Ukrainian Defense Industry JSC (Ukroboronprom)

Ukrainian Defense Industry is the joint stock company that replaced the state concern Ukroboronprom on 28 June 2023, after a corporatisation decree turned a Soviet era holding into a company with one shareholder, the Ukrainian government, and a supervisory board built to OECD guidance. The old name survives as a brand and still fronts the group's own website, so buyers and reporters use both. Herman Smetanin, who previously ran the Malyshev plant in Kharkiv, is director general. The group runs its own compliance and anti corruption departments, has worked with the Basel Institute on Governance on internal controls, and has adopted NATO integrity recommendations, all of which matters to Western firms weighing whether to co-invest. Beneath the corporate centre sit well over a hundred design bureaus, repair plants and factories inherited from the Soviet defence complex, several dozen of which have already been re-registered as commercial companies in their own right.

The work has long been organised into five clusters, and all five are still there. Aircraft building and aviation maintenance covers airframe design and the overhaul of fixed wing types and helicopters, with Antonov the member everyone knows. Precision weaponry and munitions covers guided missiles, artillery projectiles and small arms rounds, and it is the area the war has changed most. Production of 155mm ammunition was started from nothing, and in February 2024 the group signed a joint venture with Rheinmetall, the Ukrainian Competence Centre for Ammunition, in which the German firm holds 51 percent. Armoured vehicles, automotive equipment, engineering and special equipment covers the BTR-3E1 and BTR-4E wheeled carriers designed at the Kharkiv Morozov bureau, the T-84 tank line, and the recovery and engineering vehicles built around them. Bureviy, a rebuilt Uragan rocket launcher carried on a Tatra Force chassis, came out of the same industrial base. Shipbuilding and marine facilities covers naval craft, yards and marine equipment. Radar, radio communications and air defense systems covers ground surveillance radars, field communications and the servicing of legacy surface to air batteries.

Output has climbed steeply. The government put group production at roughly UAH 122 billion in 2024 and above UAH 180 billion in 2025, and the company entered the Defense News global top fifty on arms revenue of about 2.2 billion dollars. The 2S22 Bohdana wheeled 155mm howitzer, built by a group plant, went from a handful a month to more than twenty with European money behind it. A separate agreement with Northrop Grumman covers a medium calibre ammunition plant for 20mm through 50mm natures, and another venture with a United States partner covers special chemicals. Much is deliberately unpublished. Site locations, headcounts by plant and current output rates are treated as sensitive under martial law, and several member factories have been hit by missiles, so specifics about where anything is made should be read with that caveat attached.