Mykhailo Fedorov

Mykhailo Fedorov is the public face of Ukraine’s wartime technology drive. Born in 1991 in Vasylivka, Zaporizhzhia Oblast, he built a digital-marketing business and ran the online side of Volodymyr Zelensky’s 2019 campaign before becoming, at twenty-eight, Ukraine’s first Minister of Digital Transformation and a Deputy Prime Minister. On 14 January 2026 he was appointed Minister of Defence.

His first signature project was civilian: Diia, the smartphone app and portal that put dozens of government services — and, later, legally recognised digital documents — in a single place, paired with the Diia.City regime that gave IT companies a low-tax, low-bureaucracy home. After Russia’s 2022 invasion he turned the same playbook on the war. He launched the United24 fundraising platform, coordinated the rollout of thousands of SpaceX Starlink terminals, and — most consequentially for the drone war — drove the “Army of Drones” programme, a joint effort with the Ministry of Defence and General Staff to buy, repair and crew unmanned systems at scale.

In 2023 he co-launched Brave1 , the state-backed cluster that funds, tests and codifies Ukrainian defence-tech, and pushed to strip the paperwork out of drone procurement so domestic makers could scale toward millions of airframes a year. That deregulate-and-buy approach reshaped Ukraine’s defence-industrial base and made FPV and long-range strike drones a mass-produced commodity rather than a boutique capability.

Moving into the Defence Ministry in January 2026 placed the official most identified with Ukraine’s drone-scaling doctrine in charge of the budget that procures it. His record is not without critics — the speed-over-process model that built Diia and the Army of Drones has drawn scrutiny over oversight — but no individual is more closely associated with the idea that a software-industry mindset, applied to war, can out-produce a larger enemy.