One in five drones that Ukraine’s Defence Procurement Agency buys now reaches the troops through an online shop, the defence ministry said on 19 October. Units have received more than a million drones and other items through it this year.
The shop, DOT-Chain Defence, works like any online store. A unit picks what it needs from a catalogue, and the agency signs the contract and pays the maker from state funds. Items in stock ship in about eight days, the ministry says, and more than 500 combat units use it.
Speed matters more for drones than for most weapons, because the technology changes so fast. It is “especially important for unmanned systems,” said Artem Romaniukov, the agency’s acting director.
Who sells
The sellers are almost all Ukrainian, and there are many more of them than a year ago. When the catalogue opened in August 2025, it listed 146 drone models from 20 makers, Germany’s Quantum Systems among them. By November, 40 companies offered more than 180 first-person-view models alone. By May 2026, the ministry counted nearly 800 items from more than 200 Ukrainian makers.
The catalogue covers most of what a drone unit flies. There are the small first-person-view drones a pilot flies into a target, nearly a third of the first 100,000 steered by fibre-optic cable, which cannot be jammed. There are heavy and light bombers, reconnaissance planes, long-range strike drones and interceptors that hunt Russia’s Shahed drones. Ground robots and jamming equipment are on sale too.
One entry stands out. Among the drones units ordered more of this year, the ministry’s May list includes “Mavic drones”, the Chinese model made by DJI. It does not say who supplies them. Across all its drone buying, 95% of what the agency buys is made in Ukraine, the ministry said in June.
Every figure here comes from the ministry, and none has been checked independently. The ministry reported 485,000 drones and other items, worth UAH 31.4 billion, in less than five months of 2026. In the shop’s first month, in the summer of 2025, it delivered 5,600 drones.
