Ukraine develops homegrown Mavic drone replacement as minister vows data-driven military overhaul

Ukraine's new defence minister announced this week that the military will begin replacing the Chinese-made DJI Mavic drone with a domestically produced alternative—a shift driven by long-standing concerns about Beijing's alignment with Moscow and the vulnerability that comes with relying on foreign suppliers for critical battlefield equipment. The Mavic, a retail-grade reconnaissance drone, has become ubiquitous on Ukrainian frontlines, prized by army units and volunteer groups who continuously fundraise to acquire them. Ukraine already manufactures its own attack drones and defensive systems designed to intercept Russian aircraft, but the Mavic's combination of capability and availability has made it indispensable. Mykhailo Fedorov, the defence minister, promised that Ukraine's homegrown version would match the camera quality of the original while extending flight range—though he withheld details about the manufacturer.

Fedorov's announcement was part of a broader pledge to overhaul Ukraine's military through data-driven decision-making. He described this transformation as rooted in "the mathematics of war," a framework intended to reward commanders who deliver results on the battlefield and give Ukrainian forces a measurable edge. The overhaul will include a mission control system for drone operations and artillery crews, designed to capture performance metrics and effectiveness data in real time. More ambitiously, Fedorov said Ukraine would create a system allowing allied nations to train artificial intelligence models using Kyiv's accumulated combat data—millions of hours of drone footage and combat statistics collected throughout the war. The initiative reflects both Ukraine's technological ambitions and its willingness to share hard-won battlefield intelligence with partners.

On the same day Fedorov made these announcements, Russian forces launched a significant air attack that severed power to more than a million residents of Kyiv. The strikes targeted electrical substations, including those supplying power to Ukraine's nuclear plants. The UN's atomic watchdog confirmed that several substations critical for nuclear safety were damaged, raising alarms about the integrity of systems designed to monitor and secure nuclear facilities. In the northern region of Chernihiv, which borders Russia, 87 percent of the population lost power. The Chornobyl plant—where the reactor destroyed in the world's worst civil nuclear disaster remains entombed and requires constant cooling and monitoring—temporarily lost all off-site power. Ukraine's foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, condemned the strikes as deliberate endangerment of nuclear safety, noting the contradiction between Russian officials' stated concern for power infrastructure and their actual targeting of it.

The human toll was immediate. Drone and missile strikes killed four people: three in the southeastern city of Zaporizhzhia and one in the Kyiv region. Across the country, in the east, south, and north, other regions came under attack. In Kyiv alone, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy reported that more than one million households remained without power by evening, and more than 4,000 apartment buildings had no heating as winter conditions persisted. The scale of the blackout underscored Russia's strategy of targeting civilian infrastructure alongside military objectives.

Meanwhile, diplomatic channels remained active but showed signs of divergence. A round of peace talks between US and Ukrainian officials over the weekend was followed by a meeting at Davos between envoys for Trump and Putin. Kiril Dmitriev, Russia's representative, characterized the discussion as "very positive" and "constructive," claiming that "more and more people are realising that Russia's position is right." Dmitriev met with Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law. Zelenskyy, however, urged the United States to increase pressure on Moscow, saying America "has not yet had the strength" to halt Russian operations. He called for tougher sanctions to constrain Russian missile production, noting that some of the weapons used in Tuesday's strikes had been manufactured that year. Zelenskyy signaled willingness to travel to Davos if Washington was prepared to sign security guarantees and a postwar prosperity agreement—a conditional offer that reflected both his desire for direct involvement and his conditions for participation.