Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy blasted his European allies Thursday for what he portrayed as the continent’s slow, fragmented and inadequate response to Russia’s invasion nearly four years ago and its continued international aggression.
Addressing the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Zelenskyy listed a litany of grievances and criticisms of Europe that he said have left Ukraine at the mercy of Russian President Vladimir Putin amid an ongoing U.S. push for a peace settlement.
True and false at the same time. Taken separately, a lot of things have changed. Dozens of prototypes have become experimental products and are being used. E.g. factory A opened, factory B got furnished and is doing test production, factory C is being built, with the understanding that it will give production in 2027. That helps, if you know “I will get a shiny new thingy in 2027”, you can donate your old thingy in 2026 (but the old thingy could be obsolete already).
But he’s right about attitudes. Attitudes in many offices are complacent. Things are not taken seriously, people are stuck in their routine and helpless.
I would like to deny, but I’ve had a chance to observe first hand. An office which you’d expect to respond to queries fast, responded slower than moss grows. An office which you’d expect to be constructive and help find a way to legally reserve airspace kept playing table tennis with applications until threatened with civil disobedience. Conditions for a project competition which you’d hope to accommodate agile development turned out to be a bureaucratic jumble in which you can’t even sign an application due to severe limitations. I’ve heard credible stories of drone developers in Eastern Europe driving hundreds of kilometers to Ukraine to test (or testing illegally) because at home, things are overregulated. It’s a recipe for falling behind.
On the grand scale, politicians are also relatively passive and not very resourceful. It was sad to watch the situation involving frozen Russian funds. There was a way to help and intervene effectively, but politicians were too risk-averse to use it.