June 23, 2026: Ukraine invented modern drone technology and has since been the leading developer of new technologies and techniques. In exchange for drone technologies, Ukraine wants to create a customer base of nations willing to invest in Ukraine as well as continuing to build drones and other military hardware for Ukraine.

This effort involves Drone Diplomacy as well as trade deals involving the evolving Ukrainian drone technology. Middle Eastern and NATO nations, especially those that border Russia, are aware that Russia is already repositioning its forces towards NATO nations and building bases to support that effort. With all of this in place, Russia could quickly unleash drone swarm attacks that NATO states are unprepared to deal with. Middle Eastern nations need the Drone Deal to defend themselves against Iranian drones and missiles.

The Ukrainian drone export program is known as the Drone Deal and, so far, Ukraine has found at least twenty countries that are interested. Each nation will be offered a different mix of drone exports and imports and/or investments in Ukraine. Last year Ukraine worded out a Drone deal with America involving $10 billion a year for five years. This included American firms building up to ten million drones a year for Ukraine in addition to investments into Ukrainian industries. The Americans expect to obtain rights to Ukrainian drone technology and help with training American military personnel on how best to use drones in combat. The instructors are English-speaking Ukrainian soldiers. Some are retired, usually because of disabling wounds, but all are eager to impart their knowledge to NATO allies.

NATO nations are especially keen to have their troops learn all about interceptor and FPV/First Person View drones. The latter employ goggles so the user can see what the drone camera sees and use a game controller to maneuver the drone. Since this is similar to what video gamers use, most young men and women are already experienced with this sort of thing.

Another aspect of this is that Ukrainian-developed drones changed the nature, and cost, of warfare. Drones are cheap and the drone operators are rarely casualties. Ukrainian civilians and soldiers often modify their drones and share those innovations with other Ukrainians. Those concepts spread to Europe and the United States, where entrepreneurs began developing new weapons and military equipment. One entrepreneur, Elon Musk, created SpaceX, a company that put thousands of communications satellites into orbit. Musk allowed Ukrainian forces to use this satellite network for battlefield communications and it gave the Ukrainians an edge over the Russians. This was especially true when Musk later disabled Russian use of smuggled SpaceX equipment and fatally disrupted Russian battlefield communications.

Entrepreneurs have developed even more autonomous weapons and military equipment. Ukraine has also been using ground based combat drones, and in at least two cases Russian soldiers surrendered to the drones. Russia has also encouraged its entrepreneurs, but there are 500 million Europeans, 310 million Americans and only 140 million Russians.

NATO nations are facing major military, economic and security problems because of the war in Ukraine. What it comes down to is that military leaders back all possible military aid for Ukraine while political leaders face problems with paying for it. Not just the financial cost, but the impact on voters who find themselves facing higher taxes and as well as inflation and shortages of essential goods. Supporting the Ukrainian war with Russia is expensive and exposes the true costs of cutting defense expenditures in the past by not maintaining sufficient stockpiles of weapons and munitions.

The basic problem is that it is a historical fact, reinforced by the current situation, that you must maintain adequate stockpiles of ammunition, equipment and supplies for use against a large, well-equipped enemy in a war. These stockpiles are also referred to as the War Reserve, as in large quantities of everything required to keep the troops supplied during the initial 30-60 days of fighting until production can be increased to sustain the fighting. These stockpiles must contain the most useful munitions and other supplies and be positioned so they can be moved to the combat zones as quickly as possible. Without adequate logistics, as in the right supplies delivered in time, wars or at least battles, are often lost early and often. The Russians had such enormous stockpiles but ran out of those in mid-2024. That would have happened to the Ukrainians in late 2022 but for financial and military support from NATO, particularly the United States.

The original reason for NATO was, as the British put it, about keeping the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down. NATO was formed after World War II ended in 1945. That also ended over 70 years of major wars instigated by Germany. Now Germany was partitioned and the Western half faced another Russian invasion. The German occupation was short and the Germans were eager to join NATO and help keep the Russians out. That attitude persisted through the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union and reunification of Germany. The Germans had lost all interest in wars of aggression, but the Russians had not.

The Soviet Union prospered for a while after Nikita Khrushchev, who took over when Josef Stalin died in 1953, concentrated on the economy and well-being of Russians rather than the world conquest and generally murderous attitudes of Stalin. This was a welcome change for most Russians if only because Stalin’s policies had resulted in 20 percent of the Russian population dying of starvation, in wars or domestic terror against Russians by Stalin to protect his power.

Khrushchev was gone within a decade, the first Russian leader in a long time to retire alive from office rather than die or be killed while in power. Khrushchev was replaced by less altruistic politicians who had aligned with Russian military leaders who wanted to start an arms race with the West and prepare for an eventual attack on Western Europe and that new NATO alliance. Then as now, Russia described this as necessary to defend Russia from more prosperous NATO countries who might think and act like Russians. This is a bad habit that Russia is having a difficult time overcoming even though the old Soviet Union collapsed from, among other things, doing the same thing.

After the Soviet Union dissolved, Russia tried democracy to do another Khrushchev for a decade. There was some success but not enough because Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, took power and returned to the police state and military buildup that Stalin and Khrushchev’s successors tried with such disastrous results. Putin won the support of the military by spending a lot of money Russian could not afford to update the Cold War era weapons. Those updates, as well as new tactics and unit organizations, turned out to be failures and this was made clear when the overconfident Russian military invaded Ukraine.

Despite the initial failures, Russia persists and is still seeking to intimidate NATO into submission. For Russia it is a three-front war. First there is the very obvious combat in Ukraine as well as an Information War against politicians and journalists in NATO countries. Then there is an economic struggle to deal with the economic sanctions. After four years of war, Russia is broke and its economy crippled by the transformation into a war economy. In Ukraine, Russia is losing more troops than it can replace. The Ukrainians are on the offensive, taking back territory long occupied by the Russians. Ukrainian use of long-range drones to destroy Russian military and economic infrastructure throughout Russia has weakened the Russian war effort in Ukraine. It has reached the point where Ukraine has a chance of reclaiming the Crimean Peninsula this year.