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Military marketplaces, technology accelerators, distributed production, state-backed localisation and Chinese industrial inputs are shortening the path from private innovation to battlefield deployment
Russia’s drone industry is no longer best understood simply as a collection of factories producing more unmanned aerial vehicles.
A broader system is taking shape.
Small engineering teams, private technology companies, volunteer initiatives, state institutions, banks, military units and foreign suppliers are increasingly being connected into an ecosystem designed to identify new technologies, test them against operational requirements, finance production, scale manufacturing and move equipment to the front.
This matters because drone warfare operates on a much shorter technological cycle than traditional defence procurement. An FPV platform, communications system, navigation module, antenna or electronic-warfare countermeasure can require modification within weeks as the opposing side introduces new technology.
The central question is therefore not only how many drones Russia can manufacture.
It is how quickly Russia can move from an operational problem to a new product and then from that product to serial battlefield use.
By 2026, Moscow was increasingly trying to institutionalise precisely that process.
Scale Is Becoming Institutional
The transformation is visible first in the military itself.
In July 2026, Russian Deputy Defence Minister Alexei Krivoruchko said that the number of UAVs supplied to Russian forces during the first half of the year had increased by more than twofold compared with 2025. He also said that more than 8,000 specialists had been trained for Russia’s newly established unmanned-systems forces during the same period, alongside the creation of a unified training system covering both individual specialists and complete units. These are official Russian figures and cannot be independently verified in full, but they demonstrate the scale of Moscow’s effort to integrate unmanned systems into the permanent military structure rather than treat them as an improvised wartime capability.
That distinction is important.
Russia’s early wartime drone ecosystem depended heavily on improvisation: volunteer procurement, commercial quadcopters, small workshops, crowdfunding, civilian electronics and engineering teams adapting products for military use.
Elements of that model remain.
But around them, the state is building a much more formalised infrastructure.
From the “People’s Defence Industry” to an Organised Ecosystem
One of the most important institutions in this process is the Centre for Unmanned Systems and Technologies — CBST.
Founded in 2024, CBST describes itself as a platform for supporting and scaling dual-use technology projects. United Russia openly presents the organisation as an attempt to transform the spontaneous wartime phenomenon it calls the “people’s defence industry” into a structured system connecting engineers, manufacturers, financiers and military users. The organisation was established with political backing from United Russia and Dmitry Medvedev.
By August 2026, CBST said it brought together more than 500 developers and manufacturers and had provided some form of support to more than 850 innovators and technology companies during its first two and a half years. According to figures published by the organisation and United Russia, the combined revenue of CBST residents reached RUB 81.8 billion in 2025, around 30% higher than a year earlier. These are self-reported figures rather than an independent measurement of military output, but they show the size of the organisational network being assembled around Russia’s unmanned and dual-use technology sector.
The emerging model can be reduced to a relatively simple chain: operational requirement → engineering team → testing → financing → production → procurement → delivery → battlefield feedback.
The importance of CBST lies in its attempt to connect these stages.
The Front as Customer and Testing Ground
The system is not designed as a one-way industrial process in which a factory develops a product and the military eventually receives it.
Frontline personnel are increasingly treated as both the customer and part of the development process.
United Russia has publicly described direct communication between CBST-linked manufacturers and military personnel, with equipment modified in response to operational feedback. CBST’s own support model also emphasises testing, pilot deployment and assistance with scaling products that demonstrate military utility.
This creates a much faster feedback loop than traditional defence procurement: frontline → feedback → modification → production → frontline.
For unmanned warfare, the speed of this cycle can be as important as industrial capacity itself.
A larger manufacturer may possess more machinery, workers and capital. But a smaller company that can redesign a communications module, adjust software or modify a drone against a new electronic-warfare threat within several weeks may provide an immediate battlefield advantage.
Russia is now trying to preserve that flexibility while placing it inside a larger institutional system.
The Accelerator as an Entry Point into the Military Market
CBST’s technology accelerator provides another part of that infrastructure.
Its third intake, launched in June 2026 with United Russia and support from the Presidential Grants Foundation, received 550 applications from engineers, start-ups, universities and industrial enterprises.
The programme covers 29 technological areas, including unmanned systems, air defence, robotics, radar, electronic warfare, artificial intelligence, new materials, microelectronics and communications. Participants receive project support, access to experts and industrial partners, investment tracks and opportunities for pilot testing.
This is significant because the accelerator provides a potential pathway into the defence ecosystem for companies that did not emerge from Russia’s traditional military-industrial complex.
A small engineering company may no longer need to become part of Rostec or another major defence corporation before receiving access to relevant customers.
Instead, the emerging route can look more like: start-up → accelerator → testing → CBST residency → production → specialised procurement channel → military unit.
This does not replace the traditional defence industry.
It creates a parallel entry mechanism into it.
Roy.Market: A Procurement Layer for the New System
Perhaps the clearest example of this new architecture is Roy.Market.
The platform was originally launched in pilot form and, in August 2026, CBST announced that it was moving into full marketplace operation and opening to external sellers, including manufacturers and distributors already operating on Wildberries and Ozon.
Its planned catalogue is intended to grow beyond 10,000 products by 2027, including drone components, electronics, protective equipment and field clothing. Existing categories include equipment used for drone assembly and maintenance, such as 3D printers, fibre-optic reels, antennas and charging systems.
The important feature is not the interface.
It is the procurement model.
Roy.Market remains a closed platform with authorised access. Military units can assemble a basket of required equipment and send the order to a third party for payment. CBST has said charitable organisations could be incorporated into this mechanism.
In effect, this institutionalises a wartime supply pattern that previously operated largely through informal channels: a unit identifies a requirement → an outside organisation finances it → a private supplier fulfils it.
The distinction between state procurement, commercial procurement and volunteer funding therefore becomes increasingly blurred.
Logistics Is Being Designed for Dispersion
Roy.Market also reveals another lesson Russia is drawing from the war.
CBST is moving the platform towards a distributed 4PL logistics model rather than establishing a small number of large dedicated warehouses. Goods can remain with sellers or inside existing logistics networks until an order is placed, while several logistics operators may be involved in delivery. CBST has explicitly linked this model to reducing the risks created by concentrating inventory in a single location.
This is more than an e-commerce decision.
In wartime, large concentrations of drone components, electronics and other military-relevant goods create identifiable points of vulnerability.
The response is therefore distributed storage combined with distributed production.
The same logic is visible elsewhere in the emerging ecosystem.
Protected Technology Parks
In August 2026, CBST announced plans for a network of specialised technology parks for companies developing special-purpose and dual-use technologies.
The programme envisages more than 100,000 square metres of production and office infrastructure over roughly five years, with planned investment exceeding RUB 25 billion.
According to CBST chairman Andrei Bezrukov, the facilities are intended to be geographically distributed rather than concentrated in a single centre partly for security reasons. At the time of the announcement, CBST was reported to have 525 resident companies, with the number expected to continue rising.
The significance is clear.
The geography of Russian military production is itself beginning to adapt to long-range warfare.
Large centralised factories provide economies of scale, but they also concentrate risk.
A network of smaller manufacturing centres can be more difficult to disrupt simultaneously and may allow companies to move faster between prototyping and limited serial production.
The result is not necessarily decentralisation of state control.
It is decentralisation of physical production under a more organised institutional framework.
Atlant Aero: The Growth — and Vulnerability — of the New Sector
The rapid rise of Atlant Aero illustrates how quickly companies inside this new defence-technology sector can grow.
The Taganrog-based company was registered only in September 2023. By the end of 2025, it reported RUB 9.75 billion in net profit, making it the most profitable company in Rostov region according to financial data cited by Kommersant.
In April 2026, the European Union sanctioned Atlant Aero, describing the company as a developer of Orion and Molniya unmanned systems and as a supplier of military technology used by the Russian armed forces.
The case demonstrates how wartime demand has created space for companies that were insignificant or did not exist before the full-scale war to become major defence-industrial actors in only a few years.
That is one of the defining characteristics of the drone economy: entry barriers are lower, technological cycles are shorter, and commercial growth can be extremely rapid.
Russia’s Biggest Weakness Remains the Component Base
The emerging ecosystem is increasingly Russian in organisation.
It is much less Russian in its underlying industrial inputs.
Russian UAVs recovered in Ukraine continue to contain significant quantities of foreign electronics. In September 2026, Ukraine’s Presidential Commissioner for Sanctions Policy, Vladyslav Vlasiuk, said that investigators had identified 96 foreign components in a recovered Geran-4 drone, including products originating from companies in several Western and Asian jurisdictions.
This does not mean that those manufacturers knowingly supplied Russia’s military.
Components can move through distributors, re-export networks, intermediaries and third-country companies.
But the broader pattern is clear: Russia has been able to expand final assembly faster than it has been able to establish a fully domestic supply chain.
China is central to filling that gap.
China Supplies More Than Microchips
The dependence extends well beyond semiconductor components.
A joint investigation by The Insider and Nordsint found that the Chinese company Harxon was prepared to arrange deliveries of anti-jamming satellite-navigation antennas through an intermediary company after researchers posing as Russian military contractors approached the firm. Antennas carrying the same markings had been identified in Russian Geran drones recovered in Ukraine.
These components matter because electronic warfare has become one of the principal constraints on drone effectiveness.
A modern UAV is therefore better understood not as one product but as a collection of industrial dependencies: motor → battery → flight controller → navigation system → antenna → optics → communications → processor → airframe → software.
Each of these can involve a different set of suppliers and intermediaries.
That makes the supply network much harder to disrupt by focusing on a single manufacturer.
From Importing Components to Importing Factories
The more consequential development in 2026 is Russia’s attempt to move one stage further.
Rather than simply importing finished components, Russian companies are increasingly seeking the industrial equipment needed to manufacture those components domestically.
In July, The Insider and Nordsint reported that Chinese industrial supplier Nide was prepared to sell a complete drone-motor production line to a prospective Russian customer after being told that the equipment would support military drone production.
The quoted package was worth more than RMB 16 million — roughly USD 2.3 million — and included equipment covering stator, rotor and final motor assembly. According to the investigation, the proposed line could produce approximately one motor every 15 seconds at full capacity. Nide also said it had already supplied similar equipment to Russian companies.
This represents a different form of sanctions adaptation.
At the first stage: Russia imports the component.
At the second: Russia imports the machinery, know-how and materials required to manufacture the component itself.
If successful, this does not eliminate foreign dependence.
It shifts that dependence further upstream.
Batteries Are Becoming Another Localisation Target
The same process is appearing in batteries.
Investigative reporting in August identified sharp growth in Russian imports of battery materials and production equipment, much of it originating from Chinese suppliers. Russia is attempting to develop a domestic lithium-ion battery industry capable of supporting, among other sectors, the UAV market.
The process moved further in September.
The Russian government approved support worth up to RUB 10.46 billion to subsidise a preferential loan for a planned 4 GWh lithium-ion battery plant operated by INESIS, a company controlled by drone manufacturer Transport of the Future. The support is scheduled across several years.
This illustrates how the drone economy is beginning to pull adjacent industries into its orbit.
Motors, batteries, composites, electronics and communications equipment increasingly become not simply industrial products but strategic bottlenecks around which state industrial policy is organised.
Dependence on China Is Changing — Not Disappearing
This is an important distinction.
Russia’s localisation campaign does not necessarily mean technological independence from China.
A Russian factory may manufacture the final motor while using Chinese production machinery.
A Russian battery may be assembled from Chinese electrolyte, cathode material or industrial equipment.
A domestically assembled navigation system may still depend on imported electronic components.
The result may therefore be a transition from dependence on finished Chinese products to dependence on Chinese industrial inputs, machine tools, materials and technology.
For Moscow, that can still be advantageous because domestic final production is harder to interrupt through simple export restrictions on finished components.
But it also means that China remains deeply embedded in the industrial foundations of Russia’s drone economy.
Sanctions Are Moving Deeper into the Supply Chain
Western sanctions increasingly reflect this networked structure.
In July 2026, the EU sanctioned five companies belonging to the ABS Electro Group and its chair, Irina Kharisova. The Council said the companies produced electronic and radio-electronic components used in Russian UAVs, including systems that increase the resistance of Shahed and Geran drones to electronic warfare.
Atlant Aero had already been listed several months earlier.
The growing focus on component producers illustrates a broader shift: the relevant unit of analysis is becoming less the completed drone and more the industrial network behind it.
A drone manufacturer can change supplier.
A distributor can be replaced.
A shell company can disappear.
But specific industrial bottlenecks — motors, navigation electronics, optical components, batteries, fibre-optic systems, machine tools and specialised manufacturing equipment — are more difficult to substitute quickly.
Rapid Expansion Also Creates Governance Risks
The same rapid expansion that allows new manufacturers to grow quickly also creates opportunities for waste, fraud and competition over state subsidies.
In May 2026, former Transport of the Future chief executive Yuri Kozarenko was detained on suspicion of large-scale fraud. In July, the case expanded to include managers from the EFKO group and Alla Polovchenya, a senior official responsible for unmanned systems and robotics at Russia’s Ministry of Industry and Trade. Russian investigators linked the allegations to drone projects and state subsidies. The defendants and their lawyers have disputed elements of the case, and no final judicial finding of guilt should be inferred from the investigation itself.
In August, the serving and former heads of Drone Solutions, another unmanned-systems company, were arrested in a separate major-fraud case. Public ownership data showed that approximately 23% of the company was held by the National Technology Initiative Project Support Fund, linked to the Ministry of Industry and Trade. Again, the charges remain allegations pending judicial resolution.
These cases do not demonstrate that the entire sector is dysfunctional.
They demonstrate something different.
As drones become a strategic priority, large flows of subsidies, preferential financing and state contracts create a new arena for competition over public resources.
The wartime technology economy generates not only new manufacturers but new governance problems.
Drone Warfare Is Beginning to Reshape Corporate Governance
The effects extend beyond companies that manufacture UAVs.
On 24 August 2026, President Vladimir Putin signed Decree No. 604, creating a mechanism for temporary state management of critical infrastructure where owners fail to meet security requirements, restore operations promptly, or effectively counter threats including UAV attacks.
The measure covers a wide range of strategic assets, including energy, industrial, transport and logistics infrastructure.
This has a broader implication.
Russian businesses operating strategically important infrastructure are increasingly expected not only to produce or finance the war economy, but also to bear part of the cost of defending their own assets against drone warfare.
The drone is therefore influencing not only weapons production.
It is beginning to affect industrial geography, logistics, capital expenditure and the relationship between the Russian state and corporate property.
The New Defence Industry Looks Different from the Old One
Russia’s traditional military-industrial complex remains dominated by large state-linked corporations, established design bureaus and long-standing defence plants.
That system has not disappeared.
But the drone economy operating around it has a different structure.
It includes major defence corporations, small private engineering companies, civilian firms entering the dual-use market, university teams, start-ups, volunteer networks, banks, specialised marketplaces, charitable organisations, Chinese suppliers and military units acting as direct customers.
The state is not necessarily replacing decentralisation with complete central control.
Instead, it is trying to coordinate decentralisation.
CBST organises developers.
Accelerators identify technologies.
Military units generate requirements.
Specialised platforms connect buyers and sellers.
Technology parks provide distributed manufacturing infrastructure.
Banks and state programmes provide financing.
Foreign suppliers continue to feed critical inputs into the system.
And the Ministry of Defence is simultaneously building a permanent military structure capable of absorbing these technologies at scale.
That combination is the central feature of Russia’s emerging wartime drone economy.
What This Means for Ukraine and Europe
For Ukraine, the main analytical implication is that Russia’s UAV capacity cannot be measured only by the output of a small number of famous factories.
The ecosystem is increasingly distributed across hundreds of manufacturers, component suppliers, technology developers, logistics operators and financing channels.
Physical production sites remain important, but so do the connections between them.
For European sanctions and export-control analysis, this means that the key question is increasingly not simply:
Who built the drone?
It is also: Who supplied the motor? Who provided the machine that makes the motor? Who sold the battery material? Who financed the transaction? Which intermediary imported the antenna? Which logistics company moved the equipment?
The distinction is important because Russia is trying to move progressively upstream.
Restrictions on finished drones encourage domestic assembly.
Restrictions on components encourage localisation.
Restrictions on locally producible components increase demand for foreign machine tools, industrial lines, materials and know-how.
The structure therefore evolves under pressure rather than remaining static.
Conclusion
Russia is not simply producing more drones.
It is building an economic and institutional system around unmanned warfare.
A small engineering team can enter an accelerator, test its technology against military requirements, obtain access to financing, move into a specialised production environment and sell equipment through a closed procurement platform.
A military unit can generate the requirement.
An outside fund can finance the purchase.
A private logistics operator can deliver it.
A Chinese company may supply the underlying component, material or production line.
And the Ministry of Defence is increasingly building the personnel, training structures and procurement mechanisms required to absorb the resulting technology at scale.
The system still has major weaknesses.
Russia remains dependent on foreign electronics, materials and industrial equipment. Chinese inputs remain particularly important. Sanctions force supply chains to change constantly. State subsidies create opportunities for misuse. Many localisation programmes remain incomplete.
But the direction is increasingly clear.
Moscow is attempting to transform the improvised technological mobilisation that emerged during the first years of the full-scale war into a permanent wartime innovation infrastructure.
If that process succeeds, the most important result will not be one particular FPV drone, one factory or one manufacturer.
It will be something more structural: a shorter, more institutionalised path from battlefield requirement to engineering solution — and from engineering solution to the front.
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