Russia Says FPV Drone Production Has Reached 15,000 Craft a Day

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(Bloomberg) — Russia has increased the production of first-person view drones by roughly 30-fold over the last three years, with manufacturers now capable of supplying more than 15,000 units a day, a top government official said. 

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“By comparison, in 2023, that quantity was produced in an entire month,” First Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturov said in an interview with the Kommersant newspaper published Wednesday. “The special military operation has definitively established unmanned aerial vehicles as one of the key elements of modern warfare,” he said using the Kremlin’s term for the war in Ukraine.

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Output in Russia’s aircraft sector has soared, fueled by demand for thousands of drones. With the production and effectiveness of tanks and other conventional armor hitting limits with President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine now in its fifth year, cheap and scalable unmanned systems including FPV drones have become one of the few areas of Russian industry still capable of rapid expansion.

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Drones “have become an independent strike force capable of carrying out a wide range of tactical missions,” Manturov said.

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Manturov’s figure of 15,000 aircraft a day means Russia should able to produce nearly 5.5 million FPV drones annually if production is sustained at that rate every day of the year. That figure doesn’t include the volume long range drones that Moscow is using to strike deep inside Ukraine. 

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The interview was published on the same day that the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, Putin’s main annual business summit, opened and as Russian air defense repelled a Ukrainian drone attack targeting energy and military facilities in the area.

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Manturov identified microelectronics as one of Russia’s most difficult industrial challenges. He said the country currently mass produces chips of various sizes. 

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A new endeavor, the United Microelectronics Company, aims to be able to handle the full cycle of semiconductor production, Manturov said. 

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Russia is also prioritizing work on the Soyuz-5 reusable space rocket, Arctic tankers and rare-earth projects, while also addressing the need for tighter regulation in certain marketplaces and for car imports, he said.

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