How the Ukraine-Russia war is reshaping the tech sector in Eastern Europe

Latvian startup Global Wolf Motors launched Mosphera scooter in 2020 with a hope that it would fill a niche in micromobility. Like commuters who use scooters in urban environments, farmers and vintners could use the Mosphera to zip around their properties; miners and utility workers could use it for maintenance and security patrols; police and border guards could drive them on forest paths. And, they thought, maybe the military might want a few to traverse its bases or even the battlefield—though they knew that was something of a long shot.

When co-founders Henrijs Bukavs and Klavs Asmanis first went to talk to Latvia’s armed forces, they were indeed met with skepticism—a military scooter, officials implied, didn’t make much sense—and a wall of bureaucracy. They found that no matter how good your pitch or how glossy your promo video (and Global Wolf’s promo is glossy: a slick montage of scooters jumping, climbing, and speeding in formation through woodlands and deserts), getting into military supply chains meant navigating layer upon layer of officialdom.

Then Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and everything changed. In the desperate early days of the war, Ukrainian combat units wanted any equipment they could get their hands on, and they were willing to try out ideas—like a military scooter—that might not have made the cut in peacetime. Asmanis knew a Latvian journalist heading to Ukraine; through the reporter’s contacts, the startup arranged to ship two Mospheras to the Ukrainian army. 

Within weeks, the scooters were at the front line—and even behind it, being used by Ukrainian special forces scouts on daring reconnaissance missions. It was an unexpected but momentous step for Global Wolf, and an early indicator of a new demand that’s sweeping across tech companies along Ukraine’s borders: for civilian products that can be adapted quickly for military use.

Global Wolf’s high-definition marketing materials turned out to be nowhere near as effective as a few minutes of grainy phone footage from the war. The company has since shipped out nine more scooters to the Ukrainian army, which has asked for another 68. Where Latvian officials once scoffed, the country’s prime minister went to see Mosphera’s factory in April 2024, and now dignitaries and defense officials from the country are regular visitors. 

It might have been hard a few years ago to imagine soldiers heading to battle on oversized toys made by a tech startup with no military heritage. But Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s attacks has been a miracle of social resilience and innovation—and the way the country has mobilized is serving both a warning and an inspiration to its neighbors. They’ve watched as startups, major industrial players, and political leaders in Ukraine have worked en masse to turn civilian technology into weapons and civil defense systems. They’ve seen Ukrainian entrepreneurs help bootstrap a military-industrial complex that is retrofitting civilian drones into artillery spotters and bombers, while software engineers become cyberwarriors and AI companies shift to battlefield intelligence. Engineers work directly with friends and family on the front line, iterating their products with incredible speed.

Their successes—often at a fraction of the cost of conventional weapons systems—have in turn awakened European governments and militaries to the potential of startup-style innovation and startups to the potential dual uses of their products, meaning ones that have legitimate civilian applications but can be modified at scale to turn them into weapons.

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