- Dual-track procurement: traditional channels for lethal gear and DOT-Chain marketplace for rapid non-lethal buys
- Local funding, DOT-Chain, and “unique” postal service cut delivery from months to days
- Digitiised administration (Army+, Reserve+, Impulse) improves recruitment, tracking, and real-time testing
As much as the Ukraine-Russia conflict is teaching Western nations about changing operational concepts on the modern-day battlefield, Ukraine is also able to demonstrate a new approach in equipment procurement and sustaining units in the field.
In an exclusive interview with Army Technology, Oksana Ferchuk, Deputy Minister of Defence of Ukraine for Digital Development, Digital Transformation and Digitalization discussed Ukraine’s evolved military procurement practises during a war where time is of the essence.
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“Doing it [via traditional Western European procurement], you would spend months, years [waiting for delivery]. Now you are able to test in a week’s time, adjust your products and delivery gap,” Ferchuk said, speaking to Army Technology in Lviv in late-September 2025.
Ukraine’s “unique” postal service is also able to deliver systems to units in the field without risk of being uncovered via a security weakness or a loose paper trail.
Maintaining a two-pillar procurement structure, where lethal capabilities are acquired through more traditional government-led structures, along with the rapid delivery of non-lethal systems, such as drones, sensors, and electronic warfare (EW) systems, to battlefield units via the DOT-Chain platform.
Through the DOT-Chain digital marketplace, certain Ukrainian brigades order drones and other equipment direct from the manufacturer. This allows defence start-ups and SMEs to pitch directly to the customer, who can then provide feedback and quickly iterate, a key requirement for Ukraine’s ever-evolving battlefields.
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By GlobalData“Each brigade actually has their own budget, supplied from the local communities because brigades are paying a lot of taxes,” said Ferchuk. “It was a decision made by the country that a portion of those taxes and the local authorities will return to the military units as a donation. In such a way, our brigades currently have their own budget, which they are able to spend to the specific tasks.”
With this funding, selected Ukrainian brigades can acquire platforms outside the usual acquisition structures, that could otherwise take significantly longer to deliver.
“When the government noticed that such direct procurement is working effectively, they started to allocate directly from Ministry of Defence. This is the reason why the brigade can procure directly, not everything, but in areas where the general staff and army commanders decide that it’s wise. It is working very well,” Ferchuk explained.
While Army Technology was in Ukraine, the country’s Ministry of Defence revealed that within two months of the launch of the DOT-Chain initiative, the country’s military had ordered nearly 17,000 UAVs worth about UAH 600m ($14.3m). Currently, 12 combat brigades in key sectors, including Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, and Kherson, are participating in the pilot project.
The process enabled the delivery of drones to be reduced “from months to just a few days”, stated Denys Shmyhal, Minister of Defence of Ukraine, at the time.
This approach, described by Ferchuk as “absolutely unknown to the conventional military sector”, has produced “amazing results”, with drones and other electronic systems constantly being updated.
With Russia’s EW and tactical-level doctrine changing on a monthly, if not weekly basis, this helps keep Ukraine’s frontline units operationally relevant.
“The innovation is happening in Ukraine. If you would like to be relevant to the battlefield of the current, let’s say, decade, you have to be present in Ukraine.
“If you are not present in Ukraine, trying to sell products with the old conventional methodology, most probably you will be out of this market. Not next year, not three, five years, but in ten years,” Ferchuk contended.
Ukraine also has an advantage over Western European countries in being able to test new systems in real time and contested environments. Given this, Ukraine’s defence sector had a distinct advantage over European counterparts in being able to test and iterate capabilities, validating concepts before going to market.
“The Ukrainian Army is a frontier to other countries as well. This is a trained million-person army that knows how to conduct modern war. Other armies… are far behind the current processes, trends, technologies, and tactics. The only way for them to understand it is to come and to see how it’s working,” explained Ferchuk.
“We’ve tried a lot to explain how it works online, workshops, seminars, webinars. It doesn’t work. You have to be on the frontline to understand how it’s done in reality.”
Digitisation of Ukraine’s administration
As reported by Army Technology in 2024, Ukraine has taken strides in digitising much of the administrative processes of the miliary and reserve services, bringing efficiencies at a time when the system itself has had to expand exponentially to manage the demands of the war.
This includes the development and launch of the Army+ and Reserve+ digital apps, aiding training and administration for existing personnel as well as future recruitment.
Ferchuk, who prior to Russia’s 2022 large-scale invasion had executive experience inside Ukraine’s telecommunications sector, described the Reserve+ app as “really successful” in finding a way to “communicate with your potential audience” and help prepare those at initial or early stages of determining eligibility and recruitment.
The Army+ initiative has since evolved with the launch a new version, dubbed Impulse, which is in rollout and acts as an analytical database to catalogue skillsets and needs of the individual soldier.
While such digital systems are increasingly common in the civil sectors, the adoption by Ukraine’s government for defence purposes is a distinct non-traditional approach.
“It’s a really complicated task, but we have to perform it. There is no other way. If such data, such important data, do not exist online and you cannot rely on it, then your processes and decision making can lead to the incorrect solutions,” Ferchuk said.
Ukraine-Russia war: update
Despite the coming onset of the winter season, Russia continues to make incremental gains in sporadic areas across the frontline, which has changed little through 2025.
However, recent reports indicate that Russian forces have gained access to parts of Pokrovsk, with forces operating with “increased comfort” inside the city, according to the Institute for the Study of War.
Claims and counterclaims by both sides make exact understanding as to the situation on the ground in Pokrovsk difficult.
According to Ukraine’s Ministry of Defence, the intensity of combat operations along the front “remained high” throughout October, registering an increase in the number of recorded combat engagements compared to the previous month.
In a 3 November release, Ukraine’s MoD stated that its Armed Forces has reported 5,480 combat engagement in October, regularly exceeding 200 actions per day.
In addition, in October Russian forces conducted almost 140,000 artillery strikes, including 3,353 launched from multiple launch rocket systems.
