Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
The General Staff of the Armed Forces reminded about the ministry’s collaboration with Palantir during the tenure of the former minister.
Journalist and deputy head of the Civic Anti-Corruption Council under the Ministry of Defense, Tetyana Nikolayenko, stated that the launch of the new defence-tech company by former minister Mykhailo Fedorov raises questions about his integrity during the transition from public service to the private sector. The project’s first key investor is to be the chief executive of American Palantir Technologies, Alex Karp — a company with which the Ministry of Defense collaborated during Fedorov’s tenure as minister. On the eve, lawmaker Oleksii Honcharenko also drew attention to Fedorov’s obligations regarding non-disclosure of state secrets after leaving office.
“I don’t like the news about Fedorov and Karp at all,” Nikolayenko wrote on Facebook.
Nikolayenko noted that during Fedorov’s work at the Ministry of Defense there was cooperation with Palantir, and now the head of the American company is to invest in the former minister’s business.
“First, the Ministry of Defense under his leadership provides military data to Palantir, and then Karp becomes an investor in the ex-minister’s company,” the journalist stated.
She reminded of the dispute between civil society organizations and the Defense Procurement Agency over restrictions for former agency employees who move into the private sector. According to Nikolayenko, the DAOZA established a requirement that such employees could not bid on contracts with the agency for one year.
“That was a very correct step, and at the meeting of the National Agency on Corruption Prevention I supported the agency. Moreover, international practice supports such logic,” she clarified.
“But what should we do, and how to build this integrity, when the whole former minister sees nothing wrong with the reverse logic.
And how after this do you want to stop the sale of raw video from the battlefield?” the journalist added.
In contrast, Honcharenko said the day before that after leaving office Fedorov does not cease to be bound by the obligation of non-disclosure of state secrets. The deputy referred to articles 28 and 29 of the Law on State Secrets.
“The obligation not to disclose state secrets does not end with resignation and operates for the entire duration of the classification period,” Honcharenko quoted the law.
He noted that a person who has access to state secrets, in certain cases provided by law, may be restricted from leaving the country for up to five years after resignation if the information to which they had access is not declassified.
Honcharenko emphasized that the Minister of Defense is a state expert on secrets and has the highest clearance for state secrets of “special importance.”
“This means that Mykhailo Fedorov not only had access, but personally made decisions on classifying or declassifying information in the defense sphere and determined its level of secrecy,” the deputy stressed.
Ukraine uses software and artificial intelligence platforms from the American company Palantir Technologies as the army’s digital brain, which instantly unites data from various sources into a single picture: satellite imagery, intelligence reports, thermal imagers, and drone messages. AI helps the military quickly identify enemy hardware, more accurately direct artillery, more effectively shoot down missiles, and plan complex operations on the map. The technology automatically processes massive volumes of information, turning chaotic data into precise cues for fast battlefield decisions.
In May, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, together with Fedorov, met with Karp and spoke of further development of cooperation with the American defense sector.
“Palantir is a global, well-known company with high potential, and there are certainly areas where we can be useful to each other, strengthening the defense of Ukraine, America, and our partners,” Zelenskiy said at that time.
According to the president, during the meeting with Karp they discussed technological development in the context of hostilities and civilian needs.
Fedorov said that Karp became one of the first CEOs of large Western tech companies to personally come to Kyiv after the start of full-scale aggression—in June 2022 of the year—and supported Ukraine. The former minister added that since then active cooperation began, resulting in the creation of a system for detailed analysis of air attacks, the integration of artificial intelligence for processing intelligence data, and the involvement of new technologies in planning long-range deep strike operations.
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