KYIV (Reuters) -Ukraine and the United States are in detailed talks on a deal involving U.S. investment in Kyiv’s domestic drone production, Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko said on Friday.
The announcement comes a day after President Volodymyr Zelenskiy tasked a reshuffled new government with scaling up Ukraine’s arms industry and strengthening ties with its strategic partners.
Svyrydenko, speaking to reporters alongside several other new ministers in the capital Kyiv, said the deal would also lead to the U.S., Ukraine’s biggest military backer in its war with Russia, purchasing Ukrainian drones.
“We plan to sign a ‘drone deal’ with the United States. We are discussing investments in the expansion of production of Ukrainian drones by the U.S.,” she said.
“That is, we are talking about the purchase of a large batch of Ukrainian drones.”
Svyrydenko added that a political decision on the deal had been made by Zelenskiy and President Donald Trump, and that officials were already hashing out the details.
Zelenskiy told the New York Post this week that he and Trump were considering a deal for Washington to buy battlefield-tested Ukrainian drones in exchange for Kyiv purchasing weapons from the U.S..
The Ukrainian government under Svyrydenko is expected to shore up ties with the Trump administration, which has grown increasingly critical of Russia since it stepped up air strikes on Ukraine.
Svyrydenko is well-known in Washington, having negotiated a high-level deal offering the U.S. preferential access to Ukraine’s mineral wealth that will feed a reconstruction fund.
At the briefing in Kyiv, economy minister Oleksiy Sobolev said the board of a joint U.S.-Ukrainian fund will meet for the first time by the end of the summer.
(Reporting by Olena Harmash and Yuliia Dysa; Writing by Dan Peleschuk; Editing by Andrew Heavens, Kirsten Donovan)
