What Ukraine can teach the rest of the world

本站添加: 2026-05-11

[00:00:00]What Kyiv already knows about war and can tell the rest of the world. So, I'm a member of Chatham House in UK. It's a think tank about international relationship, as well as I'm the member of RUSI, which is think tank specialized in defense and security. And also, I'm interested in AI, its development, and doing corporate trainings about it.

[00:00:20][music] And the one that meeting I attend was exactly about AI, not about Ukraine defense, war, and so on. But anyway, during two hours, Ukraine was keep surfacing. Since Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022 starting, for example, has been the backbone of Ukrainian military communications because around 42,000 terminals are in use across the hospitals, businesses, and every level of armed [music] forces, drone operations, artillery correction, command and control, all this runs on the Starlink. In February 2025, US negotiators reportedly warned Kyiv during meetings with the special envoy Keith Kellogg that Ukraine faced [music] an imminent cutoff of Starlink if President Zelensky didn't sign a critical mineral deal giving US companies [music] 50% of Ukraine's rare earth resources.

[00:01:12]Reuters reported this citing [music] three sources close to talks.

[00:01:18]Musk, in fact, he explicitly stated [music] on X that he wouldn't turn Starlink off because if he do that, the entire front line would collapse. [music] Yeah, he walked away with a statement, but they didn't matter because Taiwan, Greenland, and [music] Ukraine, and every European capital had already registered the obvious thing that private leverage exists whether or not the owner choose to use it. So, in this meeting in Chatham House, one analyst put it exactly. And he said, "What if this could be done in Kyiv? It can be done in London, in Berlin, in Paris." European governments and militaries are embedded into US own system across satellite communication, cloud infrastructure, and now increasingly frontier AI models. And the risk that private company can decide what they can do is really exist. So, the practical European responses started already. Eutelsat, this is a French British operator which runs around 600 satellites and Starlink has roughly 10,000, nothing comparable. [music] But, it has since that time signed deal with the Taiwan and Greenland and precisely because reliability of supply [music] is now being priced separately from the technical performance even. And people expect that the same things and the same pattern can happen with AI procurement within [music] some kind of like 18 months maybe. And Ukraine is exactly the lab for this sixth domain. So, military theorists have long described four physical domains: land, air, sea, space plus a cyber. Strategists now argue that the sixth domain is the live interaction between the private sector and the military. Ukraine is ahead of every NATO state [music] in this. Hundreds of private drone companies have mushroomed across the country running tight feedback loops on frontline units. A design flaw observed and down can be fixed and redeployed within the days of the or sometimes even within [music] hours. And that loop, soldier, engineer, manufacturer, and the soldier again is what no Western military currently has in in such scale. And this model this is allows the smaller, poorer country to impose serious cost on a larger one. But also it forces to rethink how defense procurement, industry [music] policy, and tech regulation actually interact because UK Ministry of Defense cannot run at Ukrainian speed under the current procurement rules. Nor can most of the NATO states actually. So, war in the AI era is whole of society effort, which is how Ukraine has been since 2014, not even 2022. So, one retired general made a point bluntly.

[00:04:04]He said that the post-Cold War habit of outsourcing war to the uniformed military is aberration, and we are back now into the era where the war in contest of wills between states fought across economic, information, energy, [music] public morale, and the military is the most visible level, but rarely the decisive one. And as I said in my previous videos about Ukrainian [music] shadow states and so on, Ukraine has been running this model since 2014, and its full intensity for sure goes in 2022 because volunteer logistic networks, [music] civilian OSINT, crowdfunding, diaspora political lobbying, cultural and narrative war, state diplomacy, are now accessories to the war effort. They are the war effort, and Europe is now having to learn what Ukraine have already internalized. So, what matters now is that anthropic Pentagon standoff is the preview of the negotiations every country outside of US and China duopoly will have to conduct with whichever whatever frontier AI suppliers it depends on. And in exactly the same terms they need to do it like Ukraine has already been forced to negotiate over Starlink. And the only question for European capitals is whether there is a time to do it before the first serious test, and whether Ukraine experience can be converted into doctrine fast enough to matter. Do you agree with such kind of statement and the things which is happening today in the world? Please let me know in the comments.