Poland takes a seat at Europe's drone table. WB Group named founding member of the EU-Ukraine Drone Alliance

The European Commission has announced the founding membership of the EU-Ukraine Drone Alliance, the first industrial platform linking the European and Ukrainian unmanned systems sectors. Among the eighteen companies selected, nine from the European Union and nine from Ukraine, there is exactly one Polish entity - WB Group. This is more than a matter of prestige. It is a seat at the table where the direction of Europe's drone programmes will be decided over the coming years.

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16 july 2026   |   23:07   |   Source: Gazeta Morska   |   Prepared by: Kamil Kusier   |   Print

fot. Grupa WB

The list of founding members was announced on 15 July 2026 during the third EU-UA Defence Industry Forum in Kyiv, under the wider EU-Ukraine Drone Deal initiative. The selected companies will form the Alliance's first board, the body that will set strategic directions for cooperation and joint projects between Ukraine and EU member states. The founders' first meeting is scheduled for September in Brussels.

Eighteen companies, one objective

The European Commission opened the call for founding members on 5 May 2026, with applications accepted until 25 May. The criteria were clear: demonstrated experience in the defence drone and counter-drone ecosystem, legal-entity status free of third-country control, and compliance with EU restrictive measures. From the pool of candidates, a deliberately narrow group was chosen.

The European side comprises: Croatia's ORQA, Spain's Indra Group, Italy's Fincantieri, Poland's WB Electronics of WB Group, Destinus, France's Delair, Finland's RSI Europe, Denmark's TERMA A/S and Germany's Quantum Systems.

Ukraine is represented by: Skyfall Industries, Greentech Harvest, Tencore, Deviro, Vyriy Industry, Athlon Avia, TAF Industries, UFORCE and F-Drones.

The line-up speaks for itself. Alongside WB Group, the board will seat heavyweights such as Fincantieri, one of the world's largest shipbuilding groups, and Indra, a pillar of Spain's defence industry, as well as companies forged directly by wartime experience, such as Skyfall, maker of the Vampire heavy bomber drones. WB Group is the sole representative of Polish industry in this company.

The Drone Deal, or Europe learning from Kyiv

The Alliance was established by the European Commission's Directorate-General for Defence Industry and Space (DG DEFIS) under the EU-Ukraine Drone Deal initiative. The platform responds to the need to accelerate the development of EU capabilities in unmanned and counter-drone systems, drawing on industrial experience and the lessons of the war in Ukraine.

The context behind the initiative is familiar across the Baltic region as well. Repeated violations of member states' airspace by unmanned aerial vehicles, including incidents over airports, critical infrastructure and military bases in Belgium, Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands, exposed a gap in Europe's ability to detect and counter drones. Brussels' response is systemic in nature: the Alliance complements the European Drone Defence Initiative and the member-state-led capability coalition on drones and counter-drone systems, with which it is expected to work closely.

Presenting the initiative, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen stressed that Europe should draw on the experience of Ukraine, which through years of full-scale war has become the world leader in developing and operationally employing unmanned systems. The EU, in turn, is to provide what Ukrainian industry needs most: manufacturing capacity, financing and a stable industrial base.

The logic of the Alliance rests on an exchange of complementary strengths. Ukrainian companies bring practical combat experience and extremely short innovation cycles, in which weeks rather than years separate concept from frontline deployment. European companies, from startups to major groups, bring scale, production infrastructure and access to capital. The third element is the end users, the armed forces, whose requirements and operational lessons are to feed directly into the Alliance's work.

Members of the EU-Ukraine Drone Alliance will co-shape technology development priorities, recommendations for future European programmes, and solutions supporting joint industrial and operational capability. Further ahead, under the Commission's plans, the Alliance is to facilitate joint ventures between Ukrainian and European companies, draw up technology roadmaps, propose interoperability standards and identify weak points in supply chains.

Why WB Group? A decade on the Dnipro

WB Group's presence among the founders is neither an accident nor a courtesy to Warsaw. The Polish manufacturer fits the criteria on which the Alliance was built almost to the letter: it combines a European industrial base with a genuine, long-standing presence in Ukraine and direct access to battlefield experience.

According to the company, WB Group has operated in Ukraine since 2014 and was among the first suppliers of unmanned systems to the country. Its flagship FLYEYE reconnaissance drone has been in service with Ukrainian users since 2015, and the WARMATE family of loitering munitions since 2017. Both systems remain in continuous use today, meaning they have passed the most demanding test military equipment can face: years of uninterrupted operation in a full-scale war, in an environment saturated with electronic warfare.

Since 2019, the group's subsidiary WB Ukraina has provided in-country support and carried out manufacturing operations. The significance of this arrangement is hard to overstate: constant contact with users and production inside a country at war allow solutions to be refined continuously on the basis of operational experience, and successive generations of systems to be developed. The cooperation covers equipment deliveries, work with the Ukrainian military and services, and joint development of advanced unmanned systems.

The war in Ukraine has shown that the development of unmanned systems must be built on an exchange of knowledge between industry and users, said Piotr Wojciechowski, President of WB Group. The EU-Ukraine Drone Alliance creates a mechanism to carry those lessons to the European level, he added, noting the company was glad to take part in the initiative from the very beginning.

It is worth noting that the model Wojciechowski describes is one WB Group has applied in practice for a decade. The feedback loop between the front line and the design office, which the European Commission now wants to institutionalise across the Union, has in the Polish company's case been running since the days when most of European industry still treated drones as a niche.

From sensor to shooter

WB Group ranks among the leaders in multi-domain reconnaissance-strike systems built on a network-centric C4ISR UxS architecture. In practice, this means the company's solutions integrate unmanned platforms, battle management systems, sensors and effectors into a single operational environment.

The key parameter of this architecture is the shortening of the sensor-to-shooter cycle, the time that elapses between detecting a target and engaging it. The war in Ukraine has brutally verified the importance of that metric: high-value targets such as rocket launchers, radar stations and command posts remain in one place for minutes, not hours. Systems able to close the reconnaissance-decision-strike loop faster than the adversary can relocate deliver a real increase in engagement effectiveness. It is this area of competence, alongside the platforms themselves, that the Polish manufacturer brings to the Alliance's work.

For thirty years, WB Group has designed and manufactured reconnaissance, command and strike systems used by NATO armed forces and Ukraine, making it one of the most experienced players on the European unmanned systems market.

The Baltic dimension of the drone puzzle

Although the Alliance is pan-European in character, its work will bear directly on the security of the Baltic Sea region. It is over the Baltic and in its vicinity that a significant share of incidents involving unidentified unmanned aircraft has been concentrated, closing airports and raising alert levels around critical infrastructure in Denmark, Germany and other states of the region. It is also in the Baltic, around gas pipelines, power and telecommunications cables and emerging offshore wind farms, that demand is growing for monitoring and protection capabilities in which unmanned systems, aerial, surface and underwater, will play an ever greater role.

Telling in this context is the presence among the founders of companies with maritime competences: Fincantieri, a shipbuilding group constructing vessels for navies, and Denmark's TERMA, a supplier of radars and surveillance systems used, among other applications, in the protection of maritime areas. The signal is clear: Europe's drone ecosystem will not be confined to the air domain, and Ukrainian experience, where uncrewed surface vessels have transformed the balance of power in the Black Sea, will be carried over to the maritime realm as well.

For Polish industry, including the companies and research centres clustered around the Tricity area, where competences in maritime autonomous systems are being developed, WB Group's seat on the Alliance board means the Polish voice will be heard when future European programmes are defined, including those with a maritime component.

From declarations to deliverables. The clock is ticking towards September

The coming months will test the pace of the Alliance's work. The September meeting in Brussels is to inaugurate the first board. Under the European Commission's plans, in 2026 the platform is to gather companies, government institutions, manufacturers, developers and test ranges from the EU and Ukraine, and by 2027 deliver joint industrial ventures, technology roadmaps and proposals for interoperability standards.

The stakes are high. Europe, having watched the drone revolution from a distance for years, is now trying to catch up at a pace dictated by a war on its borders. The EU-Ukraine Drone Alliance is the first attempt to institutionalise that pursuit at the industrial level. The fact that the eighteen-member group dealing the cards includes a Polish company with more than a decade's presence on the Ukrainian proving ground of experience is one of the better pieces of news for the national defence industry this year.

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