Turkish defence firm Baykar aims to begin production of its new unmanned combat aerial vehicle next year which is already attracting international interest, its chairman Selcuk Bayraktar said. Named "Kizilelma", the drone expands the company's product range from slow, ground attack drones to fast and agile autonomous ones that work alongside fighter jets. "It is designed to be a highly autonomous, under human purview of course, air-to-air combat vehicle," said Bayraktar, who led the design of the 15-metre-long (49 feet) jet-powered weapon. "In a sense, the Kizilelma expresses a whole new future for combat aviation." Baykar has come to prominence internationally in recent years because of the company's light drone TB-2, which has been used in Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and North Africa and has been a huge export success, catapulting the firm to becoming one of the largest Turkish defence exporters.

In Libya, Bayraktar TB2 drones helped the official government in Tripoli stamp down an uprising by warlord Khalifa Haftar. In Nagorno-Karabakh, they played a decisive role in Azerbaijan's victory over Armenia, after which autocrat Ilham Aliyev celebrated by presenting footage of drone strikes on video screens in the capital city of Baku. The Ukrainians mainly deployed them in the first months of the war, before Russian air defenses adapted their strategy. The fact that the drones are supplied primarily to countries that are close to the Erdoğan government is conspicuous. Baykar is the flagship of Turkey's defense industry, which has grown tenfold since Erdoğan came to power in 2003.

Ukraine said it will build a factory to produce Turkish armed drones that Kyiv previously bought to use against pro-Russian separatists in the east, a deal that might upset Kyiv's adversary Moscow. "A land plot on which the factory will be built has already been chosen," Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said at a news conference on Thursday with Turkish counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv. "There were a number of obstacles to the implementation [of this project] but all of them have been removed," he added, without providing further details. Pleased to welcome my Turkish colleague and friend @MevlutCavusoglu in Lviv and expand our diplomatic geography. Cavusoglu did not speak specifically about the subject but stressed that Kyiv and Ankara were "in the process of strengthening their relations in many sectors", including defence.

Turkey aims to be among the first countries to have an entirely artificial intelligence (AI)-controlled unmanned warplane, with plans for it to take to the Turkish skies in 2023, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said Wednesday. The success of Turkish unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) in the field has produced results that "require war strategies to be rewritten," the president said. Erdoğan was speaking at the ruling Justice and Development Party's (AK Party) parliamentary group meeting in the capital Ankara. The president added that currently a total of 180 Bayraktar TB2 unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs) are operated in four countries, including Turkey. Previously, Turkish drone magnate Baykar's Chief Technology Officer Selçuk Bayraktar said the maiden flight of the prototype of the country's domestically-made unmanned fighter jet is scheduled for 2023.