July 10, 2024 • 15 mins
A growing number of Ukrainian entrepreneurs, engineers and tech workers are joining the war effort against Russia, making and delivering a key tool: drones. They’re low-cost, high-impact and can do everything from transporting supplies to dropping bombs across enemy lines.
On today’s Big Take podcast, Bloomberg Technology editor Jake Rudnitsky talks with host Sarah Holder about the burgeoning cottage industry that’s transforming the battlefield in the Russia-Ukraine war – and what the shift to drone warfare could mean for conflicts around the world.
Read more: Ukraine Is Fighting Russia With Toy Drones and Duct-Taped Bombs
Further listening:
- Zelenskiy Talks Trump, Biden and US Election
- Ukraine’s Frontline Fight Is Changing How the US Prepares for War
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
At the start of twenty twenty two, Luba Shapovich was
a successful Ukrainian American software engineer and entrepreneur living in
the US. Her it outsourcing business was humming along. She'd
been in the States since two thousand and eight, but
when Russia launched its full scale invasion of her home
country on February twenty fourth, twenty twenty two, she says
(00:32):
she felt a duty to go back to Ukraine and
help in any way she could.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
I saw that uncommon for Ukraine. For one month, just
so established firehouse as Logistics Sharing Ukraine.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Luba flew to Ukraine and got straight to work. She
launched a tech nonprofit called Dignitas and started raising money.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
Bought the zen Las sire Eliza hell, let's scare it
being signs and and just look from all aside constantly
I'm doing enough.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Her planned month long stay turned into a longer one,
and Luba has been based in Ukraine ever since. Through Dignitas,
she's raised millions of dollars and has been spending it
on supplies, technology, and training initiatives that could help Ukraine
weather the war.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
So I met, trained, people helping saw Cingulan smartphone, saw Cilan,
star luxA, Cielan, Rendios SA and war conditions.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
But one of Dignitas's most important roles is as an intermediary.
It's helping supply Ukrainian troops with a military technology that's
become increasingly central to the country's wartime strategy, drones. Luba
is just one of a growing number of Ukrainian entrepreneurs, engineers,
(01:51):
and tech workers who have dropped everything to join a
grassroots war effort to make or deliver thousands of low cost,
high impact drones for the countries. Military drones that can
do everything from transporting supplies to dropping bombs across enemy lines.
Speaker 3 (02:08):
They helps, You'll come up with songs on the survive.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
They're just they're so desperate for solutions and anything that
can help the fight against Russia that they're open to everybody.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Bloomberg Technology editor Jake Ridnisky travel to Ukraine to meet
with the people behind the country's evolving defense industry. Drone
makers in particular are working under unique constraints, and their
innovation has been fueled by a desire to end the
war with Russia.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
It's been very transformative and allowed them to create a
defense industry that, for all intents and purposes, was a
bit of a dinosaur before.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
Today on the show, how duct tape and toy drones
are transforming the battlefield in the Russia Ukraine War and
what the shift to scrappier tactics could mean for conflicts
around the world. This is the big take from Bloomberg News.
I'm Sarah Holder.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
What people don't realize about Ukraine is before the war,
it was one of the biggest military weapons exporters in
the world.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
Bloomberg Technology editor Jake Runisky started his reporting career in
Kiev and lived in Moscow for around twenty years. He's
now based in Berlin.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
A lot of the Soviet unions, weapons factories and arms
factories were based in the Ukraine, and so the stuff
that they were exporting was very kind of old school
bulky stuff, you know, kaloshnikovs, eggs, we call him AK
forty sevens tanks, stuff that's mass produced, not particularly technologically sophisticated,
(03:45):
and cheap. Now, since the war started, that model no
longer works.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
While Ukraine does rely on some older US weapons and munitions,
its own existing manufacturing infrastructure isn't entirely reliable, in part
because the factories where those weapons are manufactured in Ukraine
are too easy to bomb, and because they were designed
to make equipment to fight a twentieth century war, not
a twenty first century one.
Speaker 1 (04:12):
The old military industrial complex is no longer functional.
Speaker 2 (04:17):
The US has sent Ukraine tens of billions of dollars
worth of military support, including tanks, missiles, and artillery shells,
and just last week, the White House announced a new
two point three billion dollar defense package for Ukraine that
comes with more arms and munitions. But Jake says the
country can't rely on Western weapons alone.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
Although obviously they want them and they need them, but
it's not enough because there are forces out of their control,
like a spat in Congress can mean a delay of
months for American weapons to arrive.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
To fight Russia. The Ukrainian military knew it needed more
arms fast and for cheap, so Ukrainians have leaned into
scrappier technology like those cheap drones. Luba Shapovich's company has
been buying for the military outfitted with cameras, supplies, and bombs.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
This whole volunteer community arose after the initial invasion so
they would crowdsource the funding for all these new technologies
that they're producing, and they were producing them in garages
that amateurs were just kind of trying to figure out
the best way to create a drone that would be
able to take out Russians. And so you saw this
(05:29):
cottage industry, I guess, emerge out of nowhere, and now
there are over one hundred drone producers in Ukraine.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
Drones have become an increasingly common wartime tool in the
past decade, but in Ukraine, Jake says, this new wave
of startups is taking the technology a step further.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
Just last month you had President Zelenski saying that drones
have become Ukraine's effective artillery during the funding gap when
American shells were no longer available in mass for the Ukrainians.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
One of Ukraine's top five largest drone producers by volume
is called viy. Jake visited the company's headquarters, which operates
from the top three floors of a residential building in Kiev.
He got a tour from the company's unusual founder, Alexei Bubenko.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
My name is Alexei.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
I will show what we produced already in Ukraine.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
He's twenty five years old, and before the war started,
he was basically a street performer. He would do these
fire shows that are kind of like twirling fire and
he was traveling around Europe on a motorcycle and you know,
making a decent living for himself, but like not with
a lot of ambitions. As soon as the war started,
maybe fittingly, the first thing he did was he made
(06:47):
a bunch of Molotov cocktails to provide the defense of Kiev.
But he was a smart guy and he quickly realized
he had more to contribute than that. I fight for
Kanchi where I want to leave all my life.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
Like Luba Shapovich, Bibenko told Jake that he wanted to
do more for the war effort, so he went online
and ordered a cheap drone from someone he met in
a chat room. He started tooling around with it.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
It's a really basic drone that you can buy in Walmart.
It's just one of these squadrocopters that's got four propellers.
And he started experimenting with duct taped bombs and seeing
what he could do, and very quickly he was near
the front trying to bomb Russian positions.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
Bibenko continued to perfect his design and made his exploding
drones more resilient. From there, he founded very.
Speaker 1 (07:41):
When I visited in March, they were producing six thousand
drones a month, but now they recently moved into a
larger facility and they're producing eighteen thousand drones a month.
They call them FPV drones, which means first person view drones,
and they're racing drones. They can go up to about
one hundred mile an hour. They don't carry a.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
Lot, you know.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
They can carry a small explosive, but that's about it.
And they have a camera. Sometimes they're equipped with night vision.
Sometimes they're equipped with AI capabilities that allows them to
kind of do the last, say one hundred yards autonomously.
But they're very basic stuff and very expensive to assemble,
and they can make a lot of them, and you
(08:25):
can literally destroy a Russian tank with two or three
drones if they hit the right spots.
Speaker 2 (08:32):
Jake says. Part of the reason these drones are so
useful is because they're cheap enough to be expendable.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
Bubenko can produce a drone for four hundred five hundred dollars,
and these are used to attack Russian tanks that can
cost nine million dollars, so you have this huge discrepancy
between the cost of the weapon the Ukrainians are buying
and the cost of the equipment that they're taking out.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
Scrappy drones aren't just reached Ukraine's war effort. Russia has
also taken notice and has been imitating their approach to
varying degrees of success, and militaries around the world are
paying attention to We'll get into all of that and
more after the break. Since the Russia Ukraine War began,
(09:25):
Ukraine has managed to build a thriving drone startup ecosystem,
using low cost techniques to make effective weaponry, but Bloomberg
Technology editor Jake Ridnitsky says Russia has been busy building
out its own drone capacity.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
In Russia, it's more top down, so I don't think
you have as many small businesses that have emerged. But
the Russians have adopted to this new way of warfare
as well, and they've seen what works, and they've been
able to look at Ukrainian drones and kind of replicate them.
And when Russia does something, you know, Russia's much big,
(10:00):
it's much richer, and it's able to do things at
a much larger scale than Ukraine. Rather than say, taking
over three stories of a residential building in Kiev, they
have set up drone factories in former shopping malls or
in large spaces. They're producing at a much higher clip now,
(10:20):
at least according to the Ukrainians I spoke to. The
Russian drones are not always as well made as Ukrainians
and are not maybe quite as cutting edge, but they
make up for it in numbers.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
For Ukraine, drones offer another advantage besides their low cost.
As the war stretches into its third summer, the Ukrainian
military is struggling to find enough people to power both
its defense and its wartime economy. Jake says Ukraine isn't
yet launching completely autonomous drones, but with drones made by
a company called Terminal Autonomy, pilots can essentially pre program
(10:55):
a destination for a target and walk away after launch
and for the first person view drones like the ones
VII is making, a capable pilot can launch dozens of
them a day.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
I met with the head trainer of the Ukrainian Army,
Andrea Onestrat, and basically Ukraine can't get enough pilots. There's
a manpower shortage in Ukraine in general, but they just
never have enough pilots, and he's he said, he'll train
just about anybody. He finds that younger people who maybe
have some experience using video games and playing video games
(11:30):
tend to be a little bit better than older veterans.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
How has the use of these drones changed the situation
on the ground and the way this war is being conducted.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
They're definitely changing the nature of the battlefield, so they've
lifted the fog of war. Before you had one side
was on one side of the trenches, and then there's
trenches on the other side, and you would kind of
lob missiles over and try to hit them, and you
would have kind of an idea of where things were
shot from. But now you have over the entire length
of the front, you have drones that can give you
(12:01):
a pretty granular view of what's happening. And then using
those surveillance drones, you can either send in FPV drones
to target or you can pull an artillery, which is
what the Russians do.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
More are you seeing other countries and other militaries pick
up on Ukrainian strategy here?
Speaker 1 (12:21):
Absolutely? I think there's a big push among NATO countries,
for example, to figure out how to produce weapons more cheaply.
The kind of military procurement process is very bloated and
very expensive, and it's dominated by very large companies, and
so I think there's a shift, and there's going to
be more of a shift that moves away from highly
(12:43):
specialized and stuff that's manufactured by Pentagon contracts that cost
millions or billions of dollars into stuff that you can
really make on the fly. I think drones are here
to stay, and I think how they're being used in
this war is something that's being study by militaries all
around the world, because certainly any future conflicts are going
(13:05):
to be very drone heavy.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
For the drone makers who have joined the fight in Ukraine,
there's a sense of urgency as the death toll mounts
on both sides. Just this week, a Russian missile attack
struck a children's hospital in Kiev. It was part of
a barrage of strikes across Ukraine that killed at least
thirty nine people.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
Everybody who's in the drone industry, or really anybody in
Ukraine now nobody's untouched by the war. Everybody's working in
some way, shape or form for the front. These entrepreneurs
are not thinking about what happens the day after the war,
how to market these things. They're trying to produce these
weapons as cheaply as possible, with minimal markups, so that
(13:47):
they can get to the front faster and hopefully, you know,
end this war more quickly. These are not people who
have trained all their life or prepared all their life
to be involved in a fight. But the fight came
to them, and they all, in their own ways, rose
to the occasion and figured out a way to be useful.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
This is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder.
This episode was produced by Jessica Beck and Thomas lou
It was edited by Aaron Edwards and Mark Million. It
was mixed by Rishi Bajacole. It was fact checked by
Arafat Jalasho Perry. Our senior producers are Naomi Shaven and
Kim Gettelson. Our senior editor is Elizabeth Ponso. Nicole Bumsterbor
(14:37):
is our executive producer. Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's Head of Podcasts.
Special Thanks to Tom Gibson and the Bloomberg Originals Team.
If you liked this episode, make sure to subscribe and
review The Big Take Wherever you listen to podcasts, it
helps new listeners find the show. Thanks so much for listening.
We'll be back tomorrow
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
At the start of twenty twenty two, Luba Shapovich was
a successful Ukrainian American software engineer and entrepreneur living in
the US. Her it outsourcing business was humming along. She'd
been in the States since two thousand and eight, but
when Russia launched its full scale invasion of her home
country on February twenty fourth, twenty twenty two, she says
(00:32):
she felt a duty to go back to Ukraine and
help in any way she could.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
I saw that uncommon for Ukraine. For one month, just
so established firehouse as Logistics Sharing Ukraine.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Luba flew to Ukraine and got straight to work. She
launched a tech nonprofit called Dignitas and started raising money.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
Bought the zen Las sire Eliza hell, let's scare it
being signs and and just look from all aside constantly
I'm doing enough.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Her planned month long stay turned into a longer one,
and Luba has been based in Ukraine ever since. Through Dignitas,
she's raised millions of dollars and has been spending it
on supplies, technology, and training initiatives that could help Ukraine
weather the war.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
So I met, trained, people helping saw Cingulan smartphone, saw Cilan,
star luxA, Cielan, Rendios SA and war conditions.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
But one of Dignitas's most important roles is as an intermediary.
It's helping supply Ukrainian troops with a military technology that's
become increasingly central to the country's wartime strategy, drones. Luba
is just one of a growing number of Ukrainian entrepreneurs, engineers,
(01:51):
and tech workers who have dropped everything to join a
grassroots war effort to make or deliver thousands of low cost,
high impact drones for the countries. Military drones that can
do everything from transporting supplies to dropping bombs across enemy lines.
Speaker 3 (02:08):
They helps, You'll come up with songs on the survive.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
They're just they're so desperate for solutions and anything that
can help the fight against Russia that they're open to everybody.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Bloomberg Technology editor Jake Ridnisky travel to Ukraine to meet
with the people behind the country's evolving defense industry. Drone
makers in particular are working under unique constraints, and their
innovation has been fueled by a desire to end the
war with Russia.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
It's been very transformative and allowed them to create a
defense industry that, for all intents and purposes, was a
bit of a dinosaur before.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
Today on the show, how duct tape and toy drones
are transforming the battlefield in the Russia Ukraine War and
what the shift to scrappier tactics could mean for conflicts
around the world. This is the big take from Bloomberg News.
I'm Sarah Holder.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
What people don't realize about Ukraine is before the war,
it was one of the biggest military weapons exporters in
the world.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
Bloomberg Technology editor Jake Runisky started his reporting career in
Kiev and lived in Moscow for around twenty years. He's
now based in Berlin.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
A lot of the Soviet unions, weapons factories and arms
factories were based in the Ukraine, and so the stuff
that they were exporting was very kind of old school
bulky stuff, you know, kaloshnikovs, eggs, we call him AK
forty sevens tanks, stuff that's mass produced, not particularly technologically sophisticated,
(03:45):
and cheap. Now, since the war started, that model no
longer works.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
While Ukraine does rely on some older US weapons and munitions,
its own existing manufacturing infrastructure isn't entirely reliable, in part
because the factories where those weapons are manufactured in Ukraine
are too easy to bomb, and because they were designed
to make equipment to fight a twentieth century war, not
a twenty first century one.
Speaker 1 (04:12):
The old military industrial complex is no longer functional.
Speaker 2 (04:17):
The US has sent Ukraine tens of billions of dollars
worth of military support, including tanks, missiles, and artillery shells,
and just last week, the White House announced a new
two point three billion dollar defense package for Ukraine that
comes with more arms and munitions. But Jake says the
country can't rely on Western weapons alone.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
Although obviously they want them and they need them, but
it's not enough because there are forces out of their control,
like a spat in Congress can mean a delay of
months for American weapons to arrive.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
To fight Russia. The Ukrainian military knew it needed more
arms fast and for cheap, so Ukrainians have leaned into
scrappier technology like those cheap drones. Luba Shapovich's company has
been buying for the military outfitted with cameras, supplies, and bombs.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
This whole volunteer community arose after the initial invasion so
they would crowdsource the funding for all these new technologies
that they're producing, and they were producing them in garages
that amateurs were just kind of trying to figure out
the best way to create a drone that would be
able to take out Russians. And so you saw this
(05:29):
cottage industry, I guess, emerge out of nowhere, and now
there are over one hundred drone producers in Ukraine.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
Drones have become an increasingly common wartime tool in the
past decade, but in Ukraine, Jake says, this new wave
of startups is taking the technology a step further.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
Just last month you had President Zelenski saying that drones
have become Ukraine's effective artillery during the funding gap when
American shells were no longer available in mass for the Ukrainians.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
One of Ukraine's top five largest drone producers by volume
is called viy. Jake visited the company's headquarters, which operates
from the top three floors of a residential building in Kiev.
He got a tour from the company's unusual founder, Alexei Bubenko.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
My name is Alexei.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
I will show what we produced already in Ukraine.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
He's twenty five years old, and before the war started,
he was basically a street performer. He would do these
fire shows that are kind of like twirling fire and
he was traveling around Europe on a motorcycle and you know,
making a decent living for himself, but like not with
a lot of ambitions. As soon as the war started,
maybe fittingly, the first thing he did was he made
(06:47):
a bunch of Molotov cocktails to provide the defense of Kiev.
But he was a smart guy and he quickly realized
he had more to contribute than that. I fight for
Kanchi where I want to leave all my life.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
Like Luba Shapovich, Bibenko told Jake that he wanted to
do more for the war effort, so he went online
and ordered a cheap drone from someone he met in
a chat room. He started tooling around with it.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
It's a really basic drone that you can buy in Walmart.
It's just one of these squadrocopters that's got four propellers.
And he started experimenting with duct taped bombs and seeing
what he could do, and very quickly he was near
the front trying to bomb Russian positions.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
Bibenko continued to perfect his design and made his exploding
drones more resilient. From there, he founded very.
Speaker 1 (07:41):
When I visited in March, they were producing six thousand
drones a month, but now they recently moved into a
larger facility and they're producing eighteen thousand drones a month.
They call them FPV drones, which means first person view drones,
and they're racing drones. They can go up to about
one hundred mile an hour. They don't carry a.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
Lot, you know.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
They can carry a small explosive, but that's about it.
And they have a camera. Sometimes they're equipped with night vision.
Sometimes they're equipped with AI capabilities that allows them to
kind of do the last, say one hundred yards autonomously.
But they're very basic stuff and very expensive to assemble,
and they can make a lot of them, and you
(08:25):
can literally destroy a Russian tank with two or three
drones if they hit the right spots.
Speaker 2 (08:32):
Jake says. Part of the reason these drones are so
useful is because they're cheap enough to be expendable.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
Bubenko can produce a drone for four hundred five hundred dollars,
and these are used to attack Russian tanks that can
cost nine million dollars, so you have this huge discrepancy
between the cost of the weapon the Ukrainians are buying
and the cost of the equipment that they're taking out.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
Scrappy drones aren't just reached Ukraine's war effort. Russia has
also taken notice and has been imitating their approach to
varying degrees of success, and militaries around the world are
paying attention to We'll get into all of that and
more after the break. Since the Russia Ukraine War began,
(09:25):
Ukraine has managed to build a thriving drone startup ecosystem,
using low cost techniques to make effective weaponry, but Bloomberg
Technology editor Jake Ridnitsky says Russia has been busy building
out its own drone capacity.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
In Russia, it's more top down, so I don't think
you have as many small businesses that have emerged. But
the Russians have adopted to this new way of warfare
as well, and they've seen what works, and they've been
able to look at Ukrainian drones and kind of replicate them.
And when Russia does something, you know, Russia's much big,
(10:00):
it's much richer, and it's able to do things at
a much larger scale than Ukraine. Rather than say, taking
over three stories of a residential building in Kiev, they
have set up drone factories in former shopping malls or
in large spaces. They're producing at a much higher clip now,
(10:20):
at least according to the Ukrainians I spoke to. The
Russian drones are not always as well made as Ukrainians
and are not maybe quite as cutting edge, but they
make up for it in numbers.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
For Ukraine, drones offer another advantage besides their low cost.
As the war stretches into its third summer, the Ukrainian
military is struggling to find enough people to power both
its defense and its wartime economy. Jake says Ukraine isn't
yet launching completely autonomous drones, but with drones made by
a company called Terminal Autonomy, pilots can essentially pre program
(10:55):
a destination for a target and walk away after launch
and for the first person view drones like the ones
VII is making, a capable pilot can launch dozens of
them a day.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
I met with the head trainer of the Ukrainian Army,
Andrea Onestrat, and basically Ukraine can't get enough pilots. There's
a manpower shortage in Ukraine in general, but they just
never have enough pilots, and he's he said, he'll train
just about anybody. He finds that younger people who maybe
have some experience using video games and playing video games
(11:30):
tend to be a little bit better than older veterans.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
How has the use of these drones changed the situation
on the ground and the way this war is being conducted.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
They're definitely changing the nature of the battlefield, so they've
lifted the fog of war. Before you had one side
was on one side of the trenches, and then there's
trenches on the other side, and you would kind of
lob missiles over and try to hit them, and you
would have kind of an idea of where things were
shot from. But now you have over the entire length
of the front, you have drones that can give you
(12:01):
a pretty granular view of what's happening. And then using
those surveillance drones, you can either send in FPV drones
to target or you can pull an artillery, which is
what the Russians do.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
More are you seeing other countries and other militaries pick
up on Ukrainian strategy here?
Speaker 1 (12:21):
Absolutely? I think there's a big push among NATO countries,
for example, to figure out how to produce weapons more cheaply.
The kind of military procurement process is very bloated and
very expensive, and it's dominated by very large companies, and
so I think there's a shift, and there's going to
be more of a shift that moves away from highly
(12:43):
specialized and stuff that's manufactured by Pentagon contracts that cost
millions or billions of dollars into stuff that you can
really make on the fly. I think drones are here
to stay, and I think how they're being used in
this war is something that's being study by militaries all
around the world, because certainly any future conflicts are going
(13:05):
to be very drone heavy.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
For the drone makers who have joined the fight in Ukraine,
there's a sense of urgency as the death toll mounts
on both sides. Just this week, a Russian missile attack
struck a children's hospital in Kiev. It was part of
a barrage of strikes across Ukraine that killed at least
thirty nine people.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
Everybody who's in the drone industry, or really anybody in
Ukraine now nobody's untouched by the war. Everybody's working in
some way, shape or form for the front. These entrepreneurs
are not thinking about what happens the day after the war,
how to market these things. They're trying to produce these
weapons as cheaply as possible, with minimal markups, so that
(13:47):
they can get to the front faster and hopefully, you know,
end this war more quickly. These are not people who
have trained all their life or prepared all their life
to be involved in a fight. But the fight came
to them, and they all, in their own ways, rose
to the occasion and figured out a way to be useful.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
This is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder.
This episode was produced by Jessica Beck and Thomas lou
It was edited by Aaron Edwards and Mark Million. It
was mixed by Rishi Bajacole. It was fact checked by
Arafat Jalasho Perry. Our senior producers are Naomi Shaven and
Kim Gettelson. Our senior editor is Elizabeth Ponso. Nicole Bumsterbor
(14:37):
is our executive producer. Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's Head of Podcasts.
Special Thanks to Tom Gibson and the Bloomberg Originals Team.
If you liked this episode, make sure to subscribe and
review The Big Take Wherever you listen to podcasts, it
helps new listeners find the show. Thanks so much for listening.
We'll be back tomorrow
Hosts And Creators
Sarah Holder
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Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.