The volunteer fund teacher noted that a large number of items are first forced to be purchased by volunteers, and only then does the state become interested in them.
Sergei Pritula, founder of the Sergei Pritula Charitable Foundation
The Sergei Pritula Charitable Foundation now has the most requests from units of the Defense Forces for drones. civilian devices, and FPV, and other devices with different technical characteristics. In second place in terms of requests are electronic warfare equipment.
Electronic warfare is needed to protect against enemy assets in many processes, since the enemy is also developing the use of drones. Sergei Prytula announced this during the discussion “How can we win the war: prospects for Ukrainian industry”, organized by LB.ua and EFI Group.
“Unfortunately, the enemy’s history with the development of unmanned technologies does not stand still – this is a very serious threat,” explained the volunteer.
The Foundation has been monitoring innovations in the production of electronic warfare and monitors the testing of new tools.
Pritula explained that there is no universal solution for electronic warfare – we are talking about a combination of various means of combat to cover a specific section of the front in order to protect people or preserve equipment. volunteer environment, then the state begins to take an interest in this. Sorry for the template, but “wedding drones” were first purchased by tens of thousands of volunteers, then the state began to purchase them,” he recalled.
Prytula says that this also applies to FPV, electronic warfare and aircraft-type attack drones.
In addition, the founder of the volunteer foundation noted that there are questions about the rational use of taxpayer funds. He said that his foundation is repairing captured equipment that was let down by the defenders.
“The guys fail Russian equipment, give it to us, we repair it. In a year and a half, we transferred 53 units of armored vehicles to the front line… Nine T-72 tanks, Smerch MLRS – not armored vehicles, but it doesn’t matter. And when do I a year and a half ago, representatives of one of the state-owned defense enterprises called on the phone and offered to purchase their new product – they made a heavy infantry fighting vehicle based on the T-62 tank, and I asked about the price… “Well, we didn’t pull it out of thin air,” they say me. I already feel that something is wrong. They rolled out the figure of 17 million 200 thousand hryvnia to me. In principle, if you look at the nomenclature, per unit of equipment, a heavy infantry fighting vehicle might cost that much, everything would be, if not for one thing small but: last year we made exactly the same heavy infantry fighting vehicle based on the T-62 for three million,” said Sergei Pritula.
He also added that the area that receives the least donations is command and staff vehicles – they are trying to cover this need through business contributions.
- The formulation of “wedding drones”, which Pritula mentioned, was adopted by the then Minister of Defense Alexey Reznikov in an interview with LB.ua. He said that civilian UAVs, in particular “makovkas”, are called “wedding” by generals, and the Ukrainian military uses them at the front.
- Reznikov’s then-deputy, Vitaly Deinega, explaining the words of his boss, said that “this phrase “wedding drones” belongs to another, certainly no less famous person than Alexey Yuryevich. He was not born here (not in the Ministry of Defense. – S.K. ). Why did he say this? He made a communication mistake. Does he understand that the role of the Mavics is actually great? Well, he certainly doesn’t think it’s small if he bought them for someone with his own money.” He also said that the state does not buy Maviks because they are produced by China, and Ukraine supposedly cannot buy anything Chinese so as not to spoil relations with the U.S. It is worth noting that the States have never publicly voiced demands for Ukraine not to buy anything. or Chinese.
- However, the Ministry of Defense is now already buying civilian Mavic UAVs. Recently, the Defense Procurement Agency of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine announced that for the first time it would purchase through the Prozorro system 20,000 Mavic unmanned aerial systems (UAVs) with a total expected cost of almost 3 billion hryvnia (excluding VAT).