As US and Ukrainian officials this week neared a landmark deal on drone production, German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius was visiting a frontline command post with his own Ukrainian counterparts, demonstrating Berlin’s support for the Kyiv government.
A day earlier, Alex Karp, CEO of data integration and analysis giant Palantir, had made his own pilgrimage to Kyiv, meeting controversial president Volodymyr Zelenskiy and signing a data sharing partnership with the Ukrainian military on a new project known as “Brave1-Datamine”.
Having survived a freezing winter in which Russian drones and missiles attacked essential infrastructure, and successfully used a range of new technology to reduce casualties and stabilise frontlines, Ukraine finds itself increasingly wooed for its technological innovation by suitors including the US military.
After an inconclusive US intervention in Iran that has depleted US arsenals, and amid growing concern about Europe’s readiness for any future war with Russia, Ukrainian innovations are increasingly seen as the one bright spot in a messy global strategic picture.
It is a sweet reversal for a nation that had, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion, depended heavily on the US in particular for effective weaponry.
Even in the once-sceptical Trump administration, senior officials have praised the speed of a technological revolution that has reshaped warfare. Ukraine leads the field in crunching combat data and building unmanned systems.
US Army Secretary Dan Driscoll told the Senate Armed Services Committee this week that Ukraine's “Delta” command and control system was now able to, “integrate every single drone, every sensor and every shooting platform into just one single network” – something the US Army was still trying to achieve.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said he was sending US military personnel to Ukraine to, "ensure we are learning every possible lesson from a conflict and incorporating it in real time into how we defend and how we go on offense in an era where drone dominance is required.”
According to the Financial Times and CBS, US and Ukrainian officials are now moving towards a memorandum of understanding that would allow Ukrainian drones to be tested – and potentially also built under licence – in the United States.
In other words, under pressure from an existential conflict, Ukraine’s defence innovations have in many cases leapfrogged those of more established but more ponderous US and European partners in both scale and sophistication.
Karp told Ukraine's United 24 media outlet that Ukraine had built, “among the most important, easy-to-use, interactive and adaptive targeting systems in the world. Parts of that first system are ours, but a large part was built by them.”
The process began almost immediately after Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022, but has been supercharged in the last three months under Ukraine's new defence minister, Mykhailo Fedorov.
The advances have coincided with a much broader global leap in artificial intelligence-powered technology that is rewiring military coordination systems.
According to the Pentagon's AI and digital chief, Cameron Stanley, the Pentagon's AI targeting system Maven, delivered by Palantir, supported almost all the 13,500 US strikes in Iran.
But as Stanley outlined to an AI conference last week, it required unprecedented amounts of computing power; enough, in fact, to raise US officials' fears that future conflicts might demand more megabytes than they can muster. And yet, for all their claimed sophistication, those strikes dramatically eroded America’s stocks of advanced and costly long-range precision weaponry - without neutralising Tehran’s ability to strike shipping or nearby Persian Gulf states and US bases.
Ukraine’s success, in contrast, has been achieved by driving down costs and complexity, and maximising the manufacture of often much cheaper drones and missiles. Since Zelenskiy visited the Middle East at the end of March, Ukraine has struck deals to support Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar in building up defences against both Iranian Shahed-type drones and ballistic missiles.
Increasing interceptions of both types of attack was an early priority of Fedorov and his new team in Ukraine, who also worked with Elon Musk's SpaceX to deny incoming Russian drones access to the Starlink mobile internet systems that some were using.
In March, the CEO of German defence giant Rheinmetall, Armin Papperger, dismissed Ukraine's drones - mostly the product of small firms employing innovative, low-bandwidth solutions - as made by “housewives”. After an angry social media backlash in Ukraine, Pistorius' visit this week appeared in part to be an effort to smooth ruffled feathers and acknowledge remarkable achievements.
But it was a visit backed up with real support: Germany has now replaced the US as Ukraine’s principal backer when it comes to military aid.
It expects to supply 100,000 artillery shells this year, PAC-3 air defence missiles from next year, and a host of other support efforts including cooperation on new long-range attack drones capable of reaching deep into Russia.
“We are strategic partners,” Pistorius said on Monday. ”On the one hand, we continue to support you in your defensive struggle, but on the other we are increasingly building a structured, long-term partnership to be reckoned with.” On Wednesday, Ukraine struck a similar deal with Lithuania, another nation that feels exposed to potential Russian aggression.
Around the world, firms are falling over each other to access Ukraine’s defence data. In April, 1,300 delegates from more than 30 countries attended Kyiv's Defence Tech week, which ended with a three-day “hackathon” working on a range of real technical and tactical problems.
Ukraine has gone out of its way to make itself a viable business destination despite continuing Russian strikes, providing bombproof rooms in hotels and government-backed travel insurance that promises to treat and repatriate foreign visitors who come to harm.
For all that, Ukraine’s winter was not for the fainthearted, with Russian strikes damaging communal heating systems in big cities. Sewage froze, and vulnerable residents had to congregate at “heating points” simply to survive as mobile crisis teams raced to fix the damage after every strike. Officials in Kyiv say Russia launched some 19,000 long-range Shahed drones over the winter, but that, by the end of March, Ukraine was downing almost 90 per cent.
Ukraine also says its strike rate against Russia's lethal first-person view (FPV) drones close to the frontline is improving fast.
Simultaneously and perhaps equally importantly, a new generation of unmanned ground vehicles – largely unmatched in the West – have helped keep down casualties at the front, largely halting the advance of Russian forces.
The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) reported that, in April, Ukraine had taken back more territory than it lost.
In the first three months of this year, Ukrainian officials say Russia suffered some 26,000 casualties – more than the Kremlin was able to recruit over the same period.
For all that, there is no sign that Ukraine can force an end to the war on its terms. But even if it were to happen, it might be only a matter of time until the Kremlin tests its strength elsewhere. Ukraine’s defence partners are no longer coming to Kyiv just to see how they can help: increasingly, they are there to learn and arm for much wider confrontations, and a new kind of war.
(By Peter Apps. Editing by Kevin Liffey)