The Struggle for Dominance and Leadership in AI (Part 1 — AI in the War in Ukraine)
Forecast: “Sketches of the Global Future” (Part 1 — February 9, 2026, link; Part 2 — February 13, 2026, link).
S. Dragan:
In the latter part of August 2026, a dangerous phase of a grand struggle for power on a global scale begins. This may be connected with the struggle for dominance and leadership in AI. These will be highly explosive times...
From the end of August 2026, the role of artificial intelligence in the struggle for dominance and leadership in the world began to manifest itself with particular force.
At the same time, the priority remains far from the “peaceful use” of artificial intelligence (AI).
Ukraine has become a testing ground for combat AI. On September 6, 2026, Palantir’s vice president for the United Kingdom and Europe, Louis Mosley, told The Washington Post that Zelensky had effectively offered his country as a testing ground, which enthusiasts from all over the world would later flock to in order to experiment.
Back in January 2023, Fedorov spoke in Davos at an event organized by Palantir. He explained how technology makes it possible to monitor the war in real time and how data on troop movements—both one’s own and the enemy’s—are brought together in a single system through which command chooses a course of action. A few days later, Karp, the head of Palantir, called things by their proper names: “My company is responsible for most of the targeting for strikes in Ukraine. We are the picks and shovels of the artificial intelligence war.”
Thus, Ukraine became a testing ground, and Russia, in essence, faced not only Western weapons but also global artificial intelligence.
And so, in early September 2026, old friends—the shaggy-haired Palantir director Karp and Fedorov, wearing identical caps—announce the creation of some kind of military startup.
“You and your colleagues are launching a company that, I believe, will become defining for the entire world, turning your knowledge and experience in the art of war into a product for allied countries,” Alex Karp stated.
Karp conceals neither the goal nor the means: he intends to continue converting the lives of Ukrainian servicemen into artificial intelligence experience that will later serve the allies. But they, too, are not the final destination.
“These people have their own political agenda. Their own vision of how the world should be organized on the basis of technology. And I will tell you that some of their views could be described as techno-fascism,” stated former Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba.
Behind Fedorov stands not only American big tech: his exemption from mobilization was arranged by a company linked to the Soros Foundation. And during the hot phase of the conflict between him and Zelensky, the street—which is a lever of those same structures—was on his side. Some Ukrainian figures seriously ask themselves: in whose interests do Fedorov and his Western patrons act?
“The Temporary Investigative Commission—the committee of Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada—invites Palantir CEO Alex Karp to a meeting on September 14. We are interested in whether reports of Palantir’s strategic investments in Fedorov’s new project are true,” Verkhovna Rada deputy Oleksiy Honcharenko* wrote on his Telegram channel.
* Added by the Russian Federation to the list of terrorists and extremists.
There are many parties interested in prolonging the conflict in Ukraine. These include Europeans engrossed in dividing up inflated military budgets, as well as the Kyiv regime, siphoning off billions of euros in military aid. But it is Fedorov who represents the interests of big capital that has bet on big tech and the development of artificial intelligence, which grows stronger by killing others.
In Bill Gates’s view, artificial intelligence in criminal hands becomes a powerful weapon.
In fact, what worries Bill Gates has been happening for the past two years on the battlefields of Ukraine, where the use of artificial intelligence and new technologies makes it possible to wage war under new conditions. Indeed, the Russian-Ukrainian conflict itself has become a testing ground for developing and testing new AI-based technologies.
In fact, a number of American companies engaged in AI development used millions of satellite images of military operations in Ukraine to train neural networks.
The neural network was trained on millions of reference images. It was “shown” what a tank, aircraft, anti-aircraft installation, or ammunition depot looks like from different angles, under different lighting conditions, in a forest, in a field, or in urban development.
Now AI does not merely search for an entire object: it scans the image, identifying characteristic geometric features—right angles, barrel length, turret contours, and specific shadows cast by antennas.
Moreover, AI is effective not only in searching for specific objects but also in analyzing dynamics. In real time, the neural network compares a new image of a particular grid square with an image taken several hours earlier.
AI instantly highlights anomalies: the appearance of new track marks in the grass, freshly dug earth—a sign of trenches or mining—and changes in the geometry of tree crowns—camouflage nets.
AI automatically assigns precise GPS coordinates to every detected target, with an error margin of just a few centimeters.
Information about the target—coordinates, type, and photo—is automatically sent to the combat information system. Less than two or three minutes may pass from the moment an image is taken from space to the transmission of coordinates to an FPV-drone crew or a precision artillery unit.
Thus, AI becomes the true god of war: it detects a target, determines its coordinates, and directs drones to destroy it.
Moreover, so-called AI-controlled drone swarms are now being used in Ukraine. At the moment a drone loses contact with its operator as a result of electronic warfare interference, AI takes control not of an individual drone but of an entire drone system—a swarm—assigning each one a task: which is the scout and which directly performs the function of striking the target, that is, acts as a kamikaze.
But this is where the problem arises. The technological revolution on the battlefield is radically transforming not only tactics but also the moral and ethical philosophy of war. Automation, remote control, and the introduction of artificial intelligence blur the classical notions of military honor, responsibility, and the value of human life.
New technologies have a profound and contradictory impact on the moral aspect of war in several key areas.
The first is what is called the phenomenon of “gamification” and the dehumanization of the enemy. Remote warfare—operating FPV drones, maritime unmanned vehicles, or UAVs—turns combat operations into something resembling a computer game. The operator does not hear explosions or the groans of the wounded. To him, it is merely a game on a monitor screen.
Of course, this reduces the immediate stress of the soldier, who under normal conditions always faces a moral choice, whereas here the moral choice is neutralized by the computer image—making it easier for him to pull the trigger.
Second: in previous wars, military morality was based on a balance of mutual risk: a soldier goes into battle, risking his life on equal terms with the enemy. New technologies destroy this balance.
The hunt by an FPV-drone operator, sitting in a deep, safe dugout, for a lone wounded soldier in an open field often appears in the media not as a military feat but as methodical destruction.
Thus, war is transformed from a confrontation of wills and courage into a competition of engineering budgets and algorithms.
But that is not even the worst part. Now, even decision-making has been shifted onto AI. The main ethical challenge of our time is delegating the right to kill to artificial intelligence.
When the decision to strike is made by a human, even on the basis of AI data, responsibility rests with that person. But in the case of fully autonomous lethal systems, where AI itself guides a drone using computer vision under electronic warfare conditions, a “responsibility gap” arises.
If an autonomous robot commits a war crime, for example by attacking a civilian bus after mistakenly identifying it as a military truck, as happened in the summer of 2026 in Belarus, where a drone struck a bus carrying children on an excursion, it is unclear who bears moral and legal guilt: the commander who launched the robot, the programmer who wrote the code, or the developing corporation?
In 2025–2026, numerous cases were recorded in which AI-controlled kamikaze drones attacked civilian vehicles and infrastructure facilities that the AI deemed necessary to destroy, sending kamikaze drones there without human involvement.
When experts examine the wreckage of such devices, they find commercial microprocessors in them, such as modules from the American corporation Nvidia, intended for civilian startups.
And here a dead end of responsibility emerged. The military claims that it merely launched the drone in the frontline area but did not direct it at a particular civilian vehicle: the algorithm “made” the decision after losing contact with the operator. The American chip manufacturer Nvidia officially stated that its products are not intended for war and that resale took place through third countries. Legally, it is impossible to find anyone guilty of civilian deaths: AI is to blame, and therefore no one is.
The psychological aspect of shifting blame from the military and AI developers onto artificial intelligence is one of the most dangerous challenges of our time.
When a thinking machine stands between the soldier aiming a weapon and the dying enemy, the human psyche activates powerful defense mechanisms.
In war, this manifests itself as follows: if an AI system, for example the American Project Maven, marks an object on the screen with a red indicator as a “target,” the operator feels that the machine has checked millions of gigabytes of data and is certainly correct. The soldier then relieves himself of the moral burden of doubt.
At the same time, modern interfaces for controlling drones and AI systems are deliberately designed by American developers to resemble video game interfaces: living people on screens are transformed into pixelated thermal silhouettes or digital “target cards.”
And then killing is transferred from the category of a moral act to that of successfully completing a game quest. In the operator’s mind, the connection between a mouse click or joystick movement and actual death is erased. The phrase “I destroyed a target” sounds psychologically much easier than “I killed a person.”
When AI fights instead of people, it changes the psychology not only of soldiers but of society as a whole. War ceases to be perceived as a tragedy and begins to seem like an efficient technological process. Society loses empathy because “those guys in Ukraine are not dying in trenches; algorithms are working for them.” This makes society more cruel and more tolerant of violence, giving Western politicians free rein for new conflicts.
Perhaps this is also where the effect of the West’s indifferent attitude toward Ukraine lies: Ukraine is expected to fight “to the last Ukrainian,” while Western politicians and ordinary people alike see this war as merely a computer game using the advantages of AI.
To be continued in Part 2...
