An industrial estate on the outskirts of Tallinn in Estonia houses an unlikely winner from the war in Ukraine: a start-up that makes autonomous vehicles used to carry casualties and clear routes for soldiers on the battlefield.
Milrem Robotics is part of a wider shake-up of the arms trade in the wake of the conflict that has seen smaller, technology-led companies gain prominence in an industry dominated by long-established incumbents such as Lockheed Martin and BAE Systems.
As well as Milrem, others such as America’s AeroVironment and Turkey’s Baykar, have caught the headlines after the success of their equipment on the Ukrainian battlefield. Milrem, together with Germany’s Krauss-Maffei Wegmann, has delivered 14 unmanned ground vehicles to Ukraine, while the Pentagon has sent several hundred of AeroVironment’s Switchblade drones armed with warheads. Baykar’s armed Bayraktar TB2 drone has similarly been deployed in Ukraine.