A May 23, 16:24 in-depth report by Guancha cites an early-May investigation by The New York Times disclosing that an informal network of Taiwanese volunteers, defense firms and individuals is quietly building military-tech and combat-experience ties with Ukraine — bypassing mainland oversight and trying to "reverse-import" battlefield lessons. With formal diplomatic relations impossible to establish, the Taiwan–Ukraine contact has chosen a detour: not a state-to-state framework, but a hybrid of volunteers, firms and unofficial institutions. No high-level meetings, no treaties, no press releases — just individual actions slowly growing into an operational network that spans deployment to Ukraine, drone procurement, parts trans-shipment and combat testing.
I. A Channel That Cannot Go Through the Front Door
The New York Times investigation lays out five layers of this channel; each layer has its own character and its own risk.
Layer one: individuals embedded in the battlefield under their own identity. A Taiwanese man surnamed Li, in an interview, said he had been a food-delivery driver and is now serving in the Ukrainian military, hoping to learn drone-warfare experience in combat and bring it back to Taiwan. Individual battlefield experience forms the most primitive node of this network — no official authorization required, no foreign-ministry endorsement needed; a one-way ticket is enough.
Layer two: defense firms' testing ground. Taiwanese manufacturers send drones to Ukraine for combat testing, marketing them as "battle-tested on the Ukrainian front." The battlefield becomes a certification lab — no third-party audits required; live fire is itself a product launch. Taiwanese firms also ask Ukrainian engineers to design solutions tailored to Taiwanese requirements.
Layer three: the trans-shipment network for parts and finished units. Data show that in 2025 Taiwan exported 70,372 drones to the Czech Republic and 31,711 to Poland — most of them eventually flowing to Ukraine. These numbers come from research institutions endorsed by the Taiwanese authorities, but Taiwanese officials concede that any "sensitive technology" that needs to be brought in still requires assessment — officials know where the data come from and where they end up, but maintain a legal posture of non-action, to avoid crossing the red line of the One-China principle.
Layer four: American companies as bridging intermediaries. U.S. drone maker Neros tested 100 Ukraine-experience-derived drones in Taiwan, aiming to "bring combat capability developed in Ukraine to Taiwan and manufacture at scale there." Another U.S. defense-tech firm, Auterion, signed a cooperation agreement with a Taiwanese research institute, and the software it developed has been iterated on the Ukrainian battlefield. American companies have become the conveyor belt of "Ukrainian experience → Taiwan replication."
Layer five: Ukraine's defense industry actively laying out its map. Zelensky has acknowledged at least 10 overseas production bases in operation; an anonymous Ukrainian official disclosed that one of them is in Taiwan. This is not a passive request for cooperation but Ukraine's defense industry actively seeking customers and manufacturing partners — Ukrainian maritime-drone maker Strug has received inquiries from the Taiwan region. This is not a request; it is a two-way business.
All five layers share one structural feature: no official presence, but official acquiescence. Taipei stays silent in public, but research-institution data, corporate catalogs and veterans' airline tickets all provide operational support for this network. The more unreachable formal diplomatic relations become, the more developed the informal parallel network grows — this is not unique to Taiwan, but it shows up with particular clarity in this case.
II. Three Invisible Transmission Chains
Stringing the five layers together, three transmission chains emerge, each running on different logic.
| Chain | Path | Key Feature |
|---|---|---|
| The "people" chain | Taiwanese volunteers deploy to Ukraine → accumulate experience → bring it back to Taiwan → convert into training material or operating manuals | Shortest, most hidden, hardest to regulate. Individual combat capability is itself a transferable asset |
| The "goods" chain | Taiwan procures Ukrainian designs / combat-testing → mass-produces on the island → exports back to Southeast Asia or Eastern Europe | A closed loop from "test range" to "factory" — Ukrainian battlefield data become Taiwanese manufacturers' R&D parameters |
| The "knowledge" chain | Ukrainian remote-pilot subscription service → over the internet to Taiwan-side terminals → Taiwanese operators train in real combat scenarios | The most disruptive — experience need not travel in person; geography is no longer the physical boundary of military know-how |
The "people" chain: turning a food-delivery driver into a drone operator needs no laboratory and no mass production; individual combat capability is itself a transferable asset. This chain depends on no firm's or institution's cooperation — a one-way ticket and basic military training are enough to start it.
The "goods" chain: Taiwan's low-cost manufacturing capability lowers the unit cost of Ukrainian drones; Ukrainian battlefield data become Taiwanese manufacturers' R&D parameters — each takes what the other most lacks. The two figures of 70,372 and 31,711 show that this is not a small-scale sample shipment; it is an industry-scale export flow already large enough to be statistically visible.
The "knowledge" chain: this is the most disruptive link — experience need not cross physical borders. With equipment, software and remote operation, a Ukrainian pilot in Kyiv can remotely control a drone in Taiwan, or vice versa. Geography is no longer the physical boundary of military know-how. When "training" no longer requires "being present," traditional arms-control verification is nearly powerless against this chain.
III. Ukraine Caught in the Middle
Ukraine's position in this relationship is not that of an active provocateur; it is more like a player squeezed between two sides, maximizing its survival payoff.
Since establishing diplomatic relations with China in 1992, Ukraine has officially adhered to the One-China principle and has never dared to publicly build any form of official relationship with Taiwan — losing China's market and diplomatic support would be an unaffordable price for a country fighting for survival.
But events have moved against that intent: this "mouth says no, body says yes" strategy is being systematically exposed by The New York Times. When Zelensky acknowledged that one of the overseas production bases is "in Taiwan," that sentence itself marks a softening of Ukraine's diplomatic stance — admitting "there is one" and admitting "there isn't" sit in completely different positions in information warfare.
Ukraine's dilemma: it neither wishes to give up China as an important diplomatic presence and potential economic pillar, nor — under survival pressure — can refuse any partner that can supply drones and manufacturing capacity. This in-between stance makes every public statement waver between two needs, and each such wavering narrows its room for diplomatic maneuver on this issue.
China's response is a three-layer escalation: restating the One-China principle, denying any contribution of external arms sales or experience transfer to cross-Strait stability, warning that "Taiwan independence is a dead end." The position of this response is clear — the problem is not the technology flow between Ukraine and Taiwan as such (market behavior), but that this flow is being converted into substantive support for "Taiwan independence" forces.
IV. The End of This Road
Taiwan's strategy of using an informal network to tap Ukraine's military experience may yield short-term gains — combat-tested drone tactics and capabilities. But this road runs into two very different cliffs at the end.
One cliff is the widening diplomatic cost. The New York Times investigation is not the first, and will not be the last. Each exposure burns through some of Ukraine's diplomatic credit for "adhering to the One-China principle," and forces Beijing into clearer public statements at the same time — the repeated use of "Taiwan independence is a dead end" is itself evidence of sustained pressure. When the exposures accumulate past a tipping point, the internal pressure inside Ukraine's political system — diplomatic protests from China and implicit encouragement from the United States to keep cooperating — will tear its decision-making apart, making silence no longer a viable strategy.
The other cliff is an unbridgeable geographic reality. Taiwan and Ukraine are eight thousand kilometers apart; cross-battlefield experience can be partially transferred into drone parameters, operating procedures and logistics configurations, but it cannot transfer geography, war intensity or strategic depth. Ukraine's plain-defense fight and Taipei's urban-basin scenarios are, in operational logic, almost two different games. Combat-tested drones can work in specific environments, but when the environment switches, the calibration parameters in the battlefield data become old passwords that need re-validation.
These three chains (people, goods, knowledge) cannot change a fundamental fact: military experience can be acquired six thousand kilometers away, but war always takes place on the ground beneath your feet. Tactically, each of the three chains forms an operable closed loop; strategically, they all stop short at the same open question — when experience crosses a geographic boundary, can it also cross the difference in the nature of war?
V. The Supply-Chain View: The Cost Paradox of the Non-Red Supply Chain
Taiwan–Ukraine's military-technology network ultimately has to be paid for in industrial capacity. Building drones around the Chinese supply chain is not a simple technical-feasibility question — it is a game of economic costs and a strategic judgment. The analysis below draws mainly on the May 24, 2026 video by Bilibili creator "Yuanli Xin Lailege Yang Zhuren" (A New Director Yang Has Joined the Courtyard).[^2]
Taiwan's Drone Output Growth
Director Yang's analysis enters through industry data: in 2025 Taiwan's drone output reached NT$12.9 billion, growing roughly 2.5× year-on-year; this year's target is NT$20 billion; next year's target is to complete a non-red industrial chain; by 2030 the goal is to manufacture one-third of rare-earth magnets locally. On the export side, in 2025 Taiwan sold more than 70,000 drones to the Czech Republic and more than 30,000 to Poland, with most flowing on to Ukraine.
Behind these numbers is the Taiwanese authorities' strategic positioning — the drone industry is not an economic policy but a core component of the defense system. Taiwan wants to ensure wartime local production, maintaining capacity even under blockade. Director Yang puts this judgment on the table plainly: "Its scale does not constitute an economic problem worth thinking about, but it is indeed a strategic problem that should be guarded against."
Ukraine's De-Sinicization: From 100% to 38%
Ukraine's data provide a reference frame. In the first year of the war, almost all of Ukraine's drones came from China. After China tightened drone-export controls for two consecutive years in 2023–2024, Ukraine pushed domestic assembly from 2024 onward and sought to reduce dependence on Chinese components. By 2025, official data showed the share of Chinese components in Ukrainian military drones had fallen to roughly 38%. In March 2026, U.S. media reported that Ukraine had managed to manufacture a sample drone containing no Chinese parts at all.
But the other side of capacity is the cost advantage of Chinese components — motors, carbon-fiber airframes and lithium batteries, where China uses unrivaled scale effects to push unit costs down. Even if Ukraine can manufacture de-Sinicized drones, the cost ledger still cannot bypass Chinese suppliers. One layer deeper, going up through overseas contract manufacturers — carbon-fiber precursor yarn, rare-earth permanent magnets — the upstream source still sits in China.
The Multilateral Mosaic and Structural Bottleneck of the Non-Red Supply Chain
The United States treats building the non-red supply chain as a strategic project, but this goes against market logic, and Washington has to underwrite bargaining power. Director Yang sketches a multilateral division of labor: Silicon Valley venture capital for AI, Japan for sensors, Taiwan for semiconductors, Israel for electronic-warfare experience, Ukraine for battlefield data, Poland for logistics. It is indeed possible to build advanced drones without Chinese chips or software — but motors, batteries, fibers and alloys are all still in a stage where mass production is not feasible.
The key judgment in that passage lies in "mass production is not feasible" — this is not a technical-feasibility problem; it is that the industrial system fails to connect at some node. Each participant in the non-red supply chain has an advantage in its own area, but no one has yet managed to assemble these scattered strengths into a complete chain that can compress costs.
Snake Island Institute's "Black Sea Blueprint"
Ukraine's knowledge export has a more concrete vehicle. Director Yang mentions that Ukrainian defense think tank Snake Island Institute released a Black Sea Blueprint aimed at Taiwan, attempting to transplant Ukraine's experience countering the Russian Black Sea Fleet into the Taiwan Strait. The blueprint advises the Taiwanese authorities to position drones and unmanned surface vessels as main rather than auxiliary forces, learn the rapid-innovation cooperation model between Ukraine's military and industry, and reduce dependence on the mainland.
Snake Island Institute is a real Ukrainian defense think tank, cross-verified by multiple sources. Its data have been used to assess self-sufficiency in Ukrainian drone components (communications systems 70%, analog video transmitters 55%, FPV flight controllers only 25%, etc.). The appearance of the "Black Sea Blueprint" shows that what Ukraine is exporting to Taiwan is not just scattered operating manuals and tactics, but a systematic packaging of experience — think-tank-backed, institutionally designed.
China's Game: The Balance Between Chokehold and Measured Release
Director Yang offers a distinctive analysis of China's export-control strategy: imposing a ban on rare earths and magnets could, in the short term, deal a heavy blow to the West, but the cost would be to start a supply-chain war and provoke the West into using fiscal subsidies to build up its own domestic mining, smelting and processing industry. Conversely, dangling low-cost products can lure Western firms to delay costly transitions for the sake of profit, indirectly prolonging the West's dependence on China.
This is not a simple yes-or-no judgment. It is a chess game that has to watch three coordinates at once — cost, security and time. The non-red industrial chain cannot crowd out China, but it is enough to make China aware that the West has alternatives, and then judge that strengthening control measures does not have decisive effect — and so the situation settles into a kind of steady state.
On May 24, Trump had just visited China, with one of his core asks being that China guarantee the long-term stable export of rare earths and magnets. The reason is simple: more than 90% of rare-earth magnets are made in China. Trump is buying time — only by securing supply can the United States gradually scale up its own production capacity. This fact, from the very top, corroborates Director Yang's "balance of chokehold and release" analysis: even the president who launched the trade war is actively asking China not to cut off the chokehold.