A Brilliant System Has Been Created In Ukraine

• Nikolai Statkevich
• 15.06.2026, 11:21

The free market was a key factor in the victory.

Typically, even in democratic countries with free-market economies, authorities resort to command-and-control methods during major wars to regulate economic processes. Private companies are instructed on what military products to produce and in what quantities. The process of developing prototypes of these products and adopting them into service, however, is a very complex and time-consuming bureaucratic process. And it is by no means certain that military equipment manufactured in a factory and adopted into service will have an advantage over the enemy’s equivalent equipment. Especially during an arms race, when each side strives to modernize its military equipment based on combat experience and the enemy’s achievements. But the military has no choice—take what you’re given; we know better what to give. It was important for me to find out how the economies of both sides in the Russian-Ukrainian war are managed and function for the war.

On the Russian side, everything is close to traditional methods. For the most part, state-run research institutes and design bureaus develop new weapons or propose upgrades to existing ones. The factories are also predominantly state-owned; they carry out tasks related to the production or modernization of military equipment, while headquarters distribute it to the troops.

The Ukrainian economy, which is predominantly private, is organized differently to fulfill military tasks. Even before the war, I received a letter in prison from a Belarusian girl who had ended up as an emigrant in Ukraine—in Irpin, near Kyiv. I hope she managed to evacuate before the Russians captured that city. The young woman wrote that two things had struck her in Ukraine: first and foremost, the extremely efficient private small and medium-sized businesses, and the widespread corruption in government agencies. The latter was no news to me—I had known about it since Soviet times. And I knew that Ukrainian businesses had learned to bypass bureaucratic hurdles with the help of bribes. It’s customary there to “grease the wheels” of the sluggish state machinery so that it turns in the right direction. But I didn’t know how they had managed to combine the entrepreneurial spirit characteristic of Ukrainians, along with the already developed experience and energy of private initiative, with a corrupt state apparatus, so that the troops would receive the best weapons—not the ones for which a large bribe had been paid. That is, until I read that military equipment and gear produced by Ukrainian private companies are listed on a special online platform called “Brave1 Market,” where commanders of certain vetted military units purchase them using points allocated to those units. Delivery of the purchased items takes place within two weeks. Points are awarded to each unit, after video evidence is verified, for enemy soldiers and military equipment destroyed, according to the top-down “Army of Drones bonus” system—which specifies how many points are awarded for which type of destroyed equipment or soldier. For example, 40 points are awarded for a destroyed tank, and 6 points for a killed enemy. A "Vampire" drone can be purchased for 43 points. And to direct troops to destroy a specific type of target first, there is no longer a need to issue stern orders or directives to the troops. It is enough simply to increase the points awarded for destroying that type of target.

Naturally, commanders strive to acquire the most necessary and effective equipment in order to achieve the greatest combat effectiveness and earn as many points as possible. Therefore, sellers of the best military equipment receive more points, which the state converts into money, and the best military units receive the best supply of the finest weapons. Something akin to an open arms market has emerged, oriented toward the needs of military “buyers,” which forces industrial “sellers” to compete with one another and constantly work on improving weapons while taking the troops’ opinions into account. The result is a highly flexible, responsive, and effective military-economic system with minimal bureaucratic—and thus corrupt—involvement. This is likely why Ukraine is currently winning the military-technological race against Russia. All the more so because Ukrainian companies, unlike Russian ones, face no restrictions on purchasing components on the global market—components used to assemble the weapons that currently dominate the battlefield: drones of all types and purposes.

Of course, this system also has its vulnerabilities. In my view, this primarily involves the analysis of video evidence of the destruction of enemy personnel and equipment, where there is room for subjective conclusions. But in the future, this task may be handed over to artificial intelligence.

There are telling historical examples of the importance of this task. For example, during World War II, the American allies offered the Soviet Union, in addition to their fighter planes, also supply them with “photo-machine guns”—cameras that would activate when the pilot pulled the trigger of an aircraft cannon or machine gun, to record whether an enemy aircraft had actually been shot down. But Soviet representatives proudly refused—arguing that all their pilots were communists or Komsomol members, and they would not lie about whether they had shot down an enemy aircraft or not. However, some time later, when the number of German planes shot down, according to reports from Soviet aviation units, exceeded the total strength of the Luftwaffe by a factor of five (even though the latter still dominated the skies), Soviet representatives nevertheless asked the Americans to supply them with these machine guns. After that, the “reported” combat effectiveness of the “Stalin’s Falcons” dropped dramatically.

I do not know who specifically in Ukraine proposed this globally unique military-economic system based on free-market principles. But this person not only deeply understood the Ukrainian mentality and reality but also managed to create a brilliant system that, for the sake of victory, activated the strengths of this mentality while neutralizing the negative aspects of the existing reality.

Mykola Statkevych, Telegram