Mykhailo Fedorov

Mykhailo Fedorov (born 1991) ran the digital side of Volodymyr Zelensky’s 2019 campaign and became, at 28, Ukraine’s youngest minister — heading the new Ministry of Digital Transformation and later rising to first deputy prime minister. Before the invasion his signature was Diia, the state-services app that put government in citizens’ phones; after February 2022 he became the war’s chief technologist.

The Army of Drones

Fedorov co-founded the “Army of Drones” program in 2022, a crowdfunded, fast-procurement pipeline that turned consumer and domestic drones into Ukraine’s decisive weapon, and later the Brave1 defense-tech cluster that funnels state money into startups. Under his push, Ukrainian drones gained AI-assisted terminal guidance that locks onto targets through jamming, AI navigation that flies without GPS or a pilot, and early swarm coordination — capabilities he discusses with unusual candor, framing each “technological cycle” as a race Ukraine must win against Russia.

The same ministry has pushed AI into civilian government: in 2024 Diia gained an AI assistant, part of Fedorov’s ambition to make Ukraine the first state with an AI agent inside public services. He is equally frank about where the military side leads — toward autonomous systems that decide to kill, a prospect arms-control advocates find alarming and Fedorov treats as an inevitability Ukraine cannot afford to sit out. His vision paper on an AI-powered military describes the conflict plainly as a “tech war.”