Russian intelligence offered one of the tech entrepreneurs a huge sum of money to work for them. He refused, even with risk of being detained and possibly tortured
– Alexei made explosives in his apartment while Kostya drove his red Tesla round the city pretending to be a taxi but actually delivering ammonia to bombmakers. When Kherson was liberated in November, they started a new business: making drones for the Ukrainian army.
In Kherson, the duo’s reputation as electronics whizzes and bombmakers spread. One resistance member I talked to called them “the crazy professors”. When the Ukrainians liberated the city in November, Ukrainian intelligence debriefed them. The Russians had, but were now shelling Kherson daily; the army needed their know-how.
Occasionally inspiration comes from closer to home: Alexei recently designed a grenade made from a beer can The drone war has evolved into a technological race: to jam, and to be unjammable. According to the Ukrainian government, there are more than 200 companies officially manufacturing drones in Ukraine and hundreds more smaller-scale operations, like Midnight Lab. Alexei and Kostya build most of their products with aThey are experimenting with, silent motors and wooden frames: this innovation is driven by changing needs on the battlefield.
I met him in his office in Kyiv at the end of a working day. In person he is tall, imposing, magnetic; his hair is razored on the sides and the top plaited in the style of a Cossack warrior. He told me he wants to pull his corner of government into what he calls Ukraine 2.0. “We are trying to build a new country,” he said, “taking the parts we love, getting rid of the parts we don’t. It’s motivation: to give us something to fight for.
While startups like Midnight Lab have MacGyvered innovation for the battlefield, there are limits to what a small workshop can produce. Kamyshin said that Ukrainian companies were not yet manufacturing larger and longer-range kamikaze drones, like the ones Russian forces have deployed against Ukrainian cities, because they were expensive and complicated to produce.
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