More than 500 combat units order drones, munitions, ground robots and electronic-warfare gear from it.
Olena Mukhina
October 19, 2026
Euromaidan Press
Ukraine has turned buying weapons into something closer to online shopping. One in five drones bought by Ukraine’s Defense Procurement Agency now reaches troops through DOT-Chain Defence, a state digital marketplace established in 2025 that lets combat units order what they need directly, the Defense Ministry says.
Drone technology changes so fast that a weapon ordered through months of paperwork can be obsolete before it arrives, so Ukraine built a marketplace that puts the choice in the hands of the units that fight. Launched in July 2025, DOT-Chain Defence now serves more than 500 combat units.
Unlike the agency’s other channels, central competitive tenders and fixed procurement lists, the marketplace lets commanders pick from a catalog themselves. The system works like an online store, where the military spends state funds to decide exactly what the state supplies them.
Speed is the point of the model. When an item is in stock, the average time from a unit’s order to shipment is eight days, rising to about a month and a half for pre-orders, the ministry notes. “Delivery speed is especially important for unmanned systems, because technology in this field develops dynamically,” DOT-Chain Defence chief Artem Romaniukov says. Also, he states that makers and soldiers constantly rework designs to beat new countermeasures.
The catalog spans the main types of unmanned aerial vehicles, FPV drones, bombers and fixed-wing aircraft, along with their munitions, ground robotic systems and electronic-warfare gear.
The shift moves the burden off the fighters. A unit builds its own order in DOT-Chain Defence, and the agency handles the procurement side, signing contracts with manufacturers and making payments. That means that purchases are completed in a few clicks.
In the first nine months of 2024, Ukraine’s troops received more than a million drones and other equipment through this system, part of a drone-buying surge that reached about $8 billion in the first half of the year.
Olena Mukhina is a journalist from Kyiv. Before joining Euromaidan Press, she worked as a website editor for Kyiv Post.