22JUN

Brave1 Market takes 590,000 drone orders

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13:56UTC

Ukrainian brigades ordered more than 590,000 drones through Brave1 Market in nine months, paying with points earned for confirmed results.

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EconomicAssessed

Key takeaway

Ukrainian brigades ordered over 590,000 drones themselves this year as approvals of new designs accelerated.

Ukrainian units ordered more than 590,000 drones through Brave1 Market in the first nine months of 2026, Ukraine's Ministry of Defence said on 25 September⁠¹. Brave1 Market is the ordering platform of Brave1, the state defence-technology cluster. Brigades choose a supplier there and pay with ePoints, credits earned for confirmed results such as hits, reconnaissance and evacuations.

That works out at roughly 65,000 drones a month chosen by the units that fly them rather than by a central buyer. The ministry says the average monthly value of orders has more than doubled since January, and that orders for fixed-wing kamikaze drones peaked at six times their January level. It gave no hryvnia total and no supplier count, so the volume cannot be turned into a price per drone. In August the ministry said Brave1 listed 46 AI products.

The ministry has also codified 650 drone systems since January, among them 238 strike copters and 231 fibre-optic systems⁠². Codification is the approval a Ukrainian maker needs before the state can buy its product. Fibre-optic drones trail a thin cable instead of using a radio link, so a jammer cannot cut them off, and they now nearly match strike copters among approved designs.

The ministry had reported 413 codified systems by mid-July⁠³. By Lowdown's calculation from those two figures, approvals ran at about 100 a month from mid-July, against about 63 a month before: roughly 1.6 times the earlier pace. A system that pays brigades for results only works if they have a wide catalogue to choose from, and codification is how Kyiv widens it.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

Ukraine's army uses huge numbers of small drones to scout and to strike Russian forces. Instead of a central office buying all of them, the government runs Brave1 Market, an online shop where frontline units choose drones themselves. Units pay with ePoints, a kind of credit they earn for confirmed results such as destroying enemy equipment. Before a company can sell a drone through the system, the defence ministry must approve, or codify, the design. Some newer drones are steered through a thin cable rather than by radio, so enemy jamming cannot cut them off.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

Electronic warfare drove the design shift. Jammers cut the radio link of most small drones, so fibre-optic control, which trails a cable instead, has become a default requirement, and 231 of the 650 approvals now use it.

The ministry's codification by type also shows where the next demand sits: 42 interceptor drones, 32 middle-strike and nine deep-strike systems were approved alongside the copters. Interceptors answer Russia's Shahed-type attack drones, and the deep-strike types reach targets far behind the front.

What could happen next?

Consequence
Fibre-optic control becomes a standard Ukrainian requirement, pushing radio-only designs to the margins of state buying.
Opportunity
Approved Ukrainian interceptor and deep-strike designs give European partners a catalogue to co-produce if exports open.

Source Landscape

This story draws on neutral-leaning sources

Primary parallel: In August the ministry said Ukrainian forces strike targets with more than 70 AI and computer-vision systems and that more than 200 companies build AI-enabled drones. The 650 codified systems show the same breadth reaching the formal approval stage, where a design becomes something the state can buy.

Counter-parallel: The Pentagon's Gauntlet I, a central fly-off that chose suppliers for the front, had left a large share of its ordered drones undelivered by late August. Ukraine's model lets units choose and reorder from many approved makers instead of waiting on a few chosen ones.

Nearly 91 per cent of the 1,526 weapon and equipment models newly codified in the first eight months of 2026 were Ukrainian-made, according to the ministry. Drone approvals therefore feed money almost entirely into domestic industry.

The ministry gives no hryvnia total and no supplier count for Brave1 Market. Without them, nobody outside Kyiv can tell whether orders are spread across many makers or concentrated in a few.

Consensus view: Ukraine's Ministry of Defence presents ePoints as a demand signal: brigades spend credit earned for results on the drones that work for them. Its 25 September release says orders for fixed-wing kamikaze drones peaked at six times their January level, which points to units buying deeper strike over short-range FPV (first-person-view) copters.

Counter-view: Ukrainian makers may be outgrowing the home market. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy disclosed in March that about ten Ukrainian drone factories had been built abroad to work around the wartime export ban, so makers are already looking past Brave1 Market for buyers.

Key tension: Whether a points-funded domestic marketplace can absorb the output of hundreds of approved designs, or whether Kyiv will have to open exports to keep makers solvent.

Sources:Ministry of Defence of Ukraine (via GlobalSecurity.org)·Ministry of Defence of Ukraine (via GlobalSecurity.org)·Ministry of Defence of Ukraine (via GlobalSecurity.org)

Mentions:Brave1 →Ukraine →Gauntlet I →Pentagon →Kyiv →Volodymyr Zelenskyy →Russian forces →Ukraine's Ministry of Defence →

First Reported In

Update #18 · Four EU states skip tenders on drone defence

Ministry of Defence of Ukraine (via GlobalSecurity.org)· 1 Oct 2026

Read original →

Causes and effects

Caused by

Ukraine fields 70-plus AI strike systems

Brave1 listed 46 AI products in August; unit orders through Brave1 Market reached 590,000 by September.

Occurred 18 Aug 2026

Read story →

This Event

Brave1 Market takes 590,000 drone orders

Ukraine has moved much of its drone buying from a central ministry to the units that fly them, and is approving new designs faster.

Led to

Kyiv hits jet Gerans with 7 interceptors

Brigades' 590,000 Brave1 Market drone orders preceded the 5.5-fold rise in state drone contracting.

Occurred 18 Oct 2026

Read story →

Different Perspectives

Cross-border power traders

The France-Germany day-ahead spread flipped from a EUR 17.20 German premium on 1 August to a EUR 4.15 French premium on 3 August, the same day French curtailment peaked. They cannot yet attribute the flip to curtailment alone, since a like-for-like overnight comparison shows French nuclear output rising while wind fell and demand returned on the weekday step.

EDF

River-cooling limits took 7.6 GW, 12 per cent of its fleet, offline on 3 August, the highest curtailment since the heatwave began, with an easing forecast to 4.3 GW on 4 August and 3 GW after. It manages the cut as a recurring seasonal constraint, expecting it to lift with river temperature, not repair.

Gasunie

TTF, the Dutch hub it operates, drifted to roughly EUR 55 to 58 per MWh across the window, staying inside its recent range through both the German spark reversal and the French curtailment. It reads a flat hub price as evidence that neither event this window carried enough weight to move the fuel leg on its own.

German gas-fired generators

Record German solar of 18,761 MW on 2 August pushed the clean spark spread to minus 18.48 EUR/MWh, a loss-making day, before it returned to plus 16.20 on 3 August. They now price dispatch against post-solar residual load rather than wind alone, since the sign flipped inside 48 hours on unchanged fuel and carbon costs.

European Commission (DG Energy)

Its implementing-measures register logged transposition notices from only Portugal and Slovakia against Wednesday's Article 94 deadline for Directive (EU) 2024/1788, with 25 states silent. It expects the register to fill only gradually, since filing routinely lags legislating and any infringement track against non-notifying states runs on a slower clock than the deadline itself.

Spain's LNG terminal operators

Spain's 9,145 GWh terminal inventory is the largest single stock in the EU LNG network, an option value that can reroute cargoes wherever the winter strip pays best rather than a cavern gas obligation tied to a fixed date. That flexibility matters more as Germany's cavern shortfall pushes more of the winter security question onto import infrastructure.

Written with AI from Lowdown's published reporting. Not individually reviewed by an editor. Editorial standards.