"This Coming Winter Will Be Decisive"
1- 11.09.2026, 12:51
- 2,476
Photo: themoscowtimes.com
A former Google CEO called on the West to invest in Ukraine's defense.
“At the cost of its soldiers’ blood and thanks to the ingenuity of its engineers, Ukraine has bought the West four years. We cannot allow it to endure another winter alone under Russian shelling,” said Eric Schmidt , former CEO and chairman of the board of directors at Google , who founded a company that manufactures one of the most effective drones for the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Despite its “cumbersome military bureaucracy,” Russia has begun to combine its industrial might with its own innovations, which could play a critical role in the current conflict, he warned.
Schmidt “returned from a recent trip to Kyiv more concerned than ever since the first days of the invasion,” he writes in The Washington Post. Russia is “moving toward a strategy of total war, mobilizing factories and human resources,” and defeating it “now requires more than just arms deliveries,” he asserts: “The West must view Ukraine’s defense industry as an extension of its own, jointly produce weapons, eliminate supply bottlenecks, and ensure that Ukrainian commanders never have to limit the number of targets for strikes.”
According to Schmidt, Ukraine has engineers, determination, and an innovative spirit, but it lacks the industrial scale that only its Western partners can provide. They need to mobilize their collective resources to surpass Russia in production volumes and enable Ukraine to hold out longer than its enemy, Schmidt believes.
During his trip to Ukraine, he spoke with commanders who know what they need to do to stop the occupiers but lack the necessary resources to do so. “One of them told me that his unit had stopped searching for targets because they didn’t have enough drones to strike all the targets they had already identified. This is one of the key features of today’s war. A brilliant drone produced in the hundreds is interesting, but it is a good drone produced in the hundreds of thousands that will change the course of the war,” Schmidt writes.
He himself is trying to contribute to scaling up mass production of weapons for Ukraine. Project Eagle, the American defense company he founded—now called Perennial Autonomy—manufactures Hornet drones. According to the specialized defense publication Jane’s, over the course of three summer months, the Ukrainian Armed Forces launched 10,000 Hornet drones at Russian targets—more than 100 per day.
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