The night before this conversation, Alexander Kamyshin had managed to sleep \u2014 and in Ukraine, that detail is far from trivial. “It was one of the lucky nights. In the early hours of the morning I received a report indicating that four of our factories had been hit. None critically, and there were no casualties. For us, it was a good night,” he tells Il Foglio. He speaks from Ukraine. This is not our first meeting. Kamyshin looks very serious.<\/p>\n
He is the person chosen by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to reinvent the country’s arsenal. He headed Ukrzaliznytsia, Ukraine’s railway system, then served at the Ministry of Strategic Industries, and is now one of the president’s advisers, with the mission of helping Ukraine’s defense sector establish co-production arrangements with other countries, especially in Europe. Kamyshin is unmistakable with his dark clothes, his hair defiantly styled \u00e0 la cossack, and a smile he dispenses rarely \u2014 but when it appears, it marks his face with the expression of someone who knows a great deal and can say little.<\/p>\n
As head of Ukrzaliznytsia, he kept the country connected when the Russians were trying to cut it off, making Ukrainian trains a model of efficiency and punctuality at a time when that seemed impossible. At the Ministry of Strategic Industries, he built the production model for Kyiv’s arsenal. “In the first year of the full-scale invasion, we fought with Soviet-era equipment inherited from our stockpiles and with everything we received from our European and American partners. We will be forever grateful for that,” he says, also citing Italy among the countries that have contributed to Ukraine’s defense. “In the second year, my president decided to focus on domestic production, and it was in that context that my mission to restart the defense industry began.” When speaking of Zelensky, Kamyshin uses the possessive adjective, as if to underscore the level of collaboration, the shared mission \u2014 no loose ends, Ukraine is united. “I ran the Ministry of Strategic Industries for a year and a half, and then, once we had established production capacity, I joined the Presidential Office as an adviser.” He now handles co-production with other countries: “We already have the first co-production of Ukrainian drones in Germany. We are launching several factories, and by the end of this year we will have at least ten facilities in Europe co-producing Ukrainian drones. This strengthens not only Ukraine, but the entire free world.”<\/p>\n
Since February 28, following the Israeli-American strike, the Islamic Republic of Iran began targeting the entire Middle East with its missiles and drones, and at least five countries in the region have asked Ukraine for help. Three of them \u2014 Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar \u2014 have entered into decade-long cooperation agreements. Ukraine has become a model of defense: no one knows better than the Kyiv military how to protect against Shahed attacks, the same drones Russia uses against Ukrainian cities. Moscow imported the Shaheds in 2022; Iran was the first country to provide assistance to Russia, making it an adversary of Ukraine. In the strange entanglement of the wars chasing each other between Europe and the Middle East, one episode had already linked the history of Kyiv to that of Iran back in 2020, when, following the killing of General Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad, Iran \u2014 in retaliation against the Americans \u2014 began firing missiles at U.S. targets in the region, but one of those missiles shot down a Ukrainian commercial airliner that had just taken off from Tehran’s Imam Khomeini airport. Iran refused to conduct a thorough investigation into the incident.<\/p>\n
Today Ukraine is present in the Middle East. Zelensky has completed a tour among countries that have sought his support, and these requests demonstrate that Kyiv is a global actor \u2014 one that has changed the way war is waged and is a coveted ally. “We have received several dozen official requests from the Middle East, but also from the United States and European countries. They have asked us to help with the lessons we have learned in shooting down Shaheds. Ukraine is probably the only country on the continent that knows how to counter them.”<\/p>\n
To fight Russia, Kamyshin had to build a production system resilient to everything. “They hit our industry several times a week. We lose personnel, production capacity \u2014 but we keep functioning. We have to work under fire; our front line cannot wait.” Ukraine has increased its production from one billion in 2022 to fifty billion in all types of weapons it is now capable of producing: “And we have not reached the limit \u2014 we are still growing.” Ukraine produces everything. Drones are the best-known product, but artillery systems, ammunition, and armored vehicles also come out of Kyiv’s facilities. “And then of course the drones \u2014 from small FPVs to long-range drones, air defense drones, interceptors that protect our infrastructure and are capable of repelling Shahed attacks.” These are drones that chase down other drones and destroy them \u2014 and in the Middle East, there is great demand for these models. With drones, the Ukrainians have changed warfare: “We are transforming the entire spectrum of conventional warfare. For every conventional capability, we have a drone equivalent \u2014 more efficient, cheaper, easier to use.”<\/p>\n
One of the fixed priorities of Ukrainian production is to strip Russia of every advantage. Russia had framed this war as a conventional conflict, a Second World War with a few drones in the sky. Now the Ukrainians have transformed it into “the first drone world war.” Ukraine has so far moved with great speed in innovation, even defying the financial gap that obviously gives Russia an advantage. Kamyshin explains that their task is to always be more industrious; they have understood that the real threat today is no longer nuclear, but thousands of drones coming at you. Then there are the structural lessons: “This war has shown that at least two critical capabilities are needed: a strong army and a strong industry. You need to know how to produce new systems at scale, close to your army. And that is what we have in Ukraine.”<\/p>\n
Kamyshin says he would like Kyiv, through its own lessons, to be able to teach others how to avoid the hell in which it lives \u2014 has lived. The list of interested countries is long; among the Europeans are the Nordic and Baltic states. Italy is not on the list, but the presidential adviser assures: “We have perfect cooperation, but we can do more.”<\/p>\n
The one side that continues to deny the importance of Ukraine’s lessons is the administration of Donald Trump, which last year uttered the phrase that \u2014 now that everyone is seeking Kyiv’s military assistance \u2014 seems to have aged very badly. “You don’t have the cards,” Trump told Zelensky as he berated him in the Oval Office. When reminded of that episode, Kamyshin responds with a smile \u2014 half, measured. He tilts the camera down to show his meticulously black T-shirt: “My president has the cards. These cards are called zbroya<\/em>” \u2014 the word printed on his shirt, which means weapon. Zbroya is also the name of the initiative dedicated to scaling up Ukrainian defense industry production. One word is enough to describe Kyiv’s great transformation: from security consumer to security provider.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The night before this conversation, Alexander Kamyshin had managed to sleep \u2014 and in Ukraine, that detail is far from trivial. “It was one of the lucky nights. In the early hours of the morning I received a report indicating that four of our factories had been hit. None critically, and there were no casualties. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":7042,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"iawp_total_views":25,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7040","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-senza-categoria"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7040"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7040\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7099,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7040\/revisions\/7099"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7042"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}