Companies that want their equipment used by Ukrainian units should put staff and an office inside the country and begin by asking soldiers what the problem is, the chief unmanned systems officer of the 2nd Corps of Ukraine’s National Guard told the Apex Europe conference in London on Wednesday.
Oleksii Krymeniuk, whose corps is known as Khartiia and numbers up to 35,000 personnel across formations ranging from infantry to uncrewed systems units, was asked how feedback from operators reaches developers and what makes the cycle work.
His answer put the burden squarely on the supplier instead of on the units doing the fighting. “The main actor in this kind of feedback loop and in this kind of conversation between the unit and the industry is the industry, because this unit is constantly fighting, and unfortunately we don’t have enough time and enough resources to communicate and to ping pong and to talk to this industry,” he said.
Turning up a couple of times a year for a demonstration does not count, in his view. “They should hire the guys in Ukraine, have a Ukrainian office, and they should constantly communicate about the challenges that that unit can encounter, because some challenges that you think are challenges in Ukraine, they are not challenges, and some challenges you even didn’t hear,” he said.
He was candid about the companies that arrive with a solution already decided. “I’ve seen some companies that came to us, they propose some solutions to some problems, but for us it’s not a problem. They just want to sell us something, and they want to get this kind of approved by Ukrainian unit sign, and then it would be much easier for them to sell their products in the international market,” he said.
The example he reached for was the first-person-view drone, the product most often carried into Ukraine by visiting firms. “I’ve seen a number of companies that came to us trying to sell us FPV drones, but we have an enormous number of companies inside of Ukraine that already sell us these drones, and they’re much cheaper than the drones that we can get from international markets,” he said.
Companies willing to work that way should expect frank conversations and not take them personally. “Some of these words, they couldn’t be very polite, because sometimes it could be very rough and straightforward as any military. But it’s not that we don’t want to help you,” he said, explaining that there is simply not time for a longer version of the conversation.
His own corps has met industry halfway by standing up a small team whose only job is talking to companies and sorting what is relevant from what is not, since the number of firms now approaching units has become very large. “So it’s a two-way situation,” he said.
Asked what advice he would give a national armaments director, he returned to where equipment gets proved. “First of all, you should buy some stuff that is tested in Ukraine and fully combat tested. Not the guys who came to a very safe zone, made a couple of flights there, and say okay, it’s completely tested in Ukraine. I think it should be truly tested on the front line,” he said.
His second point was about what a buyer should be planning for. “I think there is still a belief in the decisive battle as a concept, that we can buy very expensive stuff and it will be one battle and you will win,” he said. “But from the experience of Ukraine, and from history, each war is a war of attrition, and if you can achieve mass production, mass usage of it on the ground, you’ll be successful.”
Several of the companies on the panel described doing precisely what he asked for. Helsing has around fifty people in an office in Ukraine, Ark Robotics has seventy per cent of its workforce in the country with teams embedded in frontline units, and Havoc also keeps people there.
