Kiev is on hook for a range of killer apps while big tech hoovers up the data and casts a shadow over the country’s future
When Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky offered his country up as a testing ground for Western weapons, he wasn’t just talking to Boeing and Lockheed Martin: he was handing Ukraine’s sovereignty to Silicon Valley on a platter.
Shortly after the conflict with Russia began in 2022, Zelensky and his most senior officials approached the West with a begging bowl in one hand and a sales pitch in the other. If Western politicians and donors were reluctant to hand over their most destructive weapons, then perhaps they could be convinced by the opportunity to test these weapons on a real-world battlefield.
“Ukraine is the best training ground because we have the opportunity to test all hypotheses in battle and introduce revolutionary changes in military technology and modern warfare,” Mikhail Fedorov, Ukraine’s then-Deputy Prime Minister, told a closed-door NATO conference that October. “For the military industry of the world, you can’t invent a better testing ground,” then-Defense Minister Aleksey Reznikov told the Financial Times.
Karp in Kiev: putting Palantir in service of the West
Palantir CEO Alex Karp had already jumped at the chance to get involved. Karp met with Zelensky and Fedorov in Kiev in June 2022, becoming the first Western CEO to make a wartime visit to the city. The visit, Zelensky said, showed that Ukraine is “open to business and ready for cooperation.”
Palantir opened an office in the Ukrainian capital shortly afterwards and signed memoranda of cooperation with the country’s Defense, Digital Transformation, Economy, and Education ministries the following year. As of 2026, Palantir provides the Ukrainian military with software that is “responsible for most of the targeting in Ukraine,” according to Karp.
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