Ex-Ukrainian Defense Minister a Conduit for US Corporations, Says Medvedchuk

MOSCOW, August 10. /TASS/. Former Ukrainian Defense Minister Mikhail Fyodorov was a conduit for US multinational corporations getting involved in the military campaign against Russia, Viktor Medvedchuk, head of the Other Ukraine movement and former leader of the Opposition Platform – For Life party banned by Kiev, said.

"Mikhail Fyodorov is a figurehead who became a facade concealing the real involvement of US multinational corporations in the war against Russia. [Palantir Technologies CEO and co-founder] Alex Karp and Eric Schmidt made the now former Ukrainian defense minister their courier, whose job is to run between Ukrainian offices and communicate decisions that the Ukrainian authorities are required to implement," Medvedchuk wrote in an article published on the movement’s website.

According to him, this explains the activity of the "cardboard Maidan" protests demanding that Fyodorov be reinstated as defense minister. Medvedchuk said that the former minister’s dismissal had taken on a significance disproportionate to the length of his time at the Defense Ministry.

The politician recalled that Fyodorov helped usher in new technological changes in the Ukrainian armed forces. In fact, the former minister was "the public face of projects in which drones, digital battle management systems and artificial intelligence were gradually combined into a single control mechanism," he said.

Palantir’s role

Medvedchuk noted that Karp proposed opening a Palantir office in Ukraine and providing software for warfare as early as 2022. While the software was already used in the United States and NATO countries, Ukraine became a testing ground where technologies combining intelligence, satellite, drone, radar and ground reconnaissance data, identifying links between objects and transforming analysis results into decision-making options were integrated into a system for data collection, target selection and combat command against Russia, he said.

Fyodorov promoted the system politically and institutionalized it at the state level, while Palantir created its software foundation, Medvedchuk added. Another company directly involved in these developments was Perennial Autonomy, which was formed out of the closed Project Eagle initiative created with the participation of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, he said.

According to Medvedchuk, Perennial Autonomy’s task was to transfer autonomy directly to a physical platform, including computer vision, navigation amid GPS jamming, target tracking and automation of the final stage of a drone’s flight. "Project Eagle’s organizational architecture remained opaque for a long time and was developed as a multilevel network. Its key figure is Eric Schmidt, whose involvement in Ukrainian military developments was directly linked to Fyodorov’s activities," he wrote.

Other US companies are also involved in developing and testing these systems, Medvedchuk said. In this structure, Fyodorov served as the state organizer and public face of the changes, while their technological content centered on Palantir’s developments, he added.

"In May 2026, Alex Karp acknowledged that the company played a ‘very large role’ in a significant part of Ukrainian military targeting. At this level, Palantir became the de facto technological headquarters of the war against Russia – a center where intelligence data are turned into targets, targets into combat missions and missions are assigned to specific strike assets. Therefore, Palantir is in fact the technological flagship of terrorist strikes on Russian territory," the Other Ukraine leader said.