Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk announced on April 27, 2026, that Poland will build a national “drone armada” drawing on Ukrainian battlefield expertise, with financing pooled from European and Polish sources.
The announcement was made in Rzeszów at the ‘Road to URC – Security and Defence’ conference on April 27, 2026.
Speaking alongside Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko, Tusk framed the initiative as a reversal of the wartime aid relationship.
“It is very important to me that these tragic and at the same time impressive experiences of Ukraine in its confrontation with Russia also become part of Polish know-how on how to defend Polish skies,” Tusk said in remarks reported by Polsat News. He added that Ukraine had developed “specific, unique know-how on how to defend ourselves today and tomorrow against attacks from the air.”
Svyrydenko echoed the framing in her own address, telling delegates that Ukraine’s defense sector had undergone a transformation.
“We were a country that received help from the first days of the Russian invasion, and now we are able to provide the most modern defense solutions ourselves,” she said, according to Polsat News. She added that Ukrainian-produced systems were now capable of destroying tanks, expensive weapons systems, and drones.
Leveraging Ukrainian hardware and know-how
According to statements made at the conference, Ukrainian input into the Polish program is expected to cover drone employment tactics, supply logistics, personnel training, drone control systems, and data exchange protocols, as well as the modernization of production lines at Polish enterprises, with Ukrainian specialists involved on-site.
That positioning aligns with a broader European trend. Ukraine has signed defense production agreements with several European partners over the past year, including Germany’s Build With Ukraine framework launched in December 2025, under which Berlin allocated around €2 billion ($2.18 billion) to subsidize Ukrainian defense manufacturing in Ukraine and in Germany. Kyiv has also extended the model beyond Europe, with Ukrainian air defense specialists deployed to Gulf states to counter Iranian drones.
Tusk explicitly referenced this dynamic in Rzeszów, arguing that Ukraine had “turned out to be a partner” for states seeking to defend their own airspace. He also positioned the program as a way to outpace Russian capability development. The objective, he said, was to make “leaping an entire technological era” the unexpected consequence of Russia’s war.
An umbrella over existing programs
The drone armada appears to consolidate existing Polish-Ukrainian defense industrial cooperation. Tusk and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a letter of intent on joint defense production earlier in 2026, and Poland is one of five signatories of the Low-Cost Effectors and Autonomous Platforms (LEAP) program announced on February 20, 2026, alongside France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom. LEAP committed the E5 nations to joint investment in low-cost drone strike capabilities and counter-drone systems built on Ukrainian expertise.
Polish industry has also begun translating Ukraine-tested technology into domestic mass production. State defense holding PGZ signed an agreement in March 2026 with Estonian firm Frankenburg Technologies for Polish production of the Mark 1 anti-drone missile, with combat trials in Ukraine reportedly planned for the April-to-June 2026 window.
The Polish government has not yet disclosed the budget envelope, timeline, list of participating Polish companies and research centers, or production targets for the drone armada. Whether the project will absorb existing initiatives or sit alongside them remains unclear, and Warsaw has yet to specify which European funding instruments it will use.
Eastern flank pressure
The Rzeszów announcement comes against the backdrop of 18 months of drone incursions into NATO airspace.
Up to 21 Russian drones crossed into Polish airspace on the night of September 9 to 10, 2025, prompting Warsaw to invoke Article 4 of the North Atlantic Treaty and triggering a multinational interception involving Polish F-16s, Royal Netherlands Air Force F-35s, Italian airborne early warning aircraft, a NATO A330 MRTT tanker, and German Patriot batteries.
The risk has since broadened across NATO’s northeastern flank. On March 23, 2026, a suspected drone exploded in Lithuania’s Varena district, close to the Belarusian border, after what Lithuanian Prime Minister Inga Ruginienė later described as a stray Ukrainian drone linked to an overnight strike on Russia’s Baltic oil export hub at Primorsk. Two days later, as Ukrainian strikes again targeted Russian oil export infrastructure on the Baltic coast, a drone struck the chimney of the Auvere power plant in Estonia, while a foreign unmanned aircraft entered Latvian airspace from Russia and crashed in the Kraslava region the same night. The same week, two drones came down in southeastern Finland near Kouvola, with the Finnish Air Force identifying at least one as a Ukrainian-made AN-196 Liutyi long-range attack drone.
Drone spillovers from both Russian strikes on Ukraine and Ukrainian strikes on Russia, have pushed eastern flank states to prioritize high-volume, low-cost drone defense. Estonia announced on April 9, 2026, that it would redirect a €500 million procurement of CV90 combat vehicles toward counter-drone systems, air defense, and unmanned capabilities, citing lessons from the war in Ukraine.
Tusk used the closing of his speech to note that the city of Rzeszów, located roughly 80 kilometers (around 50 miles) from the Ukrainian border, had become the principal logistical hub for Western military aid to Ukraine since February 2022. He suggested the city’s existing aerospace cluster made it a natural anchor for the new program.
