How the Ukraine-Russia war is reshaping the tech sector in Eastern Europe

LMT’s Pollaks says he has visited Ukraine often since the war began. Though he declines to give more details, he euphemistically describes Ukraine’s wartime bureaucracy as “nonstandardized.” If you want to blow something up in front of an audience in the EU, he says, you have to go through a whole lot of approvals, and the paperwork can take months, even years. In Ukraine, plenty of people are willing to try out your tools.

“[Ukraine], unfortunately, is the best defense technology experimentation ground in the world right now,” Pollaks says. “If you are not in Ukraine, then you are not in the defense business.”

Jack Wang, principal at UK-based venture capital fund Project A, which invests in military-tech startups, agrees that the Ukraine “track” can be incredibly fruitful. “If you sell to Ukraine, you get faster product and tech iteration, and live field testing,” he says. “The dollars might vary. Sometimes zero, sometimes quite a bit. But you get your product in the field faster.” 

The feedback that comes from the front is invaluable. Atlas Dynamics has opened an office in Ukraine, and its representatives there work with soldiers and special forces to refine and modify their products. When Russian forces started jamming a wide band of radio frequencies to disrupt communication with the drones, Atlas designed a smart frequency-hopping system, which scans for unjammed frequencies and switches control of the drone over to them, putting soldiers a step ahead of the enemy.

At Global Wolf, battlefield testing for the Mosphera has led to small but significant iterations of the product, which have come naturally as soldiers use it. One scooter-related problem on the front turned out to be resupplying soldiers in entrenched positions with ammunition. Just as urban scooters have become last-mile delivery solutions in cities, troops found that the Mosphera was well suited to shuttling small quantities of ammo at high speeds across rough ground or through forests. To make this job easier, Global Wolf tweaked the design of the vehicle’s optional extra trailer so that it perfectly fits eight NATO standard-sized bullet boxes.

Some snipers prefer the electric Mosphera to noisy motorbikes or quads, using the vehicles to weave between trees to get into position. But they also like to shoot from the saddle—something they couldn’t do from the scooter’s footplate. So Global Wolf designed a stable seat that lets shooters fire without having to dismount. Some units wanted infrared lights, and the company has made those, too. These types of requests give the team ideas for new upgrades: “It’s like buying a car,” Asmanis says. “You can have it with air conditioning, without air conditioning, with heated seats.”

Being battle-tested is already proving to be a powerful marketing tool. Bukavs told me he thinks defense ministers are getting closer to moving from promises toward “action.” The Latvian police have bought a handful of Mospheras, and the country’s military has acquired some, too, for special forces units. (“We don’t have any information on how they’re using them,” Asmanis says. “It’s better we don’t ask,” Bukavs interjects.) Military distributors from several other countries have also approached them to market their units locally. 

Although they say their donations were motivated first and foremost by a desire to help Ukraine resist the Russian invasion, Bukavs and Asmanis admit that they have been paid back for their philanthropy many times over.