Japan’s Ministry of Defense has signed a contract to buy interceptor drones from Ukrainian manufacturer SkyFall and is working to get them delivered early, Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi told a press conference in Tokyo on Friday.
The contract gives a Ukrainian drone maker a foothold in the Japanese defense market. SkyFall – a Ukrainian technology and defense company that develops and manufactures unmanned systems – is known for the Vampire strike drone (“Baba Yaga”), the Shrike FPV drones and the P1-SUN interceptors.
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The transcript did not specify the contract’s value, the number of drones, the model or the delivery date. Koizumi was responding to a reporter’s question about Japan’s plans to introduce Ukrainian-made drones. Japan’s former Defense Minister Onodera and others visited Ukraine at the end of last month and announced that Tokyo would experimentally introduce the drones.
“The Ministry of Defense has already signed a contract with Ukraine’s Skyfall to acquire interceptor drones, and we are working towards their early delivery,” Koizumi told reporters, according to the ministry’s transcript of the press briefing on Oct. 9.
The minister framed the purchase as part of a broader effort to learn from Ukraine’s battlefield experience. Koizumi said Ukraine has accumulated more experience in “new ways of fighting than anyone else in the world and is improving its sustained combat capability at a rapid pace”.
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“From the perspective of fostering the defense industry and the industrial base, there is much we can learn from their rapid feedback cycle, where new drones with improved capabilities are produced every two or three weeks, and they continue to produce them,” Koizumi told reporters.
He added that Japan needs such deterrence and response capabilities and will consider the matter carefully, looking at specific examples.
Meanwhile, Koizumi told reporters separately that Tokyo is not considering transferring weapons, including Patriot missiles that Japan manufactures under license, to Ukraine under the Self-Defense Forces law. He said the ministry has already supplied Self-Defense Forces vehicles and bulletproof vests and has accepted wounded Ukrainian soldiers, and that it will continue to provide any equipment it can.
Olena Hrazhdan is the Business Reporter at Kyiv Post, covering Ukraine’s markets, business, and economic policy. While she reports broadly on economic issues, her core focus is banking, finance, monetary and fiscal policy. Olena previously wrote for leading Ukrainian business media and became a Fellow of the International Monetary Fund’s Journalism Fellowship in 2024.