Aletho News

Ukraine as a laboratory of ‘techno-fascism’

By Dmitri Kovalevich | Al Mayadeen | June 14, 2026

In June 2026, the Russian military continues its slow advances against the Ukrainian military in the Donbass region and elsewhere in the former eastern Ukraine, amidst the NATO proxy war being waged against the Russian Federation. Russian forces are grinding down the dwindling ranks of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

For its part, the government in Kiev, whose mandate has expired, is focusing on drone strikes against oil refineries and shipping terminals in Russia. This fits into the overall strategy of the Western, NATO powers to deprive their economic competitors of oil supply in the struggle to maintain global hegemony. This can also be seen further in the continued, debilitating attacks and sanctions aimed against the peoples of Iran, the Middle East as a whole, and Venezuela and Cuba.

In late May, Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy issued a five-page, open letter to US President Donald Trump dated May 26, requesting that more missiles be supplied as soon as possible. As noted by the Ukrainian analytical Telegram channel Rubicon on May 30, “While arms deliveries were previously discussed rather privately, now everything is taking the form of public appeals of ‘Donald, help us, and fast!’.

Rubicon writes, “The goal of this move by Zelensky is not only to needle Trump’s pride but also to elegantly shift blame onto the White House for recent missile and drone strikes by Russia on military sites in and around the Ukrainian capital. Washington has been slow to condemn these attacks and slow to continue its supply of missiles to Ukraine’s armed forces.”

A former lawmaker from Zelensky’s party-machine, Alexander Dubinsky, wrote on Telegram May 31 that overall, Zelensky’s letter amounts to an ode to himself, as in: ‘I allow you to touch my greatness and become part of it by allocating more money and missiles.’

The US government did not respond publicly to Zelensky’s letter. The Ukrainian opposition Telegram channel Kartel comments on May 31, referencing the high-profile corruption scandal involving Zelensky’s friend who has since fled to “Israel”: “Let us recall that Zelenskyy’s friend Timur Mindich stole over $1 billion allocated for weapons production, as uncovered by NABU [National Anticorruption Bureau] investigations. So it’s no surprise that after exposures of such corruption, the Americans would choose to ignore Zelensky’s outburst.”

Zelensky’s letter also demands that the US grant licenses for the production of Patriot missiles in Ukraine. But the US military has been proven unwilling to share production of its known and tested military technologies. It has shown willingness to share new weapons systems, evidently as part of ‘testing’ programs.

The letter by Zelensky criticizes the slow pace of Patriot missile production in the US itself, adding that this could lead to crises in various other parts of the world. According to the letter, Ukraine-produced weaponry could help protect US allies in the Middle East. In other words, the man is proposing that the US also continue selling or supplying missiles and other weapons to “Israel” and the United Arab Emirates for use against Iran.

Despite Trump’s various, so-called peace initiatives to end the war in Ukraine, voiced for several years now, Victoria Fedosova, deputy director of the Institute for Strategic Studies and Forecasting at the Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia, believes that Trump is merely proposing a high-profile display of negotiations between Moscow and Kiev that would lead nowhere. In the meantime, Washington continues to supply Kiev with weapons and intelligence, some of which are being used against the civilian population of Russia. During the night of May 23 (Ukraine time), US-made Hornet drones struck a teacher college dormitory for women and girls in the town of Starobelsk in the Lugansk People’s Republic, which was annexed by Russia, killing 21 and wounding dozens more.

Despite all of Trump’s ostentatious rhetoric, there is no sign he intends to pressure Zelenskyy to end the proxy war against Russia. Moreover, Chinese media reported on June 2 that he has also asked Chinese leader Xi Jinping to pressure the Russian president to end the war; that is, end Russia’s responses to the NATO proxy war on the West’s terms.

Pete Hegseth, the US Secretary of War, has also stated that Washington will continue to find a way to help Ukraine ‘defend itself’ (code language for waging NATO’s proxy war). He made this remark at a meeting on Asian security issues in Singapore, according to Clash Report on Telegram on May 30. (Clash Report is an online news platform aligned with the views of the Turkish government.)

Hegseth also noted that the US continues to study and learn from Ukraine’s experience with the use of drones on the battlefield. He says it is vastly increasing its investments in this area. In other words, the continuation of the conflict in Ukraine benefits the US by serving as a laboratory to test new types of weapons and study the reactions by the Russian army, even though these often pose a threat to Ukrainians themselves.

As the Ukrainian Institute of Politics notes in this regard, Pete Hegset’s statements are particularly telling when viewed against the backdrop of earlier remarks by Donald Trump. In March of this year, following the escalation of the conflicts in West Asia, Trump claimed that the US had no need for Ukrainian expertise in the field of drones. However, “Judging by the current rhetoric of the U.S. Secretary of War, the situation has changed: Washington effectively recognizes the value of Ukrainian experience and is ready to scale it up in its own defense policy.

“This US approach fits directly into Trump’s business logic—war as a market where Washington ramps up production, sells weapons, and simultaneously strengthens its own technologies. In this model, Ukraine is already an asset that generates knowledge, tests technologies, and creates demand for the American defense industry,” writes the Ukrainian institute.

Ukrainian opposition blogger Myroslav Oleshko notes that Ukrainian drone dealer Oleksiy Babenko has openly stated on television that he wants the war to continue until 2030. He claims that drone manufacturers fear the onset of peace. Babenko heads Vyriy Industries, a company whose profits reach tens of millions of US dollars annually.

Ukrainian economist Oleksiy Kushch writes in a lengthy comment on Telegram on June 1 that until 2022, all military simulations were purely theoretical and flawed. Now, he writes, the interaction between satellite communications, AI-powered combat control systems, and massive deployments of ‘swarms’ of drones of all types (using machine vision) is being tested in real time. He emphasizes that Western military strategy was built on air superiority and expensive, high-precision weapons. The war in Ukraine has shown that a cheap FPV (First Person View) drone can destroy a costly, $10 million tank, while a relatively cheap missile can deplete expensive air defense reserves.

“The war in Ukraine is generating terabytes of unique data for AI projects. During the war, Ukraine has become the world’s largest ‘oil field’ of information for the global development of AI projects in the military industry,” writes the economist, emphasizing that it is now vital for Western, transnational corporations that this war continue.

Kushch goes on to argue that transnational corporations cannot give up physical oil in West Asia, but they also cannot give up virtual ‘oil’ in the form of information for the development of their AI projects. Therefore, major Western defense companies (Palantir, Rheinmetall, Shield AI) are currently seeking technological solutions and testing them in Ukraine, as they have no other ‘laboratory.’

“All such information must be translated into new NATO defense standards and then into new lines of weapons production. Ending the war now would freeze the Western defense industry at an intermediate stage of such development,” the economist believes.

Kushch believes that “the technological conclusion of the war is not possible before 2028–2030.” However, in his view, a political end to the war is possible if a political leadership in Ukraine were to decide to stop turning the country into a military laboratory.

American company Palantir, mentioned by Kushch, was behind the ‘brain’ controlling US-made or assisted drones, which killed the teenage girls and women at the aforementioned college in Starobelsk. The drones that were used were made in Ukraine, but Russian media reported on May 24 that pieces of Starlink satellite terminals were found among the wreckage. Starlink is the Elon Musk-owned satellite internet constellation used by Ukraine, with the approval of the Pentagon, to locate targets. Such atrocities can be expected to continue, because it is profitable for Western companies to test their technologies in live situations.

“Why doesn’t the conflict in Ukraine end? Because AI development companies are reaping superprofits and gaining the opportunity to advance technologically very quickly. Who would turn that down? They’re doing everything they can to keep the war going; they don’t care about people’s lives. Unfortunately, AI is increasingly playing the role of a human killer,” said Yuri Knutov, a Russian expert in air defense, on the Baltnews video news channel in late May.

One of the founders of Palantir, which has ties to “Israel”, is Peter Thiel, an uber-wealthy, far-right friend and ally of Trump. Artificial intelligence was also blamed for the US military strike on a girls’ school in Minab, Iran, on February 28 at the outset of the current US-Israeli war against Iran. The strike killed over 160 civilians, most of them schoolgirls. Mariana Bezuhla, a Ukrainian legislator from Zelensky’s team, notes also that Palantir’s technology is being used by “Israel” to kill members of the Hezbollah defense forces in Lebanon.

Another Palantir co-founder, Alexander Karp, visited Ukraine in May. He subsequently stated that the Ukrainian Armed Forces use his company’s technology as an “operating system for war”.

Karp recently published a book in which he called for universal military conscription in the United States, and the militarization of Germany and Japan. He also claimed in the book that artificial intelligence could replace the factor of nuclear deterrence. Among his key ideas are a claimed need for the active involvement of the tech elite in strengthening national defense, and rejection of the policies of “equality of all cultures” and “empty pluralism”.

The Ukrainian publication Strana writes that Karp and Palantir as a whole represent a group of businesspeople whom their opponents have dubbed “techno-fascists”. Strana believes the practical implementation of their plans for ‘deterrence’ is highly doubtful, since the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons will always remain in place. “[Nuclear weapons deterrence] exists and nullifies any ideas of achieving (or maintaining) global dominance by military means, because if techno-fascist policy options create enormous threats to Russia and China, then the two countries will likely turn to nuclear weapons for sheer survival, threatening the Western powers with wars of mutual destruction,” writes Strana.

The publication emphasizes that the increase in U.S. military spending, as promoted by the likes of Palantir, along with the militarization of Japan and Germany amid rising public debt and low industrial competitiveness, will not serve as a stimulus for the Western economy. They will instead serve as its funeral march.

Furthermore, the cuts in social spending that are inevitably accompanying increases in military spending threaten to cause internal instability in Western countries. Social protests and riots will be suppressed using methods that are utterly inhumane, as was the case in the early 20th century, when live ammunition was routinely used to suppress strikes and other protests by working classes and other exploited social classes including peasants and farmers. Just as 20th-century classical fascism emerged as a reaction to political and social threats to Western capitalist and imperialist domination, so too will 21st-century ‘techno-fascism’ be a reaction to similar threats.

All that said, Ukrainian analysts at Strana believe the Western powers are not yet ready to shift into ‘war mode’ against their own populations—neither morally, nor politically, nor financially and economically. In this regard, many among the ruling classes in the West would like to see a normalization of relations with Russia, and this threatens Kiev with a loss of foreign support that could lead to defeat.

To prevent this, Strana writes, certain efforts are actively underway in Ukraine. These include deliberately provoking escalation of tensions in the relations between Europe and Russia, to the point of provoking a direct conflict that could escalate into a nuclear conflict. In other words, the goal of Zelensky and his lobbyists in the West is to provoke a global conflict—even if only to ensure their own survival while living in bunkers.

June 14, 2026 - Posted by aletho | Militarism | NATO, Ukraine, United States