Why I'm Not Going to Gdańsk

Picture an expensive restaurant. Serious people are at the table: Americans, Europeans, Asians, in good suits. We walk in with the best drawings in the world, with combat software, with drones that do things no Pentagon engineer has dreamt of. They seat us. They smile. God, Ukrainians, you are incredible. How does that drone get past Russian electronic warfare? Show us. Write those numbers down for us.

And, warmed by the attention, we open the laptops. We share telemetry paid for in blood. They buy us coffee, clap us on the shoulder, promise to call.

Do you know what happens next? Nothing happens next. We drive back under shelling to be glad of the world's recognition, while the serious people wipe their mouths, take our free data and our free ideas, and go and open factories in Riga, Paris, Warsaw or Texas. They hire our own engineers, the ones who left because there was nothing here for them. They patent it under their own companies. They sign billion-dollar contracts with their own defence ministries.

There is an example I will not name, because the people involved are decent. A Latvian company's drones were tested in Ukraine, proven by our war and our blood. It has now signed a large contract, and a drone born of a Ukrainian war carries European origin, EU money and NATO contracts — because it is manufactured in Riga rather than in Kyiv. Our experience became a Latvian product and European money.

Interest is not investment. We are treated not as business partners but as a free Wikipedia of war.

None of this is anyone's fault but ours, and it is fixable, which is why I keep writing it down.

The numbers should be shouting and instead they are silent. By the spring of 2026 roughly a hundred of our defence companies had moved abroad. A Czech firm founded by our own engineers now supplies drones to India — not Ukraine, Czechia, on Ukrainian brains. Every second weapons manufacturer is thinking about how to leave, and the reason is not mysterious: a 25 per cent profit ceiling at home and an effective ban on export. On drone exports Ukraine could be earning up to twenty billion dollars a year. That is pensions, hospitals, teachers' salaries. We are simply giving it away. We are first in the world in combat experience and last in the world at earning from it.

Meanwhile the new economy is being built next door, on energy and data. At VivaTech in Paris the head of Nvidia repeated the formula I have been saying for years: a data centre is a power station, except that what it produces is not electricity but intellect. Whoever owns energy and compute owns the money of the next fifty years.

And who understood that first? The oil monarchies of the Gulf. Aramco and the funds of the Emirates and Dubai were among the main sponsors of the forum, putting hundreds of billions of sovereign money into data centres. They are building the future — for a few ruling families. In Nice, at Bharat Innovates, India brought a hundred and twenty of its technology companies to France and more than five hundred investors. Not begging. Selling. So that their engineers do not run to Silicon Valley but build at home.

We have all of it. Gas, the largest storage capacity in Europe, atomic generation, sun. And sixty million Ukrainians across the world who are tired of being the workforce on somebody else's contract. The sheikhs are building a fund for a throne. We could build a fund for a nation, where every citizen becomes a co-owner of the future.

So: Gdańsk. Against the background of all this — a rewritten world, three hundred billion moving through Iran, our technologies flowing across the border — another Reconstruction of Ukraine Conference opens. A hundred countries, two thousand participants, coffee, badges, presentations. The same people who have been reconstructing us from a stage for years and somehow never reconstruct anything.

I do not like conferences. They steal time from actual work. And the cherry on this particular absurdity: the conference is hosted by Poland, our nearest ally and our gate into Europe, with whom we are at this moment quarrelling over a medal — decorations returned, honours withdrawn, a dispute about the events of 1943. There is the whole picture in one frame. The world is dividing trillions and redrawing the map of technology, and we and the ally on whose soil we are being reconstructed are fighting over orders from a century ago. Symbols instead of factories. The past instead of the future.

There are no people in Gdańsk who need my view. Nobody there needs a quantum market, or factories, or AI micro-grids. They will gather to divide billions over croissants and pour it into concrete. Good, familiar, twentieth-century concrete, on which the usual schemes are built. Many of the participants are among the smartest people of our time and I respect them personally. But the conference itself is a monument to the past passing itself off as the future.

So to every colleague and investor who asked whether they would see me in Gdańsk: no.

World leaders see Ukraine as a future architect of global security. Official Ukraine is not on that list. While the world admires our private technology sector, our own officialdom is doing everything to make sure we lose the war economy and the market for artificial intelligence too. A country without a business plan for its own war is simply being used as a free proving ground.

Real respect in the adult world does not look like a post saying proud to stand with Ukraine. It looks like a hard contract. Manufacturing in Ukraine. Tax in Ukraine. A share of the profit to us. Enough of being led by compliments. It is time to put the drawings away and say: you want the technology? Certainly. Money on the table first, and a plant in Lviv. No? Then goodbye.

I am not waiting for an invitation. The window is open, and windows close. Not to Gdańsk, not to anywhere. I am building, and I am calling on everyone tired of being a note in somebody else's symphony to build too.

The age of concrete schemes is ending. The age of people who do things is beginning.