DECODING: Ukraine and Poland forge together the turbojet engine of resistance

Introduction: An agreement signed in the city of steel

Gdańsk, June 25, 2026

In Gdańsk, the Polish port city that once served as the cradle of Solidarity, another act of resistance was quietly sealed on June 25, 2026. Ukrainian company JSC Ivchenko-Progress and Poland's PZL Defence, a subsidiary of the Unimot group, signed a memorandum of cooperation for the joint development and production of small turbojet engines for cruise missiles and drones. The agreement was signed on the sidelines of the Ukraine Recovery Conference 2026 (URC2026), a conference intended to plan the reconstruction of a country still under bombardment.

The symbolism runs deep: in Gdańsk, they were not merely rebuilding Ukraine — they were arming its future resistance. By signing this memorandum, Ivchenko-Progress and PZL Defence unite the unique expertise of a long-established Ukrainian aeronautical propulsion design bureau with the modern industrial capabilities of a Polish company that has direct access to European Union and NATO markets.

The technology at the heart of the agreement

Turbojet engines for precision warfare

Small turbojet engines are at the core of the modern guided munitions revolution. They propel Ukrainian cruise missiles, long-range loitering drones, and a wide range of next-generation unmanned weapons systems. Ivchenko-Progress, based in Zaporizhzhia, holds deep historical expertise in aeronautical propulsion — a legacy inherited from the Soviet aerospace industry, reconverted and modernized in service of independent Ukraine. Its engines power Ukrainian drones and missiles whose strikes have proven their effectiveness deep inside Russia.

PZL Defence, for its part, brings industrial production capacity, NATO-standard compliance, and access to European export markets. The combination is strategic: Ukraine brings the technical know-how, Poland brings the secure supply chain. Together, they aim to establish stable Polish-Ukrainian supply chains in the high-technology sectors of the defense industry.

A market estimated at tens of billions of dollars

This agreement cannot be read solely through the lens of the current war. The market for unmanned aerial systems — military and civilian — is estimated to reach tens of billions of dollars over the next decade, according to Unimot's press service. Demand for small turbojet engines is described as "currently very strong" and growing continuously, driven by the global expansion of drone programs.

For Ukraine and Poland, establishing themselves as benchmark suppliers in this segment means capturing a share of this expanding market, diversifying their defense economies, and strengthening their technological autonomy relative to non-European suppliers. It is an industrial bet as much as a strategic decision.

The Build with Ukraine program

Ukrainian defense beyond borders

This agreement is part of the Build with Ukraine initiative, a program aimed at promoting the production of Ukraine-developed defense technologies outside Ukrainian territory. The objective is twofold: to protect production capacity from Russian strikes and to accelerate industrial scale-up by leveraging the infrastructure of NATO partner countries.

The Build with Ukraine program represents a major shift in Ukrainian industrial doctrine. During the first years of the war, Ukraine depended heavily on Western arms deliveries. Today, it develops its own technologies and seeks to produce them in partnership with its allies. This transition — from recipient to actor — is fundamentally reshaping the relationship between Kyiv and its European partners.

The Recovery Conference as a showcase

The Gdańsk Ukraine Recovery Conference 2026 brought together governments, investors, and industrialists from around the world to discuss Ukraine's reconstruction. But as Euromaidan Press noted, calling "reconstruction" what is happening while the country is still under bombardment raises a semantic and ethical problem: you cannot easily rebuild what you continue to destroy. The Ivchenko-Progress / PZL Defence agreement illustrates a more pragmatic reality: building defense industrial capacity in real time, during the conflict, rather than waiting for a hypothetical peace.

In this context, the Gdańsk conference served as a political platform for concrete technical cooperation. The turbojet engine agreement is the most tangible example of what "building with Ukraine" means in practice: not promises of future reconstruction, but production lines operating today.

Training: investing in human capital

Educating the defense engineers of tomorrow

Beyond engine production, the agreement between Ivchenko-Progress and PZL Defence includes an explicit component for training new engineering personnel. Both partners commit to cooperating in the training of specialists and the development of human capital for the aeronautical industry, using their own resources and those of partner higher education institutions.

This training component is strategically vital. Ukraine has lost hundreds of thousands of its most qualified citizens — killed in combat, living as refugees abroad, forced to flee the bombardments. Rebuilding a competent engineering base in aeronautical propulsion is not a matter of months. By integrating training from the industrial development phase, Ivchenko-Progress and PZL Defence are investing in the human capital that will make the cooperation sustainable.

Skills transfer as the foundation of autonomy

Poland has a solid university and technical system, particularly in aeronautical engineering. Institutions such as the Warsaw Institute of Aviation — renowned for its propulsion research — could play a key role in this skills transfer. For Ukraine, training engineers in Warsaw or Wrocław while securing production lines out of range of Russian missiles is a perfectly coherent strategy of industrial survival.

The human dimension of this agreement goes well beyond the technicalities of turbojet engines. It raises the question of what kind of country Ukraine will be after the war: an economy dependent on international aid, or a defense industrial power capable of designing, producing, and exporting its own technologies? The agreement with PZL Defence suggests that the ambition is clearly the latter.

Central and Eastern Europe: a new defense industrial hub

The war redraws Europe's industrial map

The Ivchenko-Progress / PZL Defence agreement fits into a broader dynamic: the emergence of Central and Eastern Europe as a new center of gravity for European defense industry. Poland, the Czech Republic, the Baltic states, and Romania are investing heavily in their production capacity for ammunition, armored vehicles, and weapons. The war in Ukraine demonstrated that proximity to the front line is a reality, not an abstraction, and that having local industrial capacity is an existential necessity.

In just a few years, Poland has become one of NATO's most significant military powers in Europe, with a defense budget reaching 4% of GDP. This build-up is accompanied by an active policy of developing the national defense industry, of which the partnership with Ivchenko-Progress is a direct expression.

The Polish-Ukrainian supply chain as a model

The explicit objective of both partners is to establish stable Polish-Ukrainian supply chains in high-technology sectors. This model — resilience through geographic diversification — is precisely what the war has taught industrial planners. A supply chain concentrated in a single country under bombardment is a vulnerable supply chain. Dispersing production between Ukraine and Poland — leveraging the relative security of Polish territory while preserving Ukrainian know-how — is a model of industrial resilience that others may well emulate.

Other Central and Eastern European countries are watching closely. The Czech Republic, which already produces 155mm shells for Ukraine, and Romania, which is developing maintenance capacity for Ukrainian armored vehicles, follow similar logic. A defense industrial network centered on Ukraine and its immediate neighbors is emerging — organically, under the pressure of war.

The geopolitical dimension: strengthening technological sovereignty

No longer depending on the goodwill of major powers

Behind the technical agreement lies a clearly stated political intention: strengthening the sovereign technological capabilities of Central and Eastern European countries. This framing is not incidental. It signals that Ukraine and its neighbors no longer wish to depend exclusively on the major Western powers — the United States, Germany, France — for their critical military equipment.

Technological sovereignty in military aeronautical propulsion means the ability to produce the missiles and drones you need without waiting for a green light from Washington or Berlin. Every time political decisions delayed weapons deliveries to Ukraine — the interminable debates over tanks, long-range missiles, F-16s — the human cost of that dependency was paid in Ukrainian lives. The agreement with PZL Defence is a structural response to that problem.

The Kyiv-Warsaw axis as a pillar of European defense

Ukraine and Poland share a common border, a shared history of resistance against neighboring empires, and now a common strategic interest in the failure of Putin's Russia. Their defense industrial cooperation transcends a simple commercial agreement: it constitutes a geopolitical axis taking shape at the heart of Europe.

Poland is Ukraine's primary land partner — the country through which the majority of Western military aid flows. Adding an industrial dimension to this logistical relationship — co-designing and co-producing defense technologies — transforms the partnership into something far more structural and durable than emergency deliveries. That is the difference between a crisis friendship and a lasting alliance.

The challenges ahead

From signature to production: a long road

A memorandum of cooperation is not a production contract. The distance between the signing in Gdańsk and the first certified turbojet engine deliveries is measured in years of engineering work, validation testing, regulatory certifications, and industrial scale-up. The technical challenges are real: miniaturizing turbojet engines for precision military applications is among the most demanding areas of aeronautical engineering.

Access to critical materials presents another challenge. Turbines require high-temperature superalloys whose supply chains are global and sometimes concentrated in countries that are not natural partners of Ukraine. The ongoing war has put pressure on these chains, forcing alternative solutions and accelerated qualification processes. NATO and the EU will need to actively support these critical materials supply diversification efforts.

The war as both accelerator and brake

Paradoxically, the war is simultaneously the main accelerator and the main brake on this project. It creates the urgency and demand that justify the investment. But it also destroys Ukraine's industrial fabric, displaces engineers and technicians, and makes certification and testing in the country of origin extremely complicated. This is precisely why the Polish dimension of the agreement is so important: it externalizes part of the industrial risk to secure territory.

The question of continuity after a potential cessation of hostilities also arises. Will a memorandum signed in wartime survive the peace? Will post-war Ukraine be as motivated to invest in the defense industry as it is today? These questions do not yet have answers — but they underscore the importance of anchoring these cooperations in solid contractual structures before the urgency fades.

Conclusion: The alliance forged in the turbine

What this agreement says about Europe's future

The Ivchenko-Progress / PZL Defence agreement is more than an industrial partnership. It is a statement about Europe's future: a continent that, under the pressure of war, is learning to co-produce its security rather than simply purchase it. The Ukrainian-Polish cooperation on turbojet engines sketches a model that other European Union countries should study carefully. Europe's defense cannot continue to rest primarily on American imports or on a handful of traditional industrial heavyweights.

Ukraine, after more than four years of large-scale war, is becoming a defense technology power. Its expertise in drones, missiles, and aeronautical propulsion is now internationally recognized. The Gdańsk agreement transforms this expertise into durable production capacity. And it reminds us, once again, that Ukraine's real reconstruction will not begin after the war — it is already underway, in the forges, the laboratories, and the conference rooms where Ukrainian and Polish engineers are mapping out a shared future together.

The message sent to Moscow

Vladimir Putin wagered that strikes on Ukrainian industrial infrastructure would break Ukraine's will and capacity to resist. The agreement between Ivchenko-Progress and PZL Defence answers him unambiguously: Ukrainian industrial capacity cannot be destroyed because it has begun to deploy beyond Ukrainian borders. You cannot bomb a Polish-Ukrainian supply chain from Moscow. That is precisely what strategic resilience means: placing beyond the reach of bombs what you cannot protect under the bombs.

Conclusion: Turbines and freedom

Steel as argument

A turbojet engine does not vote, does not protest, does not give speeches. But it propels the drones that track armored columns, the missiles that strike ammunition depots, the systems that give Ukraine the means of its resistance. The agreement signed in Gdańsk on June 25, 2026 between Ivchenko-Progress and PZL Defence is a material contribution to the cause of Ukrainian freedom — and by extension, to the security of all of Europe.

In ten years, if Ukraine is free, rebuilt, and a member of the European Union, we will perhaps remember the major political decisions — the sanctions, the arms deliveries, the summits — as decisive moments. But we will probably forget a memorandum quietly signed in a Polish port city, concerning small engines for drones. That would be wrong. Because it is often in these technical and humble details that lasting victories are forged.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist

Columnist's transparency note

My acknowledged biases

I am Maxime Marquette, analyst and columnist. I am firmly pro-Ukraine and I believe that industrial cooperation between Ukraine and its NATO allies is not only legitimate but necessary. I acknowledge this bias and own it fully in this piece. My support for Ukraine does not blind me to the real difficulties of translating such industrial agreements into practice — I have tried to flag them honestly.

Method and limitations

This analysis draws on the press release from Unimot's communications service as reported by Militarnyi, the Euromaidan Press report on URC2026, and information generally available on Ivchenko-Progress and PZL Defence. I do not have access to the precise terms of the memorandum, which has not been published in full. The market projections for drones come from the official communications of the parties to the agreement. I report them as their estimate, not as an independently established fact.

Sources

Primary sources

Militarnyi — Ukraine and Poland cooperate on engines for missiles and UAVs — June 26, 2026

Euromaidan Press — Rebuilding Ukraine while it burns: what the URC2026 actually delivered — June 28, 2026

Kyiv Independent — Ukraine war latest — July 2026

Secondary sources

Euromaidan Press — International section — 2026

United24 Media — Latest news — July 2026

Militarnyi — Main page — 2026