CashNews.co
7 October, 2024
Gunpowder for small arms ammunition. Illustrative photo
Ukraine has deregulated the explosives market and is preparing to issue grants for the development of powder factories.
The Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov stated this, Economichna Pravda reports.
At the Defense Tech Valley international summit held on October 3-4, the minister announced plans to invest in the development of the artillery powder production facilities.
“The amount of investment in Brave1 projects has increased. This year we started issuing grants for missiles. Next year we will issue grants for powder factories. That’s why I urge investors and businesses to think about it,” Fedorov said.
According to him, the government has deregulated the market for gunpowder and explosives and made it possible to disguise the factories through third-party companies. The latter should hide the companies’ activities from any registers, while maintaining the ability to operate within the legal framework.
Ukraine’s ammunition market is currently growing rapidly, but it is critically dependent on the supply of explosives from abroad and has to compete with global defense giants for scarce raw materials.
The emergence of Ukraine’s own suppliers of artillery gunpowder and explosives will make the Ukrainian defense industry independent and may reduce the cost of ammunition in the future.
Raw materials for gunpowder
Militarnyi previously reported that the first experimental harvest of special cotton varieties needed for the production of artillery gunpowder had ripened in southern Ukraine.
Cotton planted within a government project to produce raw materials for ammunition has ripened in the fields in two locations in the Odesa region. This is an experimental harvest of “several 10-hectare plots”.
The Ministry of Agrarian Policy has already received interim experiment results: the first cotton “boxes” have formed and opened, meaning the plant can ripen in the Ukrainian climate.
“This experiment is necessary to understand whether cotton can grow there at all and whether it can be used for strategic industrial purposes. We’ve already seen that it can grow by 99%,” Ihor Vishtak, director of the Agricultural Development Department at the Ministry of Agrarian Policy, shared.
Next, the cotton will be harvested in several stages to send the cotton at different stages of maturation for examination to the laboratories of the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Strategic Industry. They will determine whether the fiber is suitable for the production of long-range artillery powder – it must be up to 0.15 mm long.