Suffolk drone workers face Russia threat after Kremlin warning
Suffolk's Ukrainian drone factory was named on a Russian target list months before a Kremlin adviser raised the prospect of attacks this week.
Around 500 people work at Ukrspecsystems’ drone factory outside Mildenhall in Suffolk, building unmanned aircraft for Ukraine’s army. Their workplace has sat on a Russian “potential target” list since March. This week a Kremlin adviser gave that fact a headline.
Andrei Fedorov, a former Russian deputy foreign minister who now advises the Kremlin, told the BBC he could not “exclude 100 percent” that British factories producing drones for Ukraine could face “semi-military” action. He was careful with his words: any attack, he said, would come “not by Russia, but from unknown sources.” Fedorov holds no current government office, and his warning followed a decision in Kyiv the day before.
That decision was Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s. On his first overseas trip, in Ukraine to mark 35 years of independence, Burnham authorised the arms manufacturer MBDA to declassify UK data on Storm Shadow missile components, clearing the way for Ukraine to build the long-range missile itself. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov responded that Britain was “participating in this war” and “adding fuel to the fire.” Burnham’s reply was blunt: he asked reporters “who started the fire in the first place,” and called the Kremlin’s language “outrageous.”
The Suffolk factory did not appear from nowhere in this row. Ukrspecsystems, Ukraine’s largest drone maker, opened the £200m Mildenhall site in February, aiming for 1,000 drones a month and up to 500 jobs. A month later, Russia’s defence ministry published a list of 23 European drone-production sites it called potential targets; the access road serving the Mildenhall site was on it, though the factory itself was not named. Defence minister Luke Pollard visited soon after, telling staff that “our resolve to support Ukraine is stronger than ever.”
What a Russia threat to UK drone factories actually looks like
Security officials are not describing missiles landing on Suffolk. Former army officer Colonel Richard Kemp has said the real risk is deniable sabotage, carried out through criminal go-betweens rather than trained agents, and this year’s pattern across Europe backs him: arson at an Estonian drone-parts building in August, an explosion at a Bulgarian ammunition plant, another at an Italian arms factory. Britain has already lived this. In March 2025, five men were convicted under the National Security Act 2023 after Wagner Group handlers paid them a few hundred pounds each, recruited online, to burn down a Leyton warehouse storing Starlink equipment bound for Ukraine. It caused roughly £1m of damage and no one involved had any ideological stake in the war.
That case, not Fedorov’s hedged warning, is the model Suffolk’s drone workers are actually living with: cheap, deniable, and aimed at ordinary premises rather than the battlefield. Ministers have plenty to say about who started the fire in Ukraine. On what protects the people building the drones, the record so far is a factory visit and a soundbite.
