense Doctrine As NATO Scrambles To Learn” in October 2025, the learning was still informal. Nine months later it is a signed instrument with a target number and a summit signing window. The uncomfortable part for Washington and Brussels is what happened in between: Western capitals spent those years debating procurement rules and country-of-origin bans while the only combat-proven counter-Shahed curriculum was written in Kyiv, under fire. Buying that knowledge now is the right call. It is also late, and everyone signing in Ankara knows it.

Watch Ankara on July 7 and 8. Aloian says signatures are possible at the summit itself, and the Defence Industry Forum runs its drone session on the opening morning of July 7. If the seven-country target is real, the paper trail starts this week. December 31 is the scorecard.

Source: The Guardian

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.