Leonardo opens Ukraine branch: Italy taps Kyiv war experience, tests Michelangelo Dome

Leonardo has set up a new company in Kyiv with the aim of moving into the frontier of drone warfare, whose epicentre is now Ukraine, and of reaping the hoped-for benefits for European production and defence.

The Italian arms manufacturer has in recent months created Leonardo Ukraine, a company wholly owned by the group, according to the daily newspaper Milano Finanza.

At the Farnborough Airshow in the United Kingdom in July, the company’s chief executive, Lorenzo Mariani, explained how Ukraine has "acquired an operational experience without equal during the conflict" and that it was therefore necessary to "envisage forms of cooperation with the Ukrainian drone industry".

"In Ukraine a huge level of expertise has developed in systems which in Europe would initially be considered simple, but which are obviously not simple either to design or to manufacture on a large scale," Elio Calcagno explains to Euronews, Senior Fellow for Defence and Space at the Istituto Affari Internazionali (IAI).

This is an "enormous asset for European industry, including defence ministries, which may be trying to do planning in procurement and in medium- to long-term programming."

What Leonardo is looking to achieve in Ukraine

The new company has been registered in the Ukrainian companies register since last May with the declared objective of carrying out research and development in the scientific and engineering fields for optical and navigation systems. It appears in Leonardo’s half-year report at the end of June with a share capital of just under 100,000 euros, as reported by Il Fatto Quotidiano.

Besides the know-how acquired from Kyiv, it has long been known that the Italian manufacturer, controlled by the Ministry of Economy and Finance, wants to test in practice its new integrated air-defence system, the Michelangelo Dome, a complement to US Patriot batteries or the European Samp/T system, for which a business volume of some 20 billion euros is projected over the next ten years.

Ukraine as "laboratory" for war of the future

The war that followed Russia’s invasion has turned Ukraine in four years into a vast military experiment, where the almost early-20th-century trench warfare seen at the beginning has become a succession of defensive and offensive operations based largely on unmanned systems.

To the point where the domestic industry has managed not only to produce drones at low cost but to turn them into cutting-edge products, progressively tested in the field and improved on the basis of the results achieved.

"In recent years, from the perspective of countries at peace such as ours, or France, Germany, the United Kingdom, what has become evident and remarkable is the ability of Ukrainians to create a continuous flow of information between the front line, that is those who are fighting, those who in the case of drones use them every day, and the engineers in the various companies," Calcagno says.

Among the innovations they have introduced are GPS-independent navigation, resistance to electronic interference and automatic target recognition.

Supporting these defence efforts is the government in Kyiv, which has created a state innovation hub called Brave1, bringing together around 2,500 companies specialising in drones, electronic warfare and artificial intelligence.

The manufacturing hub also makes use of the Brave1 Dataroom, developed in cooperation with the US company Palantir, which provides visual and thermal data collected in real conditions, useful for training algorithms capable of detecting and intercepting airborne threats.

Germany, through some of its companies, and the European Union have already understood that this is a strategic advantage and, in the context of Europe’s rearmament and military aid to Kyiv, have strengthened cooperation with the Ukrainian defence industry, both at the level of individual member states and through European funds.

According to Il Fatto Quotidiano, Brussels has made up to 60 billion euros available for cooperation with Kyiv’s defence sector, which in the meantime has published tenders for the production of long-range attack drones, surveillance aircraft using fibre optics and an unmanned cargo vehicle.

The key role of data from the battlefield

If the testing of new weapons has often shifted from simulators to real battlefields, it is no secret that this has become even more important in the age of artificial intelligence. The acquisition of real-time data, as in other sectors, is the crucial resource for refining the design of defence systems and producing more effective ones.

The meeting in the spring between the Italian defence minister, Guido Crosetto, and his counterpart Mykhailo Fedorov, the guru of Kyiv’s new hybrid warfare who was later removed from office by Ukrainian president Zelensky, appeared to be moving in this direction.

Also part of this picture is the British licence disclosed during a recent visit to Kyiv by Prime Minister Andy Burnham for the production in Ukraine of the Storm Shadow-Scalp cruise missile (with a range of 250-500 kilometres), over which the United Kingdom, France and Italy (which insists it has not given the green light) share control.

The missiles are produced by MBDA, a company owned 37.5% each by BAE Systems and Airbus and 25% by Leonardo. As with drones, the use of missiles in a real-world context is an advantage for manufacturers.

"Absolutely," continues the IAI researcher, "in order to understand, for example, how Russian air-defence systems react, how many of these missiles manage to get through, under what conditions, in which areas. So all of this is undoubtedly valuable information for those designing these systems today and in the future," Calcagno concludes.

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