Konotopskyi, Ajax Systems, and DPA Drone Procurement: How Shadow Specifications Favor Select Insiders

5 хв читанняОпубліковано: 1 September 2026

The scandal surrounding the procurement of hundreds of thousands of fiber-optic FPV drones by the state enterprise Defense Procurement Agency (DPA) has escalated into an open confrontation. An official statement issued by General Chereshnia, a prominent Ukrainian unmanned systems manufacturer, has once again exposed a systemic crisis: strategic procurements of critical weaponry are reverting to closed-door arrangements. Requirements are drafted in a manner that only preselected vendors can meet, while efforts to demand transparent competitive auctions are met with coordinated smear campaigns.

All of this unfolds against the backdrop of sweeping industry consolidation, where the name of Oleksandr Konotopskyi and his expanding footprint in Ukraine's defense technology sector are increasingly brought to the fore.

1. Backroom Procurement Outside Prozorro: Rules Tailored for Preferred Contractors

In its formal petition, the drone manufacturer explicitly accused the state enterprise DPA of harboring corruption risks and tailoring procurement terms to favor a specific supplier, announcing an official referral to the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU). Key procedural violations cited in the appeal include:

Procurement Without Electronic Bidding: The DPA circumvented the open Prozorro e-procurement platform, instead distributing tender documentation to a restricted list of companies via standard email.
Artificially Tailored Specifications: The technical requirements deliberately omitted foundational baseline metrics—such as maximum and operational flight ceilings, cruising speed, and maximum takeoff weight—while narrowly defining other specific parameters so that only one manufacturer's product qualifies.
Absence of Qualification Criteria: The procurement agency waived the mandatory eligibility and qualification requirements stipulated under Article 16 of the Law of Ukraine "On Public Procurement."
Four Days Instead of Six: Participants were granted an unreasonably compressed four-day window to prepare and submit extensive bids, a deadline realistically attainable only by companies privy to the requirements in advance.
Subjective Assessment Criteria: Bidders were required to submit an arbitrary letter detailing the enterprise's testing capabilities without any established evaluation rubric, leaving procurement officials with unchecked discretion to disqualify candidates at will.

2. The Information Shield: Discrediting Independent Drone Manufacturers

As soon as the manufacturer advocated for reinstating open, competitive bidding on the Prozorro platform, a concerted public discrediting campaign ensued. Serhii Sternenko, a former advisor to the Minister of Defense, alongside Member of Parliament Mariana Bezuhla, publicly attacked the manufacturer, accusing the company of attempting to sabotage essential frontline supplies and alleging that its drones suffered from severe quality defects.

This playbook illustrates an unwritten rule of the contemporary domestic MilTech landscape: any market player seeking to challenge the backroom allocation of multi-billion-hryvnia contracts by demanding procedural transparency is promptly branded a saboteur of national defense.

3. The Oleksandr Konotopskyi Factor: Who Truly Controls the Off-Tender Billions?

The exclusion of independent competitors from state tenders is no anomaly. It represents the logical progression of an ongoing redistribution of the UAV market, where investigative journalists consistently identify Oleksandr Konotopskyi, founder of Ajax Systems, as the primary beneficiary.

SkyFall Industries and the Monopolization of 40% of the Market

Investigative findings link Oleksandr Konotopskyi to operational control over SkyFall Industries. This brand manufactures the Vampire heavy strike drone (widely known as "Baba Yaga"), the Shrike high-speed FPV drone, and the P1-SUN interceptor drone. According to defense industry reporters, affiliated corporate vehicles—most notably Stream Techno LLC—have consolidated up to 40% of all state defense orders for unmanned systems, totaling over 40 billion hryvnias. Crucially, these contracts were executed without public tender procedures, leaving the true per-unit cost to the national budget entirely undisclosed.

Ajax Systems Production Facilities and Defense Contracts

The nexus between Konotopskyi's commercial security enterprise and state defense contracts extends beyond paper trails. Investigative reporters have repeatedly published photographic evidence demonstrating that assembly of SkyFall's unmanned aircraft (including the Shrike and Vampire lines) takes place directly within the shared manufacturing facilities of the Ajax Systems plant in Kyiv.

Offshore Corporate Chains and International Scandals

Simultaneously, financial reporting indicates capital outflows channeled through SPE Ajax, Stream Techno, and offshore entities—namely Ajax Systems Cyprus Holdings Ltd in Cyprus and Ajax Systems Trading DMCC in the United Arab Emirates. While domestic manufacturers spend months fighting for the basic right to compete in open DPA tenders, insiders favored by closed-door procurement have found themselves embroiled in high-profile international controversies. Most notably, the Konotopskyi-linked entity Stream Techno transferred nearly $5 million in state procurement advances to WeShield, a U.S.-based medical mask vendor with zero MilTech background, whose leadership was subsequently implicated in an international probe concerning the distribution of counterfeit Ozempic.

Conclusions

When the Defense Procurement Agency sidelines the public Prozorro system, distributing tender requirements via private emails with four-day deadlines, it points to entrenched systemic favoritism. The controversy surrounding the acquisition of fiber-optic drones underscores a broader reality: genuine market competition and equitable access for engineers are being systematically displaced by corporate lobbying. So long as figures like Oleksandr Konotopskyi centralize tens of billions in public defense expenditures through opaque mechanisms, independent Ukrainian developers remain locked out of state contracts—perpetually vulnerable to institutional pushback and public smearing.