Ukraine's answer to the question every war asks — not who invents a weapon, but who fields it fast enough to win — has a name, and a CEO.

Andrii Hrytseniuk runs Brave1, the platform the Ukrainian government built in 2023 to connect industry, combat units, ministries and universities into a single innovation engine. He is not a career soldier. He was a chief information officer at Ukraine's largest banks, and that is precisely the point: when the full-scale invasion came, scientists, teachers and IT project managers turned civilian skills into weapons development. Short of tanks, they fielded heavy-lift bombers and FPV drones. With no navy, they invented naval drones. That improvisation became an institution.

Sam Cook and Rob Lee sit down with him in Kyiv for 40 minutes on how the machine actually works: problem statements instead of requirement documents, agile iterations instead of ten-year programmes of record, and six laws plus nearly fifty Cabinet decrees rewritten so a civilian company can go from an idea to a codified weapon in weeks.

Produced by the Borderlands Foundation.

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Guests:

Andrii Hrytseniuk / Brave1: https://brave1.gov.ua

Rob Lee: https://x.com/RALee85

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0:00 - Who fields technology, not who invents it

4:46 - Welcome: the engine of Ukrainian innovation

5:10 - What Brave1 is, and the Army of Drones project it grew out of

7:40 - Out-innovating an enemy with more of everything

9:15 - The banker, the scientists and the teachers who built weapons

10:38 - What other militaries should learn from civilian thinking

11:02 - ePoints: a banker's bonus scheme, applied to the army

11:46 - Design thinking and agile instead of technical requirements

12:55 - Why US requirement documents produce unchangeable technology

13:24 - Breaking open a closed defense market: six laws, fifty decrees

14:11 - Building the new process in parallel rather than fixing the old one

15:08 - How a frontline need becomes a product

16:14 - The feedback loop Brave1 sits in the middle of

17:13 - Early funding, like an angel investor

18:51 - 600 products tested and codified to NATO standards

19:54 - 400 venture funds asking which companies to back

20:13 - Reviewing the categories every nine months

21:43 - Foreign companies: Test in Ukraine

22:46 - Brave International, and Brave NATO, Germany, Norway, France

23:27 - Brave Prime, and why the global primes came

24:07 - "If you're not in Ukraine, you're not in defense"

25:19 - Why 95% Ukrainian-made drones is a problem, not a win

26:00 - Priorities: domain by domain

26:47 - Deep and middle strike: the gray zone from 10km to 70km

27:54 - Counter-UAS, and interceptors cheaper than a Shahed

28:51 - Data links, mesh networks, and the range problem

29:21 - AI: drone versus drone

29:52 - From manually operated, to human-in-the-loop, to human-on-the-loop

30:55 - "Next year the majority of hits will be fully automatic"

31:59 - Russia's autonomous strikes

33:30 - Countermeasures, and working with allies on autonomy

34:08 - Turrets

35:42 - UGVs: kamikaze, logistics, evacuation, hybrid buggies

36:59 - 50,000 ground robots contracted this year

38:02 - 100,000 UGV missions in seven months

39:14 - Four lessons for Western militaries

40:00 - One: assume you are not defended enough

40:47 - Two: the economics of war, and cheap weapons at scale

41:31 - Three: speed of innovation, and the three-to-six-month window

41:57 - Four: flexibility, scalability and supply-chain dependencies

42:38 - A culture of readiness for threats you cannot predict

43:16 - "Real strength, or the illusion of defense?"