BUNTAR AEROSPACE has formally refused its own $16 million investment round and announced that every reconnaissance drone it builds from now on will be made exclusively from scrap metal donated by Ukrainian citizens, starting with a public smelting ceremony in Kyiv on Tuesday.
The company's chief engineer, standing beside a furnace assembled from decommissioned agricultural machinery, explained that the decision was taken after the first investor wired the money and the team realized they could not spend it fast enough. «We have calculated that a single donated tractor chassis yields enough aluminium for three reconnaissance airframes,» he said. «We will therefore accept no more than one tractor per household.»
Within hours, farmers across four oblasts began queuing at collection points with trailers of obsolete equipment. A regional administration in the Poltava region converted its vehicle depot into a receiving station and published a timetable: tractors on Mondays, washing machines on Wednesdays, and on Fridays anything that once belonged to a Russian garrison.
The company has also introduced a loyalty scheme. Citizens who deliver more than a tonne of metal receive a numbered rivet from the first airframe, which the firm describes as «a piece of the sky you helped build.» The $16 million remains untouched in a bank account, guarded by a retired colonel who has been instructed to sit on it.
By the weekend, the queue outside the Kyiv smelter stretched past the ring road, and the company had to publish a second timetable for people who wanted to donate their neighbours' scrap.