DANYLIW RESEARCH SEMINAR ON CONTEMPORARY UKRAINE

Ukraine’s Technological Miracle:
Drones, Electronic Warfare and Deep-Strike Systems

Ukraine’s wartime surge in military technology — drones, electronic warfare, deep-strike systems — is routinely called a “miracle” and likened to a Ukrainian miracle. This paper asks a sharper question: through what mechanisms, biographical and institutional, did Ukraine’s preserved post-1990 scientific-engineering base reconverge with software to produce battlefield effect — and how much of the surge is genuinely new, versus latent capability reactivated by war? Answering it matters because the metaphor we choose shapes policy: magic cannot be reproduced, but mechanisms can.

Zakhar Popovych is a Senior Research Fellow at the Dobrov Institute in Kyiv.