Mattia Nelles@mattia_n
Oleksandr Yakovenko, the founder of TAF Industries, one of Ukraine's largest drone makers wrote a good response to @RheinmetallAG's Papperger's irritating statement. I used AI to translate it for you. It is worth reading in full.
"Dear Mr. Armin Papperger, CEO of Rheinmetall,
When you called Ukrainian drone manufacturers “Ukrainian housewives with 3D printers in their kitchens,” you demonstrated how deeply the European defense establishment still fails to understand the nature of modern warfare.
This is not about emоtions. This is about battlefield reality.
Here are the figures your industry refuses to acknowledge:
In 2025 alone, Ukrainian drones carried out 819,737 confirmed strikes. They accounted for 90% of all combat losses of the Russian army—more than all other types of weapons combined.
A single company, TAF Industries, produces up to 100,000 FPV drones per month. Over any given 90-day period, the products of my company alone have more confirmed hits than your entire fleet of equipment over its entire history of combat use across all conflicts. And most importantly—I built this company and achieved these results in two years, not fifty. Think about that.
Our drones achieve greater kinetic effect in three months than your flagship platforms have in half a century.
Why? Because the battlefield has changed, while your business model has not.
Russian electronic warfare has rendered GPS-guided Western munitions (Excalibur, GMLRS, etc.) almost ineffective.
Expensive and complex systems designed for wars with air superiority and conventional “peer-on-peer” conflict have become easy targets for drones costing $500–2,000 that attack them from above.
The cost-effectiveness ratio has been turned upside down: one 120mm Rheinmetall shell or one anti-tank missile costs more than a dozen of our drones—yet our drones still prevail.
This is not a “Lego game.” This is industrial Darwinism in real time. We iterate weekly. We lose factories to missile strikes and rebuild them within weeks. We print parts in basements and deploy 100,000 strike systems per month, while your engineers still require 3–5 years and hundreds of millions of euros to certify even minor upgrades.
The war in Ukraine is not a temporary anomaly. It is the first true drone-industrial war. And it has already proven that outdated European platforms—no matter how expensive or “serious”—are becoming increasingly irrelevant if they do not integrate the very technologies you are mocking.
So when you say “this is not innovation,” I hear something else: “We do not want to admit that the future is being written in Ukrainian workshops, not in Düsseldorf offices.”
The hashtag #MadeByHousewives is trending for a reason. Because these “housewives” destroy more enemy equipment every month than entire European armies do over full campaigns. And they do so while your industry continues to sell 20th-century solutions at 21st-century prices.
The invitation stands, Mr. Papperger. Stop laughing at the kitchen table. Come and learn how the war of tomorrow is actually fought. Because the next time someone asks, “Who needs tanks in the age of drones?”, the answer may be simpler than you think:
Those who still believe in 1979 will lose to those who are building in 2026.
With respect (but with facts),
Oleksandr Yakovenko
Founder of TAF Industries
One of those “Ukrainian housewives”"
pravda.com.ua/columns/2026/0…
