War Tech Talk

In this episode of Eastern Circle's War Tech Talk, host Anastasia Shapochkina sits down with Alex Fink, the American CEO of Swarmer, to discuss the present and future of AI on the battlefield. Swarmer is currently working in Ukraine to develop decentralised coordination systems using cooperative AI. Their core mission is to move away from the traditional one-to-one pilot-to-drone ratio, automating the process so that a single human operator can control hundreds of drones simultaneously.

Anastasiya Shapochkina and Bohdan Kostiuk sit down with Fedir Serdiuk, co-founder of MOWA Defence Advisory and one of the key figures in Ukraine's shift from an assistance-seeking country to a defense partner and security provider.
In this episode:
→ Why large-scale combat operations require a completely different doctrine than the Global War on Terror
→ Ukraine's "beautiful chaos" and why a zoo of weapons is a feature, not a bug
→ What it actually means to sell capability instead of equipment
→ How veterans are becoming core assets in the private defense sector
→ Why Europe's focus on drones misses the point
Ukraine started FPV warfare with drones built in people's garages. It became an industrial capability producing millions of units a year. The technology followed the people, not the other way around.

In this episode of War Tech Talk, Anastasia Shapochkina sits down with Misha Rudominski, co-founder and CEO of Himera, a Ukrainian developer of advanced communication systems. Born during the defense of Kyiv in 2022, where demand for secure communication far outnumbered supply, Himera developed a tactical radio that functions as a "digital ghost"—specifically designed to be hard to detect, intercept, and jam. Rudaminsky explains the company’s four pillars of modern military technology: reliability, scalability, affordability, and ease of use. The conversation explores how Himera uses self-managing mesh networks to overcome environmental obstacles and Russian electronic warfare, their strategic commitment to a China-independent supply chain, and their recent expansion into international markets.

In this episode of War Tech Talk, Anastasia Shapochkina speaks with Ukrainian Army veteran and Come Back Alive member Danylo Shynhelsky to reveal the inner workings of the Dronefall air defense project. We discuss how Ukrainian air defense actually works, from logistics to AI applications, to HR and civil-military cooperation.

To support Come Back Alive NGO and their Dronefall project: https://payment-page.charge-auth.com/charity/comebackalive/LAQb27N?traffic_source=easterncircles_2026

In this episode, we interview Vladislav Piotrovskyi, the co-founder and CEO of the Ukrainian defense startup DWARF Engineering.

We are discussing the rapid evolution of AI and drone technology on the battlefield, IP rights, trust between the defense tech actors, and investment in Ukrainian deftech.