Before the full-scale war, the Ukrainian IT community’s interest in military technologies could be described as ‘moderate’ at best. However, over the past 9 months, there’s been a huge change. The ever-growing need for technology has not gone unnoticed by local businesses and startups, which have actively engaged in the development of relevant solutions.

FAVBET Tech’s CEO Artem Skrypnyk discusses how Ukrainian IT specialists rediscover themselves as military tech pros and assesses the prospects of the nation’s military technology industry.

The industry’s development potential is immense. What we see now is just the emergence of the market

IT solutions are critical on the battlefield, and we've all witnessed how much our military depends on technology to successfully perform combat missions.

Today, we see positive dynamics across several fields. For instance, the Ministry of Digital Transformation has launched its own IT army that has been attacking enemy infrastructure and tracking movements of enemy forces since the first days of the invasion.

Much effort is focused on the development of big data solutions, which is important for intelligence, as well as on cybersecurity.

Ukraine is a deeply digitized state, so reliable protection of IT infrastructure, energy systems and databases is in no less demand than air defense capabilities. The number of projects in the field of artificial intelligence, robotics, and drone development is growing. The latter can be considered the locomotive of the industry, as the development and production of various modifications of drones is the industry’s hottest topic right now.

FAVBET Tech has been providing solutions for the Armed Forces of Ukraine since the first days of the war

Despite the “peaceful” specialization of our business, we’ve been working on military projects since February and have already implemented several of them. In particular, FAVBET Tech developers created a mobile application for one of the military units where our employee served. Its purpose is to simplify the work of artillerymen by automating certain routine processes necessary for accurate fire on enemy positions. We handed it over to the unit back in March and received very positive feedback.

Taking into account that FAVBET Tech had a strong staff of cybersecurity specialists even before the war, it became one of the leading areas of our military activity. We took part in DDoS attacks and hacked important enemy resources. In the first days of the full-scale war, we helped our military to find and identify the occupiers by intercepting their calls made through Ukrainian mobile towers.

Of course, there was a need for hacking not only from our team, but from the entire IT army. Ukrainian specialists participated in the hacking of Russian IT systems, as a result of which we received a large number of databases and a lot of information about Russian citizens. For example, these were attacks on food delivery service servers, public services, etc. We helped our army by giving the important data it needed and robbing the enemy. The data retrieved through hacks also helped us find and identify Russians committing crimes in Ukraine.

As for future military-tech developments, we are in constant communication with various units and try to cover all the needs where our experience can be useful. Just like most other Ukrainian businesses, we are always open to requests from the Armed Forces.

In general, it can be said that Ukrainian IT companies have sufficient expertise to be useful and effective in military tech. However, like everyone in times of war, they need to adapt to new realities and quickly change software development processes to be more focused on military needs.

We have the market-leading expertise in certain areas. Ukrainian IT companies are very strong in the area of cybersecurity, we have many talented and even world-renowned specialists and IT teams working in this field. Therefore, I’d say this is the most realistic way for most of the local companies to join the IT frontlines.