Two countries at war with each other account for more than nine in ten of the military drones that crossed borders over the past four years.
Ukraine took delivery of 8,664 foreign-supplied military drones from 2022 through 2025, most of them American, while Russia received 6,720, mostly Iranian Shahed-136s, according to SIPRI data compiled by Visual Capitalist. Taiwan, a distant third, received 291.
SIPRI's count leaves out most of what is actually flying. It tracks only large drones and long-range one-way attack models, so the cheap first-person-view drones fighting much of the war at the front don't register, and neither do drones a country builds at home.
As Visual Capitalist explains further,
Drones have become one of the defining weapons of modern warfare, and international trade in them now revolves around a single conflict.
This graphic ranks countries by the number of military drones they received from foreign suppliers from 2022 to 2025, using data from the SIPRI Arms Transfers Database. The figures include drones sent as aid and those built in the recipient country under a foreign license.
SIPRI tracks major weapons only: drone aircraft with a loaded weight of at least 150 kg, plus one-way attack drones and loitering munitions, which it classifies as missiles. Small first-person-view (FPV) and
