Mr. Papperger, in your interview with The Atlantic, you compared our industry to housewives with Legos, dismissed Ukraine's drone program as the work of "3D printers in the kitchen" and asked rhetorically, "What is the innovation of Ukraine?" before concluding there was none worth naming.

I see this differently, and I think it's important we explore why.

Innovation is not a measure of engineering complexity or corporate pedigree. By the OECD's own standard, the global benchmark our industry relies on, innovation is any process, method, or product that generates measurable economic and social value through new application. A €500 FPV drone that destroys a €4 million tank is not a borderline case. It is a textbook innovation event: minimal input, maximum output, novel process, replicated at four million units per year.

The evidence, in fact, tells a rather different story. Those same production environments have contributed to a drone campaign that has compelled what remained of russia's Black Sea Fleet to abandon Crimea entirely and withdraw to Novorossiysk, where strikes continue to this day. The same programme has disabled approximately 40% of russia's oil export capacity, described by Reuters as the most severe oil supply disruption in modern russian history, and has degraded roughly 10% of russia's entire bomber fleet. And that is far from an exhaustive list. The gender and location of those manufacturing these drones is irrelevant to that outcome.

A new kind of war, however, cannot be measured by the metrics of the old one.

Rheinmetall builds certified, complex, multirole systems. That is legitimate and tremendously valuable. What it is not is fast. Germany ordered 19 Skyranger anti-drone systems in February 2024 for €595 million. Delivery begins in 2027. Ukraine, in that same window, went from 800,000 drones produced annually to over 4 million, iterating every single one to six weeks under live electronic warfare conditions, training AI on real combat data, and conducting the first fully unmanned military operation in history. Meaning by the time your procurement timeline closes, Ukraine has already run a full innovation cycle.

And as a fellow European, it is hard to read and respect such words about our industry here in Ukraine from someone running a defence company in peacetime Germany, with stable supply chains, uninterrupted power, and engineers who go home safely at night. None of that exists here.

My colleagues here built defence and weapons systems during blackouts, in minus 20-degree temperatures with limited access to energy and safe manufacturing facilities, under bombardment, with €50,000 budgets, while their country absorbed the most aggressive land, air and sea war in Europe since 1945.

That is not amateurism. That is the most demanding engineering environment anno 2026, and it is producing results that every serious military - and primes - of allied nations is now studying.

In addition to the manufacturing facilities across Ukraine, much of this innovation also happens in R&D labs. And when I say labs, I want to be clear about what that word means in this context;

Some of our development facilities are bunkers and trenches. Reinforced positions along the frontline, operating under 24-hour shelling of drones, artillery, and toxic substances, where the air carries the smell of burnt ammunition, disturbed soil, and blood. Where there are no weekends. No Easter break. No quiet moments to reset. 'Housewives' iterate on hardware while the ground shakes above or under them. They test, they fail, they rebuild, and they redeploy, sometimes within the same operational rotation because the enemy does not pause, and neither can the solution.

The concept of a development sprint, in the Western corporate sense, assumes safety, continuity, and the ability to go home. Again, none of those conditions exists here.

What exists instead is a standard of pressure-tested engineering that no controlled environment can replicate, and no procurement specification has ever demanded.

The Pentagon watched Ukraine's drone operations with, in their own words, "anxiety and envy." France's Chief of Staff issued a formal order to the cavalry to reinvent itself in response. CSIS published a report recommending that the United States restructure its entire acquisition model around what Ukraine built.

These are not the reactions of people watching someone play with Legos.

And now consider what is happening beyond Europe's borders.

The Gulf States now live under the direct threat of Shaheds. They operate some of the most contested airspaces on earth. And they chose Ukraine as a partner for next-generation interceptor development. That is not charity. That is strategic discernment, and a precise judgment about where the leading edge of drone technology actually lies.

Leaders read signals. Dismissing the Ukrainian defence industry sends exactly the wrong one to Europe.

And I know Rheinmetall knows this, too, because you are already working with Ukraine.

But such a message is not good for Europe, which is still, by and large, investing billions in systems never tested in real electromagnetic warfare - GPS jamming, signal spoofing, live countermeasures updating weekly.

Without acknowledging and integrating the Ukrainian experience and innovation methods, Europe risks building an arsenal that will not survive first contact with modern warfare.

Ukraine has innovation, speed, and combat experience. Just like Rheinmetall has scale, capital, and industrial depth. Complementary, not competing.

The question isn't whether to engage. The question is how seriously and how fast we embrace what each brings to the table.

But for such a partnership to exist, it requires mutual respect, not for political reasons, and not out of fear of backlash from talking down to a nation that has innovated modern warfare more in four years than most defence institutions have in the past thirty. But because that's what this very moment in Europe's history demands.

Yes, Ukraine did not invent the drone.

But what the bravest people in our modern history have built here, under horrific and heartbreaking conditions, is an entirely new innovative operational system redefining warfare.

And I know that by fact, because I am here, in Kyiv. And I see this every.single.day. We can debate components, budgets, and doctrine. But we cannot debate what the evidence shows.