- Ukrainian units desperate for drones to hold Russia back are crowdfunding many of their weapons.
- Civilians and veterans have been sponsoring deadly strikes for under $1,000.
- Researchers say it's opened a new era of civilians directly sponsoring war en masse.
With $1 million, Oleksandr Chernyavskiy says he can change the war for him and his comrades.
The enlisted soldier is assigned to a drone prototyping unit with Ukraine's 241st Territorial Defense Brigade — a battle-hardened formation of reservists deployed along the eastern and northern fronts. His unit supplies 11 battalions with new drone designs, mostly cobbled together from commercial parts and Soviet arms. It also makes other weapons, too.
For $80,000, he says his team can completely build a 17-inch drone armed with a rifle — essentially a flying AK-47 or M4. Another prototype, a modified Soviet ZU-23-2 antiaircraft gun, needs $70,000 worth of parts to be fully automated to strike down Russian drones.
Chernyavskiy estimates roughly $1 million in funding would allow his unit to develop home-grown AI-controlled drone swarm tech, primarily using the money to pay software engineers and buy parts.
Much of this work, he said, depends on how much his unit can crowdfund. He ran an NGO before the war and is partly responsible for coordinating and advocating for that money.
"For drones, most funding is from volunteer help, by donors," Chernyavskiy told Business Insider. "When we have government or defense ministry funds, we try to buy regular things like mortars, shells, all connected to ammunition."
Crowdfunding has long been a pillar of Ukraine's war effort, with civilians pitching in for years to send aid supplies, clothing, and cash to the front lines. Low-cost drones, proven to be effective on the modern battlefield, have become one of the hottest commodities among units battling Russian assaults.
A commonly crowdfunded drone, a seven-inch commercial unit that carries a small payload, costs less than $1,000 to build and arm. A typical 155mm artillery shell, meanwhile, costs between $2,500 and $4,000 for Western factories to produce.
Chernyavskiy said that drones can't replace artillery, which can suppress enemy forces, serve as fire support, and hammer front-line positions at range. But drones have their place in this war, as the world has repeatedly seen. With these systems, for around an average of $15,000, his men can take out a Russian tank worth significantly more.
Ukrainian fundraisers like him have formed a robust network that pulls in millions of dollars weekly for drones, working with a mix of local manufacturing lines to turn the cash into precision strike munitions. To keep donors abreast of their work, they report daily with first-person videos of exploding drones slamming into enemy positions and vehicles.
Chernyavskiy said that Russian forces typically can't advance when harassed by drones. "If you can have 100 explosions in one day, it means no Ukrainian will be killed this day," he said. Swarming the air with recon drones also gives Moscow little chance to launch surprise attacks.
Civilian war support at an 'astonishing' scale
But due to availability, there are days when his unit can only deploy five, maybe 10 drones, reducing resistance and allowing Russian troops to get close to Ukrainian trenches and overwhelm them.
Chernyavskiy said the flow of cash from civilian supporters is keeping his men alive.
"I think it's certainly unprecedented," Federico Borsari, a resident fellow who studies technology and drone warfare at the Center for European Policy Analysis think tank, said of the current crowdfunding movement.
Borsari said that drones, easy to build and deadly, have changed how civilians can support a war effort en masse. With Ukraine, an individual civilian can now remotely yet directly pay for a hit on an enemy soldier or tank, he said.
"Really, the scale of the rapport is astonishing," Borsari said. "We're talking about hundreds of thousands of drones provided to the Ukrainian military."
Oleksandr Skarlat, a volunteer who has been running a fundraising Telegram channel since the war began, said most of his donors paying for drones are regular civilians sending part of their salaries.
Others are small businesses with cash to spare, he said. Skarlat, a professional swimmer, works as a member of a Telegram network of five fundraising volunteers led by Ukrainian activist Serhii Sternenko. Skarlat told BI he's helped raise $2.5 million for 100,000 drones.
"We started using drones because of the lack of ammunition. It was from a need of striking positions and priority targets in the most effective and cheapest way," he said. Throughout the war, Ukraine has repeatedly struggled with insufficient amounts of ammunition, such as much-need 155mm artillery shells.
In Kyiv, restaurants, cafés, and barber shops often display QR codes for customers to throw in a few dollars for drone production, said Mark J. Lindquist, a former US Air Force analyst now living in Ukraine to crowdfund for local units.
"It has to be in the millions, if not tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, because it's the most effective way for an average citizen to put together a small amount of money and make a huge difference on the battlefield," Lindquist told BI.
Lindquist, who worked as a motivational speaker before leaving for Ukraine in 2022, now flies back to the US regularly to raise money at public events for front-line units.
He estimates that he and his fundraising partners have brought in about $13 million in aid, and he now asks Americans to donate toward civilian vehicles and commercial drones that can be turned into weapons like loitering munitions.
Yet Lindquist is frustrated with donors in the US, whom he says frequently balk at paying for something that can kill.
"Largely, Americans have shied away from things that would drop these bombs you see on Instagram," he said.
Drones aren't always used for deadly ends, though. Chernyavskiy hopes to raise $50,000 to complete a land evacuation drone that can navigate deep forest terrain and retrieve lone Ukrainians guarding trenches.
With the 241st Territorial Brigade low on manpower and guns, Chernyavskiy said soldiers sometimes find themselves stationed alone on the front lines for abnormally long rotations. He said many fear it is a one-way ticket to the trenches.
"If you are injured, no one will help you; you have no chance," he said. "People usually spend one or two days in the trenches. Now they spend half a month. You can go crazy."
A drone that fetches the wounded, or even corpses, raises morale among troops who know that their bodies can still be returned to be honored, Chernyavskiy said.
US and European veterans fueling the crowdfunding effort
Chernyavskiy's unit also receives cash from Americans, often from military veterans willing to chip in anything from lunch money to $15,000 each. He said he's brought about two dozen veterans to the front lines to see his unit's work.
"After they see what is going on, they help much faster," he said with a laugh.
It's a broad effort. Daniel Viksund, a Norwegian veteran who served two tours in Afghanistan as a combat engineer and tank driver, has been coordinating donations to Ukraine, primarily from Scandinavia, since 2022.
He told BI that many of his donors are current and former military members who, after seeing videos of drones in action, sought to send more of them to Ukraine.
"Our main focus is drones. Everybody was doing cars and medical stuff. Army veterans like us, we like to do things and make it happen," Viksund said.
His 20-man nonprofit, Veteran Aid Ukraine, has sent some 500 drones to Kyiv's forces and paid for about 2,500 more. Viksund said videos sent to him from Ukrainian units show those drones have destroyed at least 60 main battle tanks and over 100 armored vehicles.
He's proud of his organization's work in Chasiv Yar, where they sent 200 drones to units defending the embattled city in late spring as US congressional infighting locked up billions in vital aid.
Viksund said Veteran Aid Ukraine alone can't provide nearly enough drones for Kyiv's remote operators. He estimates that they expend 4,000 drones on average a month.
"But when all the small rivers come together, you make a big river," he said.
Russian organizations have also been donating drones for Moscow's units, but not on such a scale.
"You don't necessarily see the same level of grassroots efforts in Russia because they have the state capacity and state resources to marshal the economy toward the war in a different way," said Jennifer Kavanagh, director of military analysis at the think tank Defense Priorities.
Kavanagh said the crowdfunding effort has been meaningful in filling gaps in Western aid, though it's dwarfed by the sheer might of the traditional arsenals sent to Kyiv.
The US and Europe have collectively sent about $90 billion in military aid to Ukraine, including powerful F-16 fighter jets, long-range missile platforms, and millions of ammunition rounds.
Return on investment in war
Some Western donors and volunteers say that lower-tech drones can make a significant difference for just a fraction of that cost.
One such donor is a wealthy software engineer in the US Mountain West who said that he had spent about $105,000 sending 142 drones to Ukraine, including eight Chinese-made Mavics that cost around $1,700 each and are popular for recon missions.
With six kids at home, he told BI that he's cut back on purchases like upgrading their 2011 GMC Savannah and fixing his couch.
"I just think that if I spend a little less, someone will survive. Someone will have a husband and father," said the software engineer, who asked not to be named out of concern that Russian intelligence services would target him. BI knows his identity and has verified his donations to a Ukrainian platform.
One of his favorite items is a 10-inch drone made from DJI parts that can be converted into a bomber with a six-pound payload.
He said each of these $1,600 drones has a typical lifespan of 50 missions and that, with a minimum hit rate of 33%, delivers at least 16 strikes on Russian targets.
"If you give these guys $100 million, they can win the war for you," he said. A common hope among drone warfare enthusiasts is that with more drones and jammers, Ukraine can effectively slow the Russian advance while exhausting its manpower and equipment.
Chernyavskiy holds on to the dream that when those resources run dry, Ukraine will have an opening to strike back and reclaim territory. Yet he cautioned against thinking that only deploying low-cost drones will win the war.
"For example, if you have fog weather, you can't fly these drones because you can see nothing," Chernyavskiy said. "But artillery does not care about the fog. If they have coordinates, they will fire and destroy whatever is alive in this sector, no problem."
Western donors wish they had more to give
Questions loom for Ukraine's future in this fight. The country continues to face shortages of troops and matériel, persistent Russian advances, and the possibility that the incoming US administration will restrict or cut the critical aid it relies on. But private citizens retain the ability to make a difference, fundraisers say.
Lindquist, the former US Air Force analyst turned fundraiser, said Americans haven't realized how far their money can go if they help fund drones in Ukraine.
"The Ukrainians have come up with a solution to be able to strap a bomb to a $500 drone and take out a $2 million tank," he said.
"If people were to understand that power of drones, we could do what our grandparents did in World War II," he added.
The software engineer in the Mountain West said he's been trying to get his friends to donate, too, but to no avail.
"They'll say they don't want to kill people. Then I ask if they want to buy a tourniquet," he said. "They think it's cool that I'm doing it, but they want me to be the one doing it."
In Ukraine, Chernyavskiy is frustrated, too. But as he says, "feelings change nothing."
"Lack of money, lack of resources. This is the nature of war," Chernyavskiy said.
Yet he stressed his brigade is stretched thin, and that if they run out of drones, the fighting turns to rifle combat. Outnumbered in the trenches, it's a battle the Ukrainians almost always lose, he said.
Last week, he said, a commander who ran one of the drone development projects with him was killed by Russian fire.
"If we have a lack of donors' help, our friends are killed, and then we are killed," he said. "If we can't pay for drones, if we don't have ammunition, we pay for it with lives."
Translation by Sofiia Meleshenko.