Ukrainian Armor

Ukrainian Armor was founded in 2014, the year the war in Donbas began, and started out making personal ballistic protection. Body armour is still a line: plate carriers, hard armour plates in ceramic and steel, soft ballistic inserts, anti-fragmentation suits, helmets and load-bearing equipment, certified to Ukrainian Ministry of Defence requirements. The company is credited with producing the first anatomically designed body armour for women serving in the Ukrainian military, which is a small detail that says something about how close the design work sits to the users.

The move into vehicles came in 2017 with the Novator, a four-by-four multipurpose infantry mobility vehicle built on a Ford F-550 chassis with a 6.7-litre diesel and a monocoque armoured body. It is around six metres long, weighs a little under nine tonnes, tops out near 140 kilometres per hour and has a range of about 500 kilometres. Serial production started in 2019 and more than a thousand had been built by September 2025. The vehicle is offered in a wide set of mission configurations: troop carrier, command and staff variant, medical evacuation, and versions carrying remote weapon stations, electronic warfare equipment or counter-drone systems. The PZSA-5 version introduced in 2025 raised hull protection to the equivalent of STANAG 4569 Level 2, rated against 7.62x39mm and 7.62x51mm armour-piercing rounds and blast charges up to six kilograms of TNT. The Novator 2 Krechet is a command variant built around the Krechet air defence control system, able to tie together digital radars, mobile firing groups and night detection devices and track a large number of targets across a wide area. Earlier and parallel vehicle lines include the Varta and Varta 2 mine-protected vehicles, the Varta-derived Kamrat, and armoured cabs supplied for the 2S22 Bohdana self-propelled howitzer.

Mortars and ammunition became the third leg of the business. The company produces launchers and rounds in 60mm, 81mm, 82mm and 120mm, with the MP-120 as the headline 120mm system. More than fifty MP-120 launchers were handed over in a single reported delivery batch, and the company has said ammunition output rose roughly tenfold over one year. It has also shown the Protector, a remotely controlled unmanned ground vehicle, and provides service support and post-warranty maintenance for the equipment it sells.

The operating context matters for reading anything about this company. It works under wartime conditions, its facilities have been attacked, and detailed figures on capacity, headcount and order book are either not published or not stable enough to state. What management has said publicly is that armoured vehicle output grew about three and a half times after the full-scale invasion, that Novator production was contracted to double in 2025 against the prior year, and that the company was contracted for at least 300 armoured vehicles that year. Chief executive Vladyslav Belbas has been openly critical of funding gaps on long-term state contracts, which is a recurring theme in Ukrainian industry reporting. The company is generally described as one of the country's largest private arms manufacturers by volume.