United to win: Baykar aims to finish drone plant construction in Ukraine in 2025

The Turkish company Baykar expects to complete the construction of a plant in Ukraine in August next year.

The company's CEO, Haluk Bayraktar, said this in an interview with Reuters.

"We have completed 80% of the construction and are now ordering equipment. The course of the war will determine the start date of production, but the facility will be ready in August 2025," he informed.

It is expected that this plant will manufacture:

• the Bayraktar TB2 model,

• as well as its more robust TB3 version.

Baykar announced it will invest $300 million in the next five years to develop a turboprop engine for the Akinci drone.

Next, the focus will shift to designing a turbofan engine specifically for the Kizilelma, an unmanned air-to-air combat vehicle currently being tested in flight.

Now, Akinci and Kizilelma use Ukrainian-made engines.

Haluk Bayraktar announced that Baykar has recently agreed with Ukrainian company Ivchenko-Progress to develop a turbofan engine jointly.

In February, the head of the Baykar company told Reuters that the plant near Kyiv planned to produce 120 Bayraktar drones each year. Construction will take about 12 months to complete, he said, "and then we'll move on to the internal engineering, equipment, and organizational structure."

On security issues related to the war, Bayraktar said plans for the plant were "going full steam ahead" and that "nothing" could stop them.

At the same time, Vasyl Bodnar, the ambassador to Türkiye, is convinced that the Baykar plant in Ukraine will be fully operational only after the end of the war.

For reference:

In July of last year, the Turkish company Baykar started building a factory in Ukraine to produce Bayraktar attack drones.

Before that, Baykar received license permits from Türkiye to establish the production of two drones in Ukraine — Bayraktar TB2 and Akıncı.

Moreover, Ukraine has signed three contracts with the Turkish company Baykar, which produces Bayraktar TB2, Kızılelma, and other drones.