How Ukraine’s wartime innovators are redefining tactical communication

Before Russia invaded Ukraine, Dnipro-based entrepreneur Misha Rudominski was chasing his childhood space dream as he raised a funding round to scale up his rocket company Promin. Then, when Russian tanks crossed Ukraine’s borders, Promin’s investors got cold feet and Rudominski’s priorities changed.

By July 2022, Rudominski had put Promin into a minimalist mode and founded HIMERA, which develops tactical communication systems that can keep Ukraine’s defenders securely connected despite omnipresent electronic jamming.

Within less than three years, the company’s engineers have developed and tested 20 versions of their radios and 80 versions of firmware. Since its conception, HIMERA has put more than 6,000 devices into the hands of Ukraine’s soldiers and even sold a batch of its products to the US Air Force.

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HIMERA is one of hundreds of defence tech start-ups that have sprung up in Ukraine since the Russian invasion. Many of these companies started by tweaking consumer-grade MAVIC drones in garages and backyard sheds but have since produced a defence tech innovation ecosystem that does things better, faster and cheaper than established western players.

“Many international manufacturers overengineer things,” Rudominski told Shephard. “They design and manufacture everything in closed campuses behind closed doors based on what they think the future will look like. This approach means not only that they can get it wrong, but also that their products are 10 times or 50 times more expensive than a Ukrainian competitor.”

When the rockets stopped flying, a new mission took flight

Caught in the ceaseless cat-and-mouse game of innovation with its Russian adversary, Ukraine has no time for overengineering. The companies dispatch workable prototypes to frontline troops as soon as they become available to gather quick feedback and improve and fix things where necessary. Even then, most technological solutions have a lifespan of less than six months before Russia comes up with a response. Many staples of western warfighting, developed over decades-long innovation cycles, were disqualified early on.

“Many of the systems we were given early on, for example, rely on GPS to navigate,” Rudominski said. “That may have worked in 2022. Since then, GPS jamming has become quite ubiquitous, so we had to find new solutions.”

Advances in electronic warfare disrupting GPS signals and radio links controlling reconnaissance and kamikaze drones have driven a fast-paced evolution in drone control. From the early China-made MAVIC drones operating on one or two radio frequencies, sophisticated frequency-hopping systems emerged capable to constantly scan the available radio spectrum for undisrupted bands. Even that was not enough. Autonomous drone pilot systems have been developed over the past year, tackling terminal guidance and making major progress in visual navigation and toward smart target recognition.

“Ukraine has been incredible in building a drone industry from nothing that is now shipping millions of drones,” said Lorenz Meier, CEO of US-headquartered drone operating system developer Auterion.

The company has been fine-tuning its products in cooperation with Ukrainian troops for the past two years, helping the embattled nation keep up with Russia’s tech response.

“Maybe a year ago, jammers were manually configured and operated in a certain frequency band,” said Meier. “Now we have intelligent jammers that can follow frequency-hopping patterns and predict your next jump.”

From the trenches to the tech lab – and back again

In addition to speed, cost is also a major motivator in the Ukrainian tech race. With a GDP per capita (as per 2023 levels) of only about €4,480 (US$4,480) compared to the European Union’s average of €37,610, Ukraine is constantly looking for solutions that would be more affordable than what is available from the west.

The need to find cheaper alternatives to western systems was very much in the minds of Rudominski and his colleagues when they founded HIMERA.

“The primary issue that we work with is that you either have communication solutions that are affordable and mass produceable but lacking the features the soldiers need in the battlefield,” Rudominski said. “Or you have tactical radios that are frontier technology and have all the needed capabilities but are prohibitively expensive and very hard to manufacture with long supply chains.”

HIMERA’s range of tactical radios are made of commercial, off-the-shelf components, Rudominski said, but at the same time offer advanced functionalities such as mesh-networking, encryption or frequency-hopping. In 2024, the devices won HIMERA the title of the Ukrainian start-up of the year.

The Ukrainian defence-tech innovation boom did not come out of the blue. The country boasts one of the best technically educated workforces in Europe, which quickly self-mobilised when Russia invaded. The country’s politicians then supported the movement with provident decisions.

Andriy Dovbenko, founder and CEO of Tech Exchange, a network that connects UK venture capital with Ukrainian start-ups, said that speedy deregulation of the Ukrainian defence tech innovation sector in the early days of the war combined with innovative approaches to procurement helped harness the country’s innovative potential.

“When the bombs started flying, all the bureaucracy we had had was dismantled a lot,” Dovbenko said. “The Ukrainian Ministry of Digital Transformation then came up with some clever ideas such as allowing battalions to directly choose what technology they want to buy. They don’t have to wait for the government to complete a procurement process – they just get the money and buy it.”

Successful destruction of enemy targets is rewarded with more resources to buy more technology, resulting in a dynamic “gamified marketplace” that helps ideas that work spread quickly. On top of that, the legacy, Soviet-era defence tech and research industry, albeit itself not as effective in helping the war effort, offers knowledge that freely flows into the commercial sphere.

“We have seen many of the old brains from the old-school Ukrainian primes in the military sector go into the new companies,” said Dovbenko. “We’ve seen many successes combining this old knowledge with the new kind of blood from the IT or other tech sectors.”

For many of the thousands of Ukrainian engineers who had worked either for western headquartered software companies in Ukraine before the war or nurtured their own start-up projects, joining the war effort was a no-brainer. Rudominski, for one, said he had no qualms about putting his childhood rocketry ambitions on the back burner. Right now, the Ukrainian defence sector is the place to be for every innovator. The rest will, hopefully come later.

“You are doing something that is useful, and you are actually in a safe environment compared to being directly serving in the military,” Rudominski remarked. “As a country, we are in a position now that our products are not only cheaper or more efficient; they are also better because they are battle-tested.”