Bureaucratic Delays in Kyiv and Rigid Thinking in the West Are Blunting Ukraine’s Battlefield Edge, Report Finds

A new report from the Centre for Statecraft and National Security (CSNS) at King’s College London, along with experts who spoke to Al Jazeera, concludes that a combination of mundane regulatory obstacles in Kyiv and unimaginative institutional thinking among European militaries is holding up joint weapons production with Ukraine. The consequences are twofold: Ukraine’s battlefield performance is being undermined, and Europe’s own armed forces are being left unprepared for the realities of modern warfare.

For the past two years, Kyiv has pursued a strategy of inviting Western partners to fund new production facilities inside Ukraine in exchange for the opportunity to test those weapons on a live battlefield. The arrangement is meant to be mutually beneficial: Ukraine receives badly needed weapons, while Western partners gain invaluable know-how from real-world combat data. That formula has produced at least 180 business-to-business partnerships between Ukrainian and foreign partners, according to the report, titled “Beyond Aid: Making Ukraine Defence Cooperation Work.” However, 22 percent of those partnerships are currently stalled.

One prominent example is an artillery shell factory that German defence giant Rheinmetall announced a year ago. The facility should now be entering production, but ground has not yet been broken on the project. According to the report, Ukrainian authorities delayed the necessary permits, and the government subsequently moved the factory’s planned site. Such delays represent more than mere administrative inconvenience; they translate directly into fewer weapons reaching the front lines.

The report also highlights legal and bureaucratic complications surrounding intellectual property. “The process of registering intellectual property is lengthy,” Chris Pool, a visiting fellow at the CSNS, told Al Jazeera. “Iteration cycles move so quickly, often what’s registered and protected is obsolete.” Former CIA Director General David Petraeus recently discussed how Ukrainian drone manufacturers “can make software changes once a week as required by what the Russians are doing to counter their systems. They can make hardware changes every three or four weeks.” By the peacetime standards of Western militaries, that pace of innovation is dizzying.

Pool raised further questions about ownership when a product is modified in the field. “What happens if the product ends up with a Ukrainian brigade and that brigade then modifies it and adapts it to new developments? Who then owns the intellectual property in the improved product? Does the Ukrainian state have a stake at that point?” he asked. Export rights present another obstacle. The report notes that while focusing exclusively on the Ukrainian market may be viable at the initial stage, “the absence of a clear export mechanism may later constrain companies’ ability to … integrate Ukrainian-based facilities into wider international supply chains.”

The problems are not confined to Kyiv’s regulatory apparatus. Pool, who has spoken with Ukrainian teams seeking Western partners, points to Europe’s rigid approach to land warfare as a significant barrier. In 2022, both Russia and Ukraine fought using classic battlefield artillery and heavy armour, and Ukraine defeated Russia’s initial attacks through effective use of defensive weapons. But when Ukraine launched its counteroffensive in 2023, it could not match Russian scale and production capacity, and it adapted quickly.

Ukraine designed cheap, long-range drones and missiles to stem the flow of Russian weapons and fuel to the front and to destroy Russian refining capacity. It also began designing and building its own first-person view (FPV) drones to serve as a form of artillery. Ukraine reportedly invested $1bn in drone warfare in 2023, ten times what it spent in 2022. A New York Times video analysis found that Ukraine struck as many Russian armoured vehicles in three months this year as in all of 2022.

Production figures illustrate the scale of the shift. In 2024, Ukraine produced a million FPV drones. In 2025, output exceeded 3 million. This year, Ukraine is expected to produce an estimated 8 million drones — 16 for every 10 that Russia fields — achieving localised air superiority. These new weapons have been accompanied by new tactics and new command structures. “The most important thing is decentralised command. Ukraine has implemented this more than anyone else,” said Konstantinos Grivas, who teaches advanced weapons systems at the Hellenic Military Academy. “Units don’t wait for commands from upstairs. They harvest their own information and make their own decisions … You need very capable junior commanders,” he told Al Jazeera.

That dispersed command model runs counter to classic military hierarchies and tactics. Pool described a certain amount of arrogance in the British approach: “In the UK, there’s a certain amount of arrogance that the British army wouldn’t fight like this, and this is all very interesting, but ultimately, not relevant to us.” Ukrainian teams he spoke with were told, “Couldn’t you just partner with [defence companies British Aerospace] or Babcock and then we can deal with the faces with whom we’re used to dealing,” he said.

Ukraine has demonstrated the limitations of that attitude in wargames. In exercises dubbed Combined Resolve in August, Ukrainian drone operators destroyed a US tank brigade by simulating their tactic of dropping armour-piercing artillery directly onto tanks. They achieved the same result against a British brigade in February. “Faced with teams who are presenting a new technology or navigation that doesn’t rely on GPS, for example, there isn’t that curiosity to find out what’s going on and how this could be adapted to the British Army,” Pool said.

Western militaries have “not even started to shift all of the land forces units into drone infantry,” according to Oleksandr Danylyuk, a former senior adviser to Ukraine’s Ministries of Defence and of Internal Affairs. The report’s findings suggest that unless Western governments and militaries overcome their regulatory paralysis and institutional conservatism, Ukraine’s ability to defend itself will continue to be constrained — and Europe’s armed forces will remain unprepared for the kind of warfare that is already being fought on Europe’s eastern edge.