Saab and Ukraine have agreed to jointly produce air defense systems under Kyiv’s “Build in Ukraine” program. The move deepens Ukraine’s defense-industrial base, strengthening supply chains and signaling growing international confidence in wartime production.
On 22 October, 2025, SAAB and Ukraine moved to co-produce air defense systems under the state-led “Build in Ukraine” initiative, as reported by Ukraine’s Ministry of Defence. The program anchors Ukraine’s shift from end-user to industrial partner inside Europe’s defense ecosystem, aiming to shorten delivery timelines and harden wartime supply chains. The announcement matters because localized manufacturing and sustainment can stabilize Ukraine’s air-defense coverage amid persistent missile and drone attacks, while attracting foreign investment and jobs. It also signals that international primes are ready to place production inside a country at war, with more than two dozen firms now localizing operations.
The prospective portfolio for joint production points first to systems SAAB already markets for the layers Ukraine urgently needs. At the very-short-range tier, the RBS 70 NG man-portable air-defense system is a natural candidate given its laser beam-riding guidance, high resistance to common jamming techniques, and suitability against helicopters, cruise missiles and small uncrewed aerial systems. SAAB’s MSHORAD configuration, essentially a mobile, vehicle-mounted evolution of RBS 70 NG coupled to an organic command-and-control node, addresses point defense for brigades, logistics nodes and energy infrastructure where mobility and rapid set-up are critical. On the sensing side, the Giraffe family (AMB and 4A among others) offers fast-revisit, 360° surveillance tailored to low, slow, small threats and has become a reference radar line across Europe. SAAB has also unveiled Nimbrix, a counter-UAS missile concept optimized for cost-imposing defense against small drones out to short ranges; while early in its lifecycle, it exemplifies the kind of high-volume effector that a localized Ukrainian line could scale quickly.
From an inventory standpoint, Ukrainian forces already operate Saab systems: Sweden decided in November 2022 to supply RBS-70 systems to Ukraine, Ukrainian crews were trained at the end of 2022 and the first RBS-70 units entered service in early 2023, and Giraffe family radars have also been delivered or donated to reinforce Ukraine’s air-surveillance capability. RBS-70 NG and Giraffe (Mark/4A family) therefore stand out as the most plausible Saab systems for local assembly or deeper localisation in Ukraine given their export track record, battlefield maturity and suitability for the current threat profile. Recent reporting also indicates agreements and discussions toward joint production/localisation of Saab air-defence equipment with Ukrainian partners, which, if implemented, would reduce training and integration risk compared with introducing wholly new classes of sensors and interceptors and would accelerate time to the field.
The advantages of joint production are immediate and cumulative. Industrially, building and servicing air-defense systems on Ukrainian soil compresses turnaround times for depot-level maintenance and battle-damage repair and reduces dependency on cross-border logistics during periods of intense strikes. Operationally, domestic integration allows mounts, power, communications and software to be tailored to Ukrainian vehicles and digital backbones, easing sustainment and improving uptime. Economically, localization retains value inside Ukraine, creates skilled jobs and draws secondary suppliers in electronics, energetics and precision machining. For SAAB, co-production diversifies supply chains, adds surge capacity for a high-demand portfolio and deepens a presence in Europe’s fastest-learning operational laboratory for air defense.
Strategic implications span the geopolitical, geostrategic and military levels. Geopolitically, the move embeds Ukraine inside Europe’s defense-industrial base rather than at its periphery, reinforcing a long-term orientation toward EU and NATO standards and procurement cycles. Geostrategically, distributed manufacturing inside Ukraine complicates adversary targeting calculus and builds redundancy alongside partner-nation lines, making it harder to throttle the flow of interceptors and spares. Militarily, a domestic production and sustainment node enables a steadier pipeline of missiles, launchers and radar components, supporting a layered architecture down to brigade level and converting ad-hoc donations into a predictable force-generation model.
Regarding budgets and contracting, no financial details for the SAAB–Ukraine co-production have been disclosed in the information provided. What can be said is that comparable European procurements of short-range air-defense packages typically run from the high tens to the hundreds of millions of euros per tranche, depending on radar mix, launcher count, missile stocks and command-and-control integration. The information provided does not identify the latest awarded customer contract for these specific SAAB systems; however, the active European order book for mobile SHORAD and 3D surveillance radars suggests a robust market context into which Ukrainian production would slot, potentially lowering unit costs through economies of scale.
The “Build in Ukraine” initiative frames this announcement: it is not a one-off industrial gesture but a policy to localize foreign primes across ammunition, armored-vehicle sustainment, air defense and emerging technologies such as counter-drone, unmanned systems and cyber. With more than 25 foreign companies already at various stages of localization, SAAB’s entry on air defense cements Ukraine’s evolution from consumer to co-producer. By establishing air-defense manufacturing and sustainment at home, Ukraine turns urgency into capacity, creating a European-linked ecosystem able to absorb frontline lessons and deliver at the tempo the battlefield now demands.
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