“I put my whole life into it,” Viktor Yarovoi (78) says of the Southern Machine Building Factory in Dnipro in eastern Ukraine, where he has worked for more than 50 years.
“But now so much has been destroyed. Half of one building has been standing without a roof for 1½ years since it was hit. People say, ‘Why rebuild when [the Russians] will just bomb it again?’”
The plant – known by the abbreviations Pivdenmash in Ukrainian and Yuzhmash in Russian – is renowned in both warring countries for having been one of the Soviet Union’s main builders of intercontinental ballistic missiles and space rockets.
Last year the factory was the first target for Russia’s new Oreshnik ballistic missile, but the choice was probably symbolic – it is the only Ukrainian defence plant that ordinary Russians would know – rather than for any vital role that it now plays in Kyiv’s war effort.
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The strike last November did relatively little damage because there were no explosives in the Oreshnik’s warheads, adding to the impression that the attack was above all a propaganda effort, to send a message to incoming US president Donald Trump and to give the impression that Russia’s defence industry was thriving while Ukraine’s was on its last legs, and even once mighty giants like the Dnipro plant were now vulnerable.
“We had 50,000 or 60,000 workers in our heyday. It was a city within a city,” says Yarovoi, who started out as a welder at Pivdenmash in 1969 and worked his way up to being a chief technical specialist in a pipe-building workshop.
“If I’d ever gone looking for another job and told them I’d worked at the factory, then anyone would have taken me with pleasure. It was a byword for discipline and quality,” he says. “There was always a terrible fear that, God forbid, a missile would fail because of some mistake that you had made.”
The factory was built at the end of the second World War, at least in part by German prisoners of war, and its immense scale – covering 744 hectares – reflected the military-industrial ambitions of the rising Soviet superpower.
After starting out as a car factory, Pivdenmash was turned into a missile production facility in the early 1950s and worked closely with the neighbouring Southern Design Bureau on top-secret defence and space projects for the Kremlin, which decreed in 1959 that the city – then called Dnipropetrovsk – would be closed to foreign visitors.
The city reopened to foreigners only in 1987, four years before the Soviet Union collapsed, replacing state control with a chaotic form of capitalism and plunging the industrial behemoths bequeathed to 15 successor states into immediate crisis.
Pivdenmash has limped along ever since: deals in new markets never matched the vast Soviet subsidies of old and the plant’s deep historical ties with Russian industry have been destroyed by 11 years of conflict – starting with the Kremlin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and escalating into full-scale war in 2022.
Details about Pivdenmash and Dnipro’s associated design bureau are wartime secrets, but development of a ballistic missile known as Hrim-2 (Thunder-2) is reportedly among the projects of the few thousand workers who are thought to remain.
Such is the history, secrecy and size of the plant – and the frequency of Russian drone strikes on its territory – that rumours swirl about what might be going on in its deepest bunkers, which Russian media claim are repair shops for Ukrainian tanks.
But just as tanks have been made to look antiquated by drones that can cripple them relatively easily and cheaply, so vast facilities like Pivdenmash seem like dinosaurs beside the low-key but efficient drone workshops that have sprung up all over Ukraine.
“There were five of us on the project to start with in 2022 and now we have well over 100 workers ... and we make thousands of drones a year,” says Dmytro Panchenko, a co-founder of Dnipro-based drone builder Chaklun (Wizard).
The group makes a range of drones for the Ukrainian military, including surveillance drones and interceptors that can bring down the highly destructive Shahed drones that Russia launches by the hundreds at cities across Ukraine nearly every night.
“They have a good success rate,” he says of the Chaklun interceptors.
“Ukraine needs to scale up drone production and the training of pilots. We are intercepting enemy surveillance drones and some Shaheds, but not all of them, because we don’t have enough drone teams on the battlefield.”
The collapse of Ukraine’s ties with Russia crippled Pivdenmash, but Panchenko doubts that Ukraine’s drone industry would suffer if the volatile Trump suddenly halted weapons supplies to make Kyiv sign an unfavourable peace deal with Russia.
“Western technology is too expensive ... and in fact many things are now being made in Ukraine that are more interesting than western or Chinese technology,” he says.
Panchenko feels no link between the cutting-edge Chaklun and Dnipro’s storied history of arms production at Pivdenmash: “I don’t really see any continuity there. This is a new story, a new page in how war is waged.”
