Europe | Drones of their own

Turkey is the arms industry’s new upstart

It has won clients in Azerbaijan, Ethiopia, Ukraine and elsewhere

|Istanbul

IT HAS LEFT a trail of smouldering Russian-made tanks, trucks and artillery in wars in Nagorno-Karabakh, Syria and Libya. Soon Turkey’s TB2 drone may have a chance to do so again in Ukraine, which has bought dozens of them over the past couple of years and is now bracing for a Russian invasion. On February 3rd Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and Turkey’s, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inked a deal to build more of them together. Some of the drones have already seen action. A TB2 destroyed a howitzer used by pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine’s Donbas region in October. American officials say Russia may have been planning to fake a TB2 strike against civilians as a pretext for war.

This article appeared in the Europe section of the print edition under the headline “Drones of their own”

When the ride ends

From the February 12th 2022 edition

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