The Ukrainian P-1 Sun interceptor is a small drone that hunts bigger drones. It seeks and destroys the Shahed drones currently being used to such devastating effect by Russia against Ukraine, and by Iran against the entire Middle East region.
Shooting one down is no small thing. Just a month ago, the conventional wisdom was that the only way to neutralize a $50,000 Shahed was with a $3 million Patriot missile, which the U.S. has been using up at a rate that has Putin and Xi cackling with glee.
Now Ukraine has turned that math on its head. The P-1 Sun can be mass-produced for $1,000 apiece. It’s built from 3-D printed parts and off-the-shelf components. It’s modular, so you can swap out the camera, battery, radio module, and explosive payload, using tools from Home Depot. Every part except the camera is made in Ukraine, and they’re working hard to develop their own camera. They can build up to 50,000 P-1s per month.
The P-1 is impressive on a lot of levels, starting with the fact that it’s been tested and proven in real combat. It can change configurations depending on the mission, but mostly what it’s used for is kamikaze attacks on incoming Shaheds. The P-1 gets blown up with the drone, but most people agree this is a thousand bucks well spent.
One of the more ironic side effects of Trump’s idiotic war is the upsurge in demand for Ukrainian military expertise. Virtually every Gulf state is engaged in the panic-buying of defensive weaponry, and they’re looking for help.
Thanks to Putin, and now Trump, Ukraine has emerged as the world’s premium supplier of drone defense. And business is good.
Which is why Ukraine’s high-profile president, Volodymr Zelensky, was touring the Middle East, signing ten-year deals with Gulf states that were desperate to protect their desalination plants, their oil infrastructure, and their citizenry — probably in that order.
Presumably the deals include P-1s, plus the training and expertise to use them and the license to manufacture them. But drone interception is just part of what Zelensky is selling. He has what we marketers would call a holistic solution, a soup-to-nuts defense system, adaptable to whatever needs defending.
Interestingly, money is not the main goal, not that he’s turning it down. Mostly he wants to trade his country’s expertise for things he can use in the endless war against Russia. That would be a long list, with missiles at the top.
Zelensky is good at laying guilt trips on the Western world. Everybody knows that those are his people literally on the firing line, holding off Putin so the rest of us don’t have to. It’s a card he’s not shy about playing.
One of the strangest things about this whole Trump-made geopolitical nightmare is that the global card table has been flipped over and nobody’s sure what hand they’re now playing. Alliances of convenience are being cobbled together all over the world, and nobody is being overly picky about who they’re getting in bed with.
The friends, for example, that Zelensky was making on his tour of the region have little interest in either democracy or human rights. But he wasn’t there to preach, he was there to make deals. And he was getting a warm reception from some newly-appreciative customers.
His first stop was Saudi Arabia, where he signed up MBS, Prince Bone-Saw himself. The two specifically spoke of “mutually beneficial” capabilities. We should recall, always, that MBS is the guy who teamed up with Netanyahu — talk about strange bedfellows — to flummox Trump into invading Iran. Was he now having second thoughts about that decision, or about his country’s ability to defend itself from a very pissed-off Iran? Who knows what MBS thinks, but Zelensky has something he urgently needs.
Zelensky moved on to the UAE and Qatar, cutting similar deals. In the case of Qatar, a major supplier of liquid natural gas to Ukraine, the reciprocal back-scratching was un-subtle: We’ll keep the drones out of your gas fields, you keep sending us gas.
His final stop was, of all places, Syria, a new face on the world stage since the fall of the hideous Assad regime last year. His goal there wasn’t so much to sell anti-drone technology as it was to lay the groundwork for resuming relations with a country that knows all about having its cities obliterated by Putin. Ukrainians and Syrians may soon be able to get drunk together and bond over Russian atrocity stories.
And if you’re wondering just where the U.S. military stands in all this, Axios reported that the same pitch Zelensky just made to all those Middle Eastern states, he actually made to the administration, way back in August, and got turned down. It was a closed-door, staff-level meeting at the White House, and the PowerPoint featured a map of the Middle East with the warning, in bold font, that “Iran is improving its Shahed one-way-attack drone design." This was a full seven months before Trump invaded Iran and stirred up a hornet’s nest of Shaheds.
The pitch was structured in transactional terms, since Zelensky knows, from painful experience, that those are the only terms Trump understands. He offered a 50-50 partnership, with the U.S. investing in — and getting full use of — Ukrainian defense technology. This included a workable plan for protecting U.S. bases in the Middle East from drone attacks, including bases that were subsequently hit.
Trump wasn’t in that room, but he was evidently briefed on the proposal, because he told his people to work on it. Who would he have told? Pete Hegseth? Kash Patel? Jack Daniels?
That these idiots passed on the deal has since been acknowledged by military people to be a major strategic blunder, especially now that Ukraine has other customers who don’t routinely insult them. Will the Saudis get their drone technology before we do? Will Qatar? Does Zelensky have any reason at all to hold Trump’s place in the queue?
One of the many ironies here is that this was the sort of thing the U.S. was good at. For at least eighty years, the world came to us for military technology and the expertise to use it. And it wasn’t just war toys, it was expertise of every kind. Now, in Trump’s upside-down world, expertise is a four-letter word, and the brains have started to drain from this country.
Experts from all over the world — people who used to want to bring their knowledge and ideas to our shores — are instead writing us off. They want to work with people who live in the real world, and who know what they’re doing.
Last year, when Trump and Vance so rudely ambushed Zelensky in the White House, Trump repeatedly admonished that “You haven’t got the cards.”
Turns out, Zelensky has plenty of cards. He just had no place to play them. The market for his country’s expertise in modern warfare had been limited by a shortage of available wars.
Then Trump blundered us into the stupidest, most expensive war in history, and suddenly the market was there. All Zelensky had to do was make the kinds of deals Trump still thinks he’s good at. MUGA!
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