In a secret production facility in western Ukraine, a team of entrepreneurs, engineers, and shop workers is building a better drone battery.
It took months to develop and frontline soldier feedback – which drove the design, testing and transition from an experimental power source to mass production – is positive, Pawell Power company director Voldymyr Nebor told Kyiv Post.
“We talk to the guys in the field constantly and they tell us what they need,” Nebor said during an interview inside a clandestine battery assembly site in western Ukraine. “Our job is to hear what they say and then come up with technical solutions.”
According to Nebor and two Ukrainian unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) operators interviewed for this article, the newest and most powerful battery, a 118,000 milliampere-hour (mAh) device heat-sealed in black waterproof plastic and weighing about two kilograms (4 pounds), will drive an Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) ground robot a full day, across practically any terrain, through pretty much any weather the skies can throw at it.
At the time he was interviewed (early November), no war drone battery anywhere of similar weight, on either side in the Russo-Ukraine War, could keep a first-person-view (FPV) aircraft flying or a UGV rolling as long as his company’s most-advanced battery, Nebor said.
Kyiv Post checks of competing products in and outside Ukraine found that the claim was generally true, but also that the Ukrainian drone components market is awash with batteries, some comparable, made by dozens of companies larger and smaller. Most are, like Nebor’s company, in continuous contact with drone operators on the front lines, and constantly tweaking their products to help the soldiers fight more effectively.
“It isn’t one thing. The criteria we have to meet (for a battery type) change constantly. War simply doesn’t allow technology to mark time,” said operations manager Oleksy Tkach*. “It really is true that war is an engine of progress. So we have to adapt constantly. What customers need from us changes based on the dictates of the war. What happens is that we get requests from soldiers, and then we try and meet those requests to the maximum, as best we can.”
The Pawell Energy achievement was to push the envelope of a fairly important component of Ukrainian national war production capacity – higher-performance, lower-weight drone batteries – a bit further, sources told Kyiv Post.
In mid-2025, Nebor’s and Tkach’s outfit became the first Ukrainian battery company to build a battery uniting solid-state batteries with high-current lithium-ion (Li-ion) power cells, deploy it to the field, process operator feedback, and then put it into production. That put a battery about twice as efficient as previous drone batteries into the hands of Ukrainian drone operators.
“I’m proud we make this battery. It’s smaller in size and in weight, and it has a higher capacity. This allows it to take on more difficult tasks. We can fly further. With this specific battery, we’ve been able to get a result of 170 kilometers (106 miles) on a two-motor drone, and then hit targets,” Nebor said.
The story of how a small regional company with a production facility from the outside indistinguishable from surrounding industrial, commercial, and residential buildings, came to manufacture cutting-edge-tech batteries for war, followed a path typical of Ukrainian military production development.
Nebor, 24, was in the 3D printing business before Russia invaded. Once his friends and relatives went off to fight, he helped crowd-source donations and equipment for the front. Early feedback drove subsequent purchases. In 2023, following a US cut-off of arms to Ukraine and stalled deliveries of artillery ammunition from Europe, Ukrainian troops with thousands of cannons and howitzers were critically short of shells. The AFU turned to FPV drones to defend the country.
A programmer with a technical education and owner of a 3D printing company, Nebor calculated that his team could help manufacture batteries for the FPV drones, replacing the missing foreign artillery shells. As the war ground on, production volumes and drone battery complexity grew.
By 2024, drones had usurped artillery as the single most lethal weapon on the Ukrainian battlefield. By 2025, even picked Ukrainian drone units like the 14th Unmanned Systems Forces (USF) Regiment, an elite outfit conducting long-range Ukrainian drone strikes into Russia, was on Nebor’s customer list. Recently, a battery test batch was sold to a Dutch company, he said.
Production site staff told Kyiv Post that the big benefit of manufacturing batteries for the AFU is contributing to the war effort.
“I like the work here,” said shop worker Voldymyr Shishkin, “For one thing, it’s a young group of people, the guys are young, for them I’m like a grandfather, which I am actually. I looked for this kind of work for quite a while, so that I could be useful and helpful, so am doing something so that our enemies can be destroyed, so that they will be killed. I know that is cruel, but that’s the truth.”
Most of the staff Kyiv Post spoke with at the production facility were highly-qualified – Nebor’s background is programming, Tkach said he is a trained aircraft mechanic, and Shishkin said he serviced MiG-29 fighter jets for the Ukrainian Air Force before retiring.
At the time of a Kyiv Post visit, production was in full swing with workers milling, gluing, soldering, wiring, shrink-sealing, packing, receiving components, and signing off on a consignment shipment. Hundreds of recently built batteries were stacked neatly in racks, waiting to go to the front.
“I know that I made these batteries. That’s a positive thing. And it also pleases me, that the production is in Ukraine. We need more of it, the more the better,” Shishkin said.
NOTE TO READER: *Tkach is a pseudonym because the interviewee requested his identity be protected. He gave his actual surname to Kyiv Post.