Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said drone cooperation between Kyiv and Washington will include a factory on American soil producing drones with Ukrainian technology, speaking in an interview with U.S. commentator Laura Loomer recorded at Mariinsky Palace and published on X on Friday, July 24. “We will build a great factory in the United States,” Zelenskyy said, adding that Ukraine wants joint production lines rather than one-off hardware sales.

The timing is not subtle. Zelenskyy meets President Donald Trump on Tuesday, July 28, and a separate source in Washington said the drone agreement’s details were still being worked out ahead of those talks. When DroneXL covered the UDD factory announcement in Ohio on July 2, the pattern was already visible: Ukrainian drone makers were not waiting for a presidential handshake to start building in America.

The Deal Behind The Announcement Rests On Anonymous Sources

The underlying export agreement has not been officially confirmed by either government. Reuters reported on July 22, citing a single source familiar with the matter, that Ukraine agreed to export drones to the U.S. for the Pentagon’s Drone Dominance program, with six Ukrainian companies cleared to ship roughly 100 drones each.

Neither Kyiv nor Washington offered official comment on that report. Ukrainian outlet Babel separately reported that the two sides signed a bilateral statement of intent laying groundwork for joint production, under which U.S. military personnel could request specific Ukrainian platforms for testing and evaluation. A statement of intent is not a contract. Until either government publishes terms, the six-companies figure and the 100-drone allocations rest on anonymous sourcing, and that caveat belongs in every story repeating them.

What is documented: Ukraine issued its first-ever export permit for fully assembled combat drones on July 1, covering a batch of F-Drones F10 strike quadcopters bound for the U.S. military, as Interfax-Ukraine reported at the time. That permit exists because Zelenskyy approved the Drone Deals export framework on April 28, a legal shift DroneXL flagged when Gulf states started shopping for Ukrainian interceptors. For most of the war, Ukrainian law required defense firms to deliver everything to Ukraine’s own forces.

Zelenskyy’s Range Claims Now Stretch To 10,000 Kilometers

Zelenskyy told Loomer that Ukrainian forces currently operate strike drones at ranges beyond 3,000 kilometers (1,864 miles), expect 4,000 kilometers (2,485 miles) by the end of 2026, and project 5,000 to 10,000 kilometers (3,107 to 6,213 miles) next year. Those are the president’s numbers, not independently verified figures.

The 3,000-kilometer claim has real-world backing. Ukrainska Pravda noted that an FP-1 drone covered that distance in July during a strike on the Omsk oil refinery, deep in Siberia. The 10,000-kilometer projection is a different animal: a forward-looking claim from a wartime leader days before a high-stakes Washington meeting, delivered to a friendly interviewer. Treat it as a negotiating position with wings until a flight proves otherwise.

The Factory Zelenskyy Promised Is Already Under Way In Ohio

The “great factory” framing lands as news, but a Ukrainian drone plant on U.S. soil was announced almost a month ago. Ukrainian Defense Drones (UDD), the American arm of F-Drones, committed $18.4 million to an assembly and manufacturing center in Holland, Ohio, with at least 300 jobs promised by the end of 2029, per Ohio Governor Mike DeWine and Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur.

That plant traces back to a scoreboard, and only afterward to statecraft. The F10 placed sixth with 72.9 points at the Gauntlet I fly-off at Fort Benning, a leaderboard DroneXL reported in March, earning a prototype order for 2,000 FPV drones. Drone Dominance, the roughly $1 billion Pentagon effort to field more than 200,000 low-cost attack drones by 2027, opened its first Gauntlet to 25 vendors in February. The second phase opens in August with 48 companies competing for orders of 60,000 drones, per Euromaidan Press.

DroneXL’s Take

Strip the summit theater away and the real story is that the direction of drone technology transfer across the Atlantic has reversed, and Washington is the buyer. Four years ago Kyiv was pleading for basic Western hardware. Now the Pentagon is scoring Ukrainian FPV drones at Fort Benning, ordering 2,000 of them, and watching a Ukrainian manufacturer break ground in a Toledo suburb. Ukraine went from arms recipient to arms exporter faster than any country I have covered in my years running this publication, and the American drone industrial base comes out ahead for it.

That is also why the “great factory” line deserves a raised eyebrow. Zelenskyy is announcing, days before meeting Trump, something his own country’s private sector already announced on June 29. The UDD plant is real, funded, and sited. The presidential version is a diplomatic gift wrap around a done deal, plus a much bigger implied promise that no document yet supports. Zelenskyy has floated a $35 to 50 billion drone arrangement in U.S. talks since March, and it remains unsigned.

Two dates settle whether this week was substance or stagecraft. Tuesday’s meeting either produces a signed framework with published terms or another round of “win-win” language. And Gauntlet II opens in August: if more Ukrainian firms convert battlefield pedigree into Pentagon orders there, the factories will keep coming regardless of what happens in the Oval Office. The competition is doing what the diplomacy only talks about.

Sources: Reuters, Ukrainska Pravda, Kyiv Post, Babel, Euromaidan Press.

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