Ukraine has put a formal proposal in front of the New Zealand government to build military drones together, joining a list of 20 countries already in talks and four that have signed binding drone agreements with Kyiv.
Ukraine’s ambassador to New Zealand and Australia, Vasyl Myroshnychenko, told RNZ on Friday that the offer had been on the table since December last year, when he raised it with then Defence Minister Judith Collins and her successor Chris Penk. Germany, Canada, Norway and Japan have already signed drone deals. New Zealand has not.
“They have the proposal on the table,” Myroshnychenko said. “Certainly we would be open for it and we do believe that we could assist and we have some of the innovation which is only available in Ukraine, and we would be happy to work jointly on this investment together.”
Defence Minister Chris Penk confirmed officials were still working through the offer. “Those matters remain under consideration by defence officials and no decisions have been made at this stage,” Penk said in a statement. “I look forward to receiving further advice in due course on potential next steps.”
The pitch from Kyiv is part of a wider push by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to monetise and export the drone know-how built up under three years of war with Russia. Uncrewed aerial systems have rewritten the rulebook in both the Russia war and the recent Iran conflict, and several Middle East governments have signed drone deals with Ukraine to defend against Iranian Shahed drones. “We are ready to deliver,” Zelensky posted on X last month after concluding several Middle East deals. “We want to help them defend themselves.”
For New Zealand, the question goes well beyond a single procurement decision. Drones sit inside the country’s long-range drone project, an item already in the Defence Capability Plan with an indicative cost of between 100 million and 300 million dollars. Australia, by contrast, has committed between 14 and 18 billion Australian dollars over the next decade for drone and counter-drone technology, and is expected to sign a bilateral security agreement with Ukraine later this year. Myroshnychenko said that agreement would lay the groundwork for an Australian drone deal, and a similar pathway was on offer in Wellington.
“Those countries who signed those agreements are now also signing drone agreements, or drone deals, as we call them,” Myroshnychenko said. “A drone deal is a starting point for creating those joint ventures in a way, because at the moment there is a ban on the export of any weapons or any defence technology out of Ukraine. But we’re trying to figure out a way how to release that technology. And for that, we need both governments to be on board.”
Geopolitical analyst Dr Del Carlini of Wellington argued that New Zealand should move quickly and bigger than the Defence Capability Plan envisages. “We should be putting a billion dollars of our defence spending into a joint venture with Ukraine to learn how to produce drones, to manufacture them here and then to have them used, in Ukraine at the moment, could be in the Middle East,” Carlini told RNZ. He also argued that pouring billions into new frigates, as outlined in the Defence Capability Plan, would look obsolete after the Iran war showed how quickly a conventional navy could be neutralised by drones.
The local industry view is more divided. Mount Maunganui based Syos Aerospace already makes drones being used by Ukraine and the UK armed forces, and a joint venture could expand its work. Philip Solaris of Obsidian Systems, who has spent more than a decade building drones in New Zealand, takes the opposite view. He says New Zealand already has the technology and the engineering talent and the money would be better spent at home.
“There’s a lot of small companies throughout New Zealand that have really key parts to play in such a situation,” Solaris said. “Ukraine has been forced into doing that, and you’ll find that actually their defence industry is largely made up from a lot of small players, not just a few big primes.” He told RNZ that the prime lesson from Ukraine was logistics, not technology, and that the next Budget needed a faster system for spending defence dollars, not necessarily more dollars.
The drone question also brushes up against the long running debate over AUKUS Pillar Two, the technology sharing pillar of the trilateral pact between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. Pillar Two members have recently lowered barriers to sharing arms technology, but the New Zealand Defence Force has held fewer meetings about joining than it did a year ago. Myroshnychenko said he had not been briefed on AUKUS and treated it as a matter for Canberra. The CBS network reported last week that the United States and Ukraine had drafted their own deal to allow drone tech exports for joint manufacture with American companies, a sign that even close allies are now treating drone production as a sovereign capability question.
Penk has previously told RNZ that drone spending in New Zealand was at the right level, while warning the country could not afford to fall behind. With Ukraine putting the offer in writing, with Australia and 19 other countries already in serious talks, and with both a National election in November and a Budget in May, the political question is whether the proposal sits on the desk for another six months or moves before voters head to the polls.
The choice also overlaps with the wider voter conversation about defence spending, foreign policy and the balance between sovereign capability and overseas partnerships. If you want to see how the parties currently in Parliament line up on defence, AUKUS and Ukraine, the Newswire voting tool walks through the main party positions ahead of the November election.
Should New Zealand sign a drone joint venture with Ukraine, take the money and build the capability here, or hold off until after the election? Tell us what you think in the comments.
See also NZ Military, Intelligence and Defence Sites — Newswire’s interactive map of every NZDF base, GCSB site and defence installation in the country.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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