I felt like James Bond being shown his latest deadly gadgets by Q

In his latest dispatch from Ukraine, as US/UK-brokered peace talks continue, LORD ASHCROFT visits a top-secret drone facility where the embattled nation's state-of-the-art weapons that can strike increasingly deeper into Russian territory are on display

- From Lord Ashcroft

AS WE criss-crossed the snow-covered roads for nearly an hour in an anonymous white VW van, I had no idea where we were heading. All I knew ~ as the daytime temperatures dipped to minus four centigrade — was that, because of my unstinting support for Ukraine’s war effort, I was being taken to a highly secretive destination to see the cutting-edge work of the world’s leading drone manufacturer.

We arrived at a grey, nondescript building and, just minutes later, I was entering a vast, pristine showroom, in which five hi-tech drones were displayed. I felt like James Bond being shown his latest deadly gadgets by Q, the head of the British Secret Service research and development division.

Yet whereas that was fiction, the weaponry in front of me was very real, as was my host for the afternoon, a shadowy figure with the call-sign “Borets”, the chief of the “9th”, a special forces department within Ukraine’s Defence Intelligence agency.

Borets, quietly spoken, calm and authoritative, and “Serhii”, the astute chairman of Ukraine’s leading drone-manufacturing company, then proceeded to give me a guided tour of the aerial weapons that have been able to strike deep — at times 1,000 miles — into Russian territory over the past three years of the all-out war that began with the Russian invasion of February 2022. Only last week, a reported 337 drones attacked Moscow — the biggest such strike yet of the brutal conflict.

And if US/UK-brokered peace talks currently underway fail, it’s likely more such attacks using these state-of-the-art unmanned aerial vehicles will follow.