Netherlands pledges €400mln for Ukraine drone development plan

Dutch Defence Minister Ruben Brekelmans has said the Netherlands will invest €400 million in a drone development programme for Ukraine.

During a surprise visit to Kyiv on Sunday he said around half of the investment would be spent in the Netherlands, with the rest split between Ukraine and other countries.

“We will focus on different types of drones, so both surveillance drones, more defensive drones, but also the attack drones because we see that Ukraine needs those more offensive drones also to target military facilities,” Brekelmans said.

If the new drone programmes proves to be successful, further funding will be available to scale up production.

“The war, of course, is intensifying every day and Ukraine is setting up more brigades who all need support, who all need military equipment. We need to have this continuous flow of support,” he added.

Brekelmans also said the Netherlands would deliver a further 24 F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine soon without specifying a timeline.

The first six jets arrived in Ukraine in August following an agreement between Kyiv and Amsterdam last year.

Since the beginning of Russia’s invasion in 2022, the Netherlands has pledged €10 billion in military support, around €4 billion of which has been spent so far.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian officials said Russian forces attacked Ukraine overnight on Sunday with 87 Shahed drones and four different types of missiles.

A 49-year-old man was killed in the Kharkiv region after his car was hit by a drone and a gas pipeline was damaged and a warehouse set alight in the city of Odesa, Ukrainian officials reported.

Ukraine’s air force said in a statement that air defences had destroyed 56 of the 87 drones and two missiles over 14 Ukrainian regions, including the capital, Kyiv.

Another 25 drones disappeared from radar “presumably as a result of anti-aircraft missile defence,” it said.

The barrage comes a day after Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he would present his “victory plan” at the 12 October meeting of the Ramstein group of nations that supplies arms to Ukraine.

Zelenskyy presented the plan to US President Joe Biden in Washington last week but its full contents have not yet been made public.

It is however known that the plan includes Ukrainian membership in NATO and the provision of long-range missiles to strike inside Russia.

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In a statement Sunday, the Ukrainian leader paid tribute to the country’s troops.

“They demonstrate what Ukrainians are capable of when they have enough weapons and sufficient range,” he said.

“We will keep convincing our partners that our drones alone are not enough. More decisive steps are needed and the end of this war will be closer.”