More than 40 foreign defense companies work in Ukraine – the president

More than a billion dollars from partner countries have already been invested in the Ukrainian defense-industrial complex, and more than 40 foreign defense companies are involved in the work in the country, President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyi said while speaking in the Verkhovna Rada on November 19.

“We have to open our defense-industrial complex for full-fledged cooperation with partners… We have attracted more than 40 foreign defense companies to work in Ukraine. More than 600 domestic companies work in the field of defense industry, which provide a total of 300,000 jobs. This is all a historic achievement of Ukraine,” said Zelenskyy, presenting the “Internal Sustainability Plan”.

According to him, Ukrainian weapons “will always be the first guarantor” of security for Ukraine. “We are preparing a reliable financial base for this. We are directing our investments to the production of weapons and attracting partners,” the president added.

Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of the Russian Federation, Ukraine has been trying to increase its own production of weapons, partly producing them together with partners.

At the beginning of December last year, Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Ukraine does not seek to depend only on partners, but is interested in cooperation, in particular, in the production of weapons. Later, after a defense conference in the United States, Kyiv announced agreements with two American companies on the joint production of 155 mm ammunition in Ukraine.

In July of this year, the German concern Rheinmetall received an order from the Ukrainian government to build a plant for the production of ammunition.