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How Ukraine Is Running Its War Like a Startup

The country is reshaping supply chains, recalibrating how information warfare can be fought, even redefining what a state can be.

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On my first night in Kyiv the Russian military launched a volley of cruise missiles at the Ukrainian capital. None of the missiles got through, but the debris of one, shot down close to my hotel, landed in the racoon enclosure of the city zoo. The animals were reportedly given anti-anxiety meds, just in case.

The fact that (missiles aside) Kyiv felt so safe, so far from the war, by May 2023, is a miracle. When the first footage emerged of Russian armored columns rolling into Ukraine in February 2022, the received wisdom was that the Ukrainians had no chance. They were facing an army that was far larger, far better resourced. And, after decades of disinformation being pumped out by Russian proxies, many in the US and Europe—even some in Ukraine itself—believed the Kremlin’s narrative that the Ukrainian state was weak and corrupt, that the country couldn’t, and wouldn’t stand on its own.

While this war started in 2014, when Russia illegally annexed Crimea, it’s been 500 days since the full-scale invasion, and WIRED decided to mark the grim milestone by looking at the roots of Ukraine’s remarkable resilience. The way that society, the military, and the government have adapted and innovated is reverberating way beyond Ukraine’s borders. It’s reshaping supply chains, recalibrating how information warfare can be fought; even redefining what a state can be, if empowered by the right technology.

In this collection, you can trace these efforts, from Ukraine’s Army of Drones to the human chains powering everyday life to the ultimate form of resistance: building their country back, stronger than ever.

Johanna Chisholm

Peter Guest

Peter Guest is acting business editor at WIRED in London. Before WIRED, he was the enterprise editor at Rest of World in Singapore and features editor at Nikkei Asia in Tokyo. He has written for Bloomberg Businessweek, The Atlantic, GQ, the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, and MIT Technology Review. In 2022, he won a Society of Publishers in Asia Award for technology journalism and a Fetisov Journalism Award for contribution to civil rights. He graduated from Imperial College London with a degree in physics.