Ukraine's The Fourth Law takes its AI drones to Lithuania for mass production

A memorandum signed at Eurosatory pushes Ukrainian combat-AI off the front line and into a NATO production base, with the frontline feedback loop intact and the hiring reserved for Ukrainians.

Ukrainian autonomy developer The Fourth Law and Lithuanian manufacturer RSI Europe signed a memorandum of understanding to build drones together in Lithuania, AeroTime reported, an agreement the two announced at the Eurosatory show in Paris on June 18. It falls under Kyiv's "Build with Ukraine" framework and was signed by RSI Europe chief executive Tomas Milašauskas and Yaroslav Tkachuk, who heads The Fourth Law's drone unit.

RSI Europe will stand up the production facilities. The Fourth Law supplies the manufacturing know-how and its artificial-intelligence autonomy, the layer built on computer vision that lets a drone find and hold a target on its own, Militarnyi reported. The plan runs to thousands of airframes, though neither the volume nor the drone types were disclosed. Hiring for the line will favor Ukrainian citizens, and The Fourth Law will feed combat data back from the front to keep the designs current through their service life.

Each side brings a track record. The Fourth Law unveiled its Zerov-8 interceptor in March, carrying an autonomous target-tracker and an anti-Shahed module the company says spots incoming drones at two to three times the range of comparable systems. RSI Europe, founded in Vilnius weeks after Russia's 2022 invasion, builds the Shpak first-person-view drone and in May delivered 9,500 of them to an unnamed NATO buyer, most passed on to Ukraine's military, according to Defence Industry Europe.

The deal pushes Ukrainian combat-AI off the front and into a NATO production base. That tracked the mood at Eurosatory, where European firms tied their factory space to Ukrainian technology already proven in the war. In the same week, the United Kingdom pledged 150,000 Ukrainian-built drones in a package worth about $1 billion. Lithuania and the other Baltic states have pushed for stronger NATO air defenses since drones began crossing the alliance's eastern flank.

Production begins once the partners meet the conditions written into the memorandum. For Ukraine, that means a drone line running beyond the range of Russian missiles, still building the autonomy software being tuned against Shaheds at the front.