Leonardo has set up a new company in Kyiv with the aim of moving into the frontier of drone warfare, whose epicentre is now Ukraine, and of reaping the hoped-for benefits for European production and defence.
The Italian arms manufacturer has in recent months created Leonardo Ukraine, a company wholly owned by the group, according to the daily newspaper Milano Finanza.
At the Farnborough Airshow in the United Kingdom in July, the company’s chief executive, Lorenzo Mariani, explained how Ukraine has "acquired an operational experience without equal during the conflict" and that it was therefore necessary to "envisage forms of cooperation with the Ukrainian drone industry".
"In Ukraine a huge level of expertise has developed in systems which in Europe would initially be considered simple, but which are obviously not simple either to design or to manufacture on a large scale," Elio Calcagno explains to Euronews, Senior Fellow for Defence and Space at the Istituto Affari Internazionali (IAI).
This is an "enormous asset for European industry, including defence ministries, which may be trying to do planning in procurement and in medium- to long-term programming."
