Kyiv, Ukraine — I spent much of Tuesday interviewing attendees of the Defense Tech Innovations Forum here in Kyiv, a conference that brought together Ukrainian companies of all sizes in the defense sector, as well as investors and officials from partner countries.
Picture a combination of a Silicon Valley “tech bro” summit in suits with no ties and the occasional black turtleneck, some burly Ukrainians in military uniforms, and a handful of women in the defense technology industry.
As Deborah Fairlamb, cofounder of Green Flag Ventures, a venture capital firm investing in Ukrainian companies put it to me, “The ministries of defense from a lot of the border countries – the Scandinavians, the Baltics — they are watching very closely what is going on here, because the Ukrainians have been very successful in essentially holding a lot of lines that they did not think they were going to be able to handle, and a lot of it is with this new technology.”
In other words, if you think your country might experience hostility from Russia in the next decade or two, you need to be paying close attention to what’s working and what isn’t in Ukraine.
One of the attendees I spoke to, Eveline Buchatskiy is a managing partner at D3 Venture Capital Firm; she attended the Munich Security Conference last week.
“Munich was very intense,” she summarized. “You had three different worlds there, Munich 1938 was one crowd, then you had the Ukrainians in attendance, I wouldn’t say shocked, but realizing they needed to think outside of the box now. You had some Europeans at loss. And then you had the Americans asking you, ‘what happened?’” She clarified that the Americans in the U.S. government; I suspect this reflects the Democratic senators in attendance who were blindsided and outraged by the remarks from Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
“I was at an event with some of the richest industrialists of Germany,” Buchatskiy continued. “I told them the private sector has a huge role to play. Yu cannot sit on the sidelines thinking that if you vote the right way and pay your taxes, it’s sufficient. You have to roll up your sleeves. You’re at war. Your house is on fire, and you’re cooking dinner.”
“Ukrainians, they get it. We just have to work twice as hard and think outside of the box. To the Americans, it’s like, I think you are in trouble. You’re not looking at the whole chess board. You’re thinking like, ‘this is Ukraine and Russia. There is this and that, and then there’s Hamas and Israel. You’re not looking at the whole chess board, like, what does a victorious Russia mean to the U.S.? It means [Russia] can divert its energy to Iran and China.”