Every close US ally that builds drones got a discount on Donald Trump's new tariff wall. The one fighting a drone war did not. Trump signed an executive order on August 13 puts a 100% duty on imported drones weighing more than 25 kg, on any drone carrying a thermal imager, on docking stations and on a schedule of critical components. Smaller drones and other parts draw 25%. The rates bite from September 3, with a further band of components following on February 9, 2027.

“I determine that it is necessary and appropriate to impose a 100% ad valorem duty rate on the import of UAS with a maximum take-off weight of more than 25 kilograms, UAS that integrate thermal imagers, UAS docking stations, and certain UAS components,” Trump said in the announcement.

Allies were handed a ceiling rather than an exemption. Drones and components from the European Union, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Switzerland and Liechtenstein are capped at 15%, and British-made products at 10%, on condition that substantially all of the hardware, software and technology behind them comes from those countries or the United States. The White House fact sheet names those seven and no others. Ukraine is not among them. So Ukrainian drones and components face the full 100% and 25% bands.

Washington spent the summer negotiating to buy Ukrainian drones at scale and has now written a tariff schedule that gives a price advantage to every allied producer except the one with four years of combat testing behind it. Not one of the seven is at war. Ukraine is.

The duty lands weeks after Volodymyr Zelenskiy said he and Trump had settled terms for a drone sale, with contracts he valued at $10bn-$30bn, and after the two governments signed a statement of intent on joint production that Kyiv has put at $35bn-$50bn. Trump had been dismissive of Ukrainian drone-making until a reversal at the Nato summit on July 8, when he committed to buying Ukrainian drones. How the duty touches any of that is still unclear, the Kyiv Independent reported on August 14.

The proclamation runs to four annexes and none of them carves Ukraine out. They are product schedules - customs classifications for the goods in each band - rather than country lists, and Ukraine appears nowhere in them or in the operative text. The only other countries named anywhere in the document are Canada and Mexico, and only for duty drawback. No route to adding a country to the reduced-rate list is set out, though nothing would stop a later proclamation amending it.

The second escape route is government procurement, and the proclamation does not provide one either. It carries no exemption for the Department of War or any other federal buyer, a reading confirmed by trade lawyers at Troutman Pepper Locke in a review published on August 17. The nearest thing to relief is a 180-day delay for firms already on the Pentagon's Blue UAS cleared list or the Federal Communications Commission's conditional approval list, which pushes their liability into February 2027 rather than lifting it, and a duty-free window for companies with an approved plan to build a US plant while that plant goes up.

Both of those reward manufacturing inside the United States. Neither does anything for an exporter in Kyiv.

The limit is not a ban, though. Kyiv approved a controlled export mechanism at the start of July for exactly this purpose, setting a floor of UAH15mn ($336,000) on contracts for finished military products and no floor at all on components.

“The mechanism introduces transparent rules for exports to partner countries under the Drone Deal format,” Prime Minister Yuliia Svyrydenko said when the rules were approved, adding that domestic supply came first. Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said licences would be decided within 30 days and that exports would be permitted “only if supplies for the Ukrainian military are guaranteed.”

What the tariff leaves open is the route Washington already prefers. Six Ukrainian manufacturers were invited into the Pentagon's Gauntlet II trials and all six have set up, or are setting up, joint ventures with American partners, with localisation of production in the United States a stated prerequisite for future Pentagon contracts. Ukrainian factories could turn out as many as 7mn drones this year on the Pentagon's own estimate, against a US programme buying fewer than 200,000 by the start of 2027 - and American missile makers have privately warned that Ukraine could out-produce them on interceptors of its own design, at a moment when Ukraine's own interceptor missiles run dry.

The drone industry's own lobby read the proclamation as the onshoring instrument it is. “This proclamation is another step to correct that imbalance,” said Michael Robbins, president and chief executive of the Association for Uncrewed Vehicle Systems International, pointing to years of subsidised adversary-built drones dumped into the US market below fair value. He asked the Commerce Department to move fast on clarifying “how the onshoring pathways will work for companies already building U.S. production capacity.”

A 100% duty on the finished article and a duty-free window for whoever breaks ground on an American factory point the same way: build it here. For Ukraine that means moving the plant, the jobs and the engineering west while the country is still fighting with whatever it can make at home.

Trump's Patriot licence, granted in July, was written on terms that will help Ukraine in its next war rather than this one. The drone tariff runs the same way round: generous in the announcement, a good deal less so in the schedule.