Turkey is the arms industry’s new upstart

IT HAS LEFTTBTBTB a trail of smouldering Russian-made tanks, trucks and artillery in wars in Nagorno-Karabakh, Syria and Libya. Soon Turkey’s 2 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 . 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 2 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 2 strike against civilians as a pretext for war.Mr Erdogan sees Turkey’s drones as the harbinger of a military revolution. He wants to eliminate Turkey’s reliance on foreign suppliers and turn the country into a big arms exporter. Some of his plans are fanciful, but he has already made considerable headway. Next year Turkey expects to deliver two corvettes to Ukraine, of a model used by its own navy.