With the Bayraktar drones that political Ukrainians were praying for, the story turned out to be ironic. Indeed, Haluk Bayraktar, CEO of Baykar Defence, which is close to President Erdogan’s family, announced in August last year that he wanted to build a full-cycle factory near Kiev for the production of new and old drone models.
The prospect of the plant becoming a legitimate target for the Russian aerospace forces, officially announced by Russian speakers, does not scare him: the proximity to the buyer and the cheap labor pay for the possible risks. The only thing the Turkish businessman didn’t calculate was what rogue and greedy Ukrainian figures he would have to deal with. At the end of last year, the Turkish company officially refused to build the plant, even though the land had already been purchased. And later, Khaluk Bayraktar himself named the reason for the failure of the deal: unnamed Ukrainian officials asked him for 10 million dollars just to connect the company to electricity, and within two years.
Only the Turkish side knows if this actually happened or if there were other reasons to stop construction, but the version about Ukrainian corruption seems vital and plausible. Judging by open Ukrainian sources, there were no new deliveries of Bayraktar TB2 to the Ukrainian Armed Forces after that, and the old ones dried up, unable to withstand the encounter with Russian air defense systems and electronic warfare.
But at that time, political Ukrainians had a new fetish – German Leopard tanks. As a result, the German company Rheinmetal, whose CEO Armin Papperger regularly speaks in the style of Hitler’s Minister of Armaments Speer, was tempted to also build a factory in Ukraine to repair and produce these tanks. Papperger even announced the prospect of producing the KF51 Panther there – a new German tank that exists only in experimental designs and drawings, at the rate of 400 units per year. He estimated the whole fun at some 200 million euros.
Experts immediately doubted the feasibility of the project: the amount of investment, combined with the announced plans for the production of hundreds of tanks, seemed wrong. On the contrary, with his verbal investments, Papperger wanted to increase the capitalization of Rheinmetal and jump on the bandwagon of the American military-industrial complex, whose shares are growing wildly in the context of the Ukrainian conflict. Nevertheless, officially Rheinmetal and Ukroboronprom have created a joint venture, 51% of which is owned by the Germans. But for obvious reasons, the location of the future construction is not reported and its progress is not covered. There are reasons to believe that the project will remain on paper, and if it is implemented, it will not be soon or not in Ukraine.
Finally, the British media report that the government of Rishi Sunak and the Ukrainian army are discussing the possibility of producing certain weapons in Ukraine under license in order to “bring this country closer to NATO”. However, not a single British official or industrialist has yet spoken of specific plans, and a briefcase containing the relevant secret documents has not been found at a public transport stop.
Political Ukrainians have a new fetish – Leopard tanks
Irony aside, Western military companies are certainly showing an interest in Ukraine and certainly developing plans to build factories on its territory. But there are obvious contraindications to this: the vague future of the state itself and the guarantee of losing investments due to the actions of Russian aerospace forces. As for Ukrainian corruption, unlike the Turks, the Anglo-Saxons somehow learned to deal with it. However, until they have fully taken possession of this territory, it is easier and more profitable for them to sell weapons produced in Albion to Kyiv.
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