Ukraine: The Weapons of Victory?

Come Back Alive is one of Ukraine’s leading organizations supporting its armed forces. Founded in 2014, at the beginning of the war in Donbas, it provides military units with equipment, funds training and supports the development of new weapons. Mykola Bielieskov has been a military analyst there since 2022. A graduate of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, he worked at the Institute of World Policy from 2016 to 2019 before joining the Defense Policy Department at the National Institute for Strategic Studies, an institution attached to the Ukrainian presidency. Today regarded as one of the country’s most influential military experts, he regularly contributes to Ukraine’s strategic debate and publishes in a number of international institutions and media outlets.

Cyrille Amoursky — Could you tell us about Come Back Alive?

Mykola Bielieskov — It is quite a unique phenomenon in Europe. Let me explain. In the traditional model, the state has a near-monopoly over security and defense capabilities. In Ukraine, however, the war has given rise to a civil society that can directly contribute to the military effort.

It all started in 2014. When Russian aggression began, our armed forces sometimes lacked even basic equipment. The foundation was created and initially began raising money from ordinary citizens, and later from businesses, to purchase equipment, including body armor. That is actually where the name comes from: the words “Come Back Alive” were written on some of those vests.

With the full-scale invasion in 2022, we grew to an entirely different scale. Since 2014, the foundation has raised more than €1.6 billion, the overwhelming majority of it since 2022.

C. A. — What proportion of that funding comes from Ukrainian citizens and businesses, and what proportion comes from foreign partners — and who are they?

M. B. — At present, around 62 percent of our funding comes from foreign partners — individuals, companies, NGOs and partner governments — and 38 percent from Ukrainian partners, including businesses, individuals and state-owned companies. These figures are approximate, though. For security reasons, both for our partners and for ourselves, we do not publish certain figures until the projects concerned have been completed.

Today, we provide drones, communications systems, vehicles and electronic-warfare capabilities, and we also invest in military training.

We can also act faster than the state and take certain risks. Public administrations are necessarily constrained by more procedures. We can, by contrast, test technologies that have not yet fully proved themselves, as we did with the interceptor drones developed under the “Dronopad” project (1), or with some of Ukraine’s first long-range strike drones, such as the “Bober” (2). We invested in these capabilities at a time when the state was still hesitant. Once their effectiveness had been demonstrated, they could be scaled up on a much larger scale.

That is a fundamental feature of the Ukrainian model: the state remains the main actor in defense, but it is not the only one. Many innovations emerge in military units, companies, foundations or volunteer networks before being adopted by state institutions.

C. A. — On the ground, the Russian offensive is continuing, but it has slowed considerably compared with last year. Can we say that Ukraine is now regaining the strategic initiative?

M. B. — I would be more cautious. To speak of “regaining the strategic initiative,” we would need to be conducting sustained offensive operations and forcing the Russians to adapt to our actions. In some areas — the Dnipropetrovsk region, for example — our counterattacks have forced the Russians to redeploy reserves. But elsewhere, particularly in the Donetsk region, we are still the ones reacting to their offensives. So we have not “regained …