Ukraine

“The quality of the tourists coming was lower. Their spending power was lower, but we got a lot of charters. Which, because of the Russia, Ukraine, because of the Middle East, has stopped to a great extent.”

“They have kept the Russian Navy out of the Black Sea with drones.”

“What you don't want to do is help Ukraine win a war with Russia. What you want is for Russia to feel that if they attack Ukraine, the consequences would be so terrible that it's just not worth doing it. You know, that's anything other than deterrence involves …”

“The other thing I want to highlight there is we actually started working on this before the very, very first USV strike happened in Ukraine.”

“I think it's going to be a battle of materiel. It's machines versus machines. The reason for this is that the autonomous mass, as we call it, so the number of drones that can fly in a coordinated way is getting better and better, and it's going to be very hard…”

“We never set it up, honestly, to have the systems deployed at scale in Ukraine, which is what we have right now.”

“Neither Iran or Ukraine have a Navy, and they both control waterways near their fronts.”

“And so that, that zone is now like, 30 kilometers wide when it used to be a few kilometers wide.”

“We intend to be deploying Bandit in Ukraine before the end of the year.”

“Ukraine is estimated to use seven million FPV drones this year”

“China is supplying drones and components to both sides. So to Ukraine and to Russia, and they have by far the strongest drone and just electronics industrial base.”

“What DJI makes, which, you know, they make the best consumer drones in the world, but they also make the most commonly used reconnaissance drones for the battlefield. Like, Ukraine and Russia are using Mavic's, Matrice's, all these DJI products that are incred…”

“I mean, I think, like, it's a morally corrupt approach but although it would also be far worse for Ukraine if they didn't have access to Chinese components.”

“And there's very few defense tech startups that have a meaningful amount of equipment deployed in Ukraine. Like you can just go down the list and see.”

“I think that's one of the things that we've seen, especially with systems that went over and failed. I think it was a lot of the systems that are in theory supposed to be easier to use or more autonomous, but then they, like, met these edge conditions that exi…”

“Today, all the last three, four years, especially following what happened in Ukraine, the Russian invasion in Ukraine, we understood as Europeans that we cannot be dependent on the Americans. And so we start investing In our defense and security, in having our…”

“I think the reason Ukraine is really winning is they have the best battlefield AI outside of probably America and Israel.”

“When you're in a situation where you're in a forest in front of a wolf, you know, you first gonna deal with the wolf that wants to eat you, and then you're gonna go consult Greenpeace. So that's kind of situation that Ukraine is in.”

“And this group of companies is currently the leading team in on-drone AI and thermal imaging on the Ukrainian battlefield. And likely one of the leading, if not the leading in the world.”

“So the cameras and drone autonomy sell daytime and nighttime cameras and different types of drone autonomous modules. To other drone manufacturers, over 200 drone manufacturers in Ukraine.”

“Many hits are happening between 30 and 40 kilometers, and that's what expected from a regular 10 inch, ah, FPV drone.”

“Last year alone, Ukraine manufactured about four million of these, and then Russia's maybe, like, 20% less than that. And for this year, the publicly voiced target was seven million on the Ukrainian side.”

“Ukraine uses a lot of helicopters to shoot down Shahids, and Russia uses helicopters to shoot down our deep strike drones.”

“The problem is, if you go back to January one, nitrogen markets and phosphate markets were already dealing with supply tightness because of European production rates, because of a lack of Chinese exports, because the ongoing Russian-Ukraine war.”

“The lesson of Ukraine is that we went through 10 years of production and 10 weeks of fighting.”

“What we got wrong to summarize it would be we thought the stockpile was the deterrent. It's not the stockpile. It's the ability to generate the stockpile.”

“Ukraine was like the military industrial complex in production where it's like they're live testing stuff. Way more rapidly, even than, like, even the US at its best, even China or wherever. In Ukraine, it's just, we try something and we immediately field it, …”

“So in Ukraine, there was this, I think it was called Operation Spiderweb, where, ah, Ukraine snuck basically like under false floorboards of a truck. They snuck a million dollars of worth of drones into Russian territory. And then the drones basically took fli…”

“Palmer says that Anduril has had products on the ground in Ukraine basically since day one. They were over there pretty quickly, you know, deploying assets and stuff like that.”

“And it was literally the same day I had received this proposal from this dev shop in Ukraine for a 105,000 dollars. They had actually sent over, we'd already done some architecture discussions and they'd sent over a PDF with a proposal about here's how we're g…”

“We traveled to Kiev. We worked with them on bringing that and making that available for voice so everybody can access it.”

“So tacked forward, like the most advanced set of work we've seen.”

“I think we're getting close to a deal on Ukraine, Russia.”

“Russia, which is lobbying about 4000 modified Shaheds at Ukraine every month, according to the Ukrainian government data, did more than any other country to demonstrate the drone's capabilities.”

“If those companies are myopically focused on that conflict, they will not have a business coming out the other end.”

“Also we have a pleasure of working with their government and where they are trying to create the first agent in the government, but the, they have a DIA app.”

“If you look back over the last 10 years, we've not been able to deter a lot of conflict. We had the annexation of Crimea in 2014. The militarization of the Spratly Islands after they told President Obama, we will not militarize it. They militarized Spratly Isl…”

“All the patriots that were to hope to prevent missile strikes from Russia on Ukraine are now In the Middle East.”

“The Russians and the Ukrainians both know that I'm going to be a fair conduit for both. That I'm going to work with both equally. That I'm not going to, you know, do something to harm one over the other.”

“Russia, Ukraine. I think it's going to settle out this year. I think there's a lot of motivating factors to get it settled out this year, economic and other political factors, but I do think it's going to settle out this year, and it's going to bring a bit mor…”

“Ukraine has been a huge focus for the last three years, and we just passed 1.8 billion dollars in medical aid over the last three years to Ukraine.”

“Ryan Mattel's stock is up 15 acts since Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, giving a market cap of eighty billion, roughly on par with US rivals.”

“I actually think there's very few lessons from Ukraine that are going to be relevant in the future war, candidly.”

“Every time I talk to people on the ground and ask them, what's the most important piece of technology that you use, they all said Starlink.”

“China has been supplying both sides of that war. When you look at sort of the drone warfare that is, that has come out of the trenches for the last three years, You know, China is a supplier in the same way that Russia is a supplier to its own side, but that m…”

“India is the only country that has its foot in the door open with Russia and with Ukraine.”

“Today, when we engage with entrepreneurs, The mindset has totally shifted. I think a lot of that has to do with Ukraine, but also the just geopolitical issues facing the world today, where all of a sudden, you know, partners that were great market opportunitie…”

“The real cause of this is the failure of the counteroffensive in the summer of 2023. Remember, we gave the Ukrainians something like a hundred billion dollars worth of weapons to retake that territory. And it was an abysmal failure.”

“Well, basically Russia is winning the war as far as I can see. And Russia has been fighting it for what, three and a half years now almost. They have also invested a lot of money, prestige, lives, and they are unlikely to stop till they have achieved their min…”

“That did not happen in Ukraine. So the oligarchs are still controlling the politics of Ukraine.”

“If you were to look at any of the ratings of democracies in the world, Russia would be amongst the lowest scores. And the Ukraine would be in the high middle scores compared to the truly free countries.”

“There is no democracy in Ukraine right now. There's just not.”

“A year ago, support for the war was in the sixties or seventies. Now it's collapsed to 24%. So the vast majority of Ukrainians now want a resolution to the conflict, even if it means making concessions.”

“Russia has five times the people, three times the munitions they have an industrial base.”

“And in Ukraine, you know, these things with the drones on cables, just crazy thing they're doing there, right? Like, you know, those like big unwindy cable things that you sometimes see on like ships, right? So they have these cables for these one-way drones t…”

“And if we think of what's happening in Russia, Ukraine, while people often talk about AI and autonomy, the real narrative is about quantity. And so for us having a strong manufacturing base that can build a lot of things, that is the best way to be able to lea…”

“And the first thing that happened in the Russia-Ukraine conflict was the entire logistics systems of Ukraine was taken down by hackers because that was the way they could sort of destabilize and immobilize the army of Ukraine. It wasn't a bomb that landed. It …”

“At the end of the Soviet Union, there were a bunch of Soviet nukes that were in Ukraine. But as I understand that the launch codes were in Moscow. So these were Soviet nuclear weapons that happened to be on Ukrainian soil. And then when the Soviet Union came a…”

“It's estimated Ukraine is going to produce four and a half million FPV drones this year.”

“I'm investing a lot actually in Ukrainian defense startups, because I think my vision is that Ukraine could become the manufacturing hub for defense.”