One of the first computers in Europe was invented in a bombed-out inn on the outskirts of Kyiv in 1951, when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union. The inventors were forbidden to read Western journals, but were nonetheless tasked with matching the computing machines that the Americans and the Britons had just built.
The against-all-odds tale of that invention, captured in the book “Innovation in Isolation: The Story of Ukrainian IT from the 1940s to the Present,” helps explain why Ukraine has so many successful tech start-ups today — such as the writing assistant Grammarly and the home security system Ajax. That scrappy culture of innovation, once key to so many Soviet technological breakthroughs, is a big part of why Ukraine is still standing three years after a merciless Russian assault.
I received a copy of the book from Oleksandr Kosovan, the chief executive of MacPaw, the Ukrainian company behind the software CleanMyMac. He commissioned it to show Westerners what Ukrainian tech savvy can do. (The book is slated to be released in the United States later this month.) We met at MacPaw’s offices in Cambridge, Mass., in November, just days after the election of Donald Trump, who has threatened to cut off aid to Ukraine, suggesting that Americans can’t be counted on as the arsenal of Europe’s democracies anymore. It was a dark moment for Ukrainians. It still is. Russian drones have recently been attacking Kyiv nightly and Russian soldiers are making steady gains in the Donetsk region.
Shortly after our meeting, a missile blew out the windows of MacPaw’s offices in Ukraine. But Mr. Kosovan and his book gave me hope that Ukraine could eventually recover by building a formidable defense industry that could one day help defend Europe — and perhaps even the United States — from looming threats. If you know Ukraine’s technological history, you can understand the country’s potential as an arms innovator and even as an essential partner in building the things NATO will need in the years to come.
Mr. Kosovan told me about the volunteer armies of software developers and engineers who are turning cheap, off-the-shelf technology into weapons that can destroy expensive tanks and ships. To survive, Ukrainians have deployed drones that spit fire, drone-jamming backpacks that protect the soldiers who wear them and a system called Delta that gives commanders a bird’s-eye view of the battlefield, complete with friendly and enemy drones.
“Tech guys are on the battlefield,” Mr. Kosovan told me. “They know what is needed. They don’t rely on the government. They rely on volunteers that can supply something without even telling the government about it.”
“When it works,” he added, “the government slowly adapts.”
This is the future of warfare, whether we like it or not. As Russia, China, North Korea and Iran double down on drones, Ukraine is an indispensable ally in the struggle to keep up. The Chinese company DJI is the world’s biggest producer of small commercial drones, and the Chinese military reportedly just ordered roughly a million kamikaze drones from a different Chinese manufacturer. To hold our own in the wars of tomorrow, we need to learn from Ukraine and bolster its ability to make drones and electronic warfare systems that combat them.
Last year Ukraine assembled about two million drones in secret, scattered workshops, Anton Verkhovodov, a partner at D3, a venture capital firm that invests in applied defense technologies, told me. No NATO partner has ever done that, he said.
“Their product know-how is unmatched,” he told me in a phone call from Kyiv. “You have thousands of engineers in Ukraine that have friends on the frontline, that understand how wars are actually fought.”
Mark Cancian, a retired U.S. Marine Corps colonel who is a senior adviser with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said it was plausible to think that Ukrainians now lead the world in producing quadcopters that give operators eyes over — and into — the battlefield.
Ukraine’s hard-won expertise at making and fighting drones is already prompting European countries to consider buying defense systems from Ukrainian companies, either now or after the war ends, Rafael Loss, a fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told me. The interest comes from an appreciation of how fast the innovation cycle can move. It can take less than a month for a new drone in Ukraine to be met with an adapted form of electronic warfare in Russia that disables it, he said. Western defense contractors can take years to develop a new weapon, including drones, and even longer to test it on a battlefield. “The U.S. and Europeans are struggling to keep up,” Mr. Loss said.
That’s why NATO allies should build on what Ukraine has learned by deepening their partnership with Ukraine’s defense sector. Buying drones from Ukrainian companies or joint ventures would help ramp up production and research and development, Kateryna Bondar, a former adviser to the Ukrainian government, told me. These companies aren’t operating at capacity and could produce more drones if Ukraine could afford to buy more, she said.
Sourcing drones from Ukraine would save money, because they can be made in Ukraine more cheaply than almost anywhere else. It would put tax revenue in the Ukrainian government’s coffers and grow the economy. Most important, it would boost Ukraine’s ability to defend itself. That’s the best security guarantee there is — and crucial to any lasting peace with Russia.
Of course, there are very real obstacles to manufacturing weapons in Ukraine during the war, including scarcity of power, the constant threat of bombardment by Russia and export restrictions by China on critical components. And there will still be weapons that Ukraine needs that it can’t make at home.
But European countries took a step in the right direction last year when they bought nearly a billion dollars’ worth of weapons for Ukraine’s military from Ukrainian companies through a program called Manufacturing Freedom, which operates like a Go Fund Me site. The program has financed the production of 18 domestically made Bohdana howitzers, the development of a long-range drone that acts like a Cruise missile called Palanyitsa and a host of other weapons. At the moment, the program is focused on helping Ukraine survive. But it’s easy to see how it could help others as well.
Americans haven’t donated to the program yet, but the Biden administration secretly made a separate big investment in Ukraine’s drone industry.
Now it’s up to President Trump to decide what to do about the war in Ukraine. Will he keep Ukraine’s long tradition of scrappy, against-all-odds innovation on our side?
