Russia starts grading its provinces on drone production, training

BERLIN – Russian provinces will henceforth be assigned a “dronification” score by the country’s Ministry of Industry and Trade in an effort to boost the development of unmanned aerial vehicles across all of Russia.

The score will be calculated based on ten criteria identified as crucial in successfully developing drone capabilities, including the availability of relevant infrastructure, access to dedicated financing, and the number of full-time drone operators working within the region.

Starting next year, participating in the scoring will be mandatory for all of Russia’s constituent parts except what the Kremlin calls the “new regions” – the unilaterally annexed parts of Ukraine. In its first iteration in 2025, a total of 47 regions participated. Ranked highest was the south-central Russian Republic of Bashkortostan, also known as Bashkiria.

A previous Defense News investigation revealed how drone makers in Bashkiria were benefiting from generous public contracts and pivoting from producing agricultural drones to loitering munitions for use in war.

Runners-up in this year’s ranking included the Samara, Sakhalin and Novgorod oblasts, as well as Ulyanovsk and Yamalo-Nenets. Moscow ranked ninth and Saint Petersburg came in twelfth, although it scored highest in the category of industry-relevant infrastructure, Russian media reported.

The initiative has been promoted by Russian Deputy Minister of Industry and Trade Vasily Shpak as an explicitly civilian project, aiming, as he says, to help build a new sector of the economy based on unmanned aerial vehicles. He has said that the rating system, in addition to assessing regional readiness for the mass deployment of UAVs, should help shift public perception of drones away from their military associations and towards civilian applications.

Nonetheless, the technology is inherently dual-use, and raising capabilities for civilian drone production would also provide a significant boost to any potential non-peaceful applications. Existing Russian drone programs with officially civilian aims have, on several occasions, found military applications, including in Moscow’s war of aggression against Ukraine. This includes civilian drone makers selling their products for military use, all the way to government projects for training school children to build and operate drones.

In 2023, Russian authorities unveiled a program for the development of unmanned aviation in the Russian Federation by the end of the decade. The government is investing between 660 billion and 1 trillion Rubles ($8.2 billion to $12.4 billion) in the initiative, with additional funding streams and programs available for specific drone-related projects.

Russia starts grading its provinces on drone production, training

Unmanned

C4ISRNet