What Ukraine has that Japan and Taiwan lack

On September 1, former Ukrainian defence minister Mykhailo Fedorov announced that Alex Karp, CEO of artificial intelligence and data analytics firm Palantir Technologies, would become the lead investor in a new defence technology company he is building.

This confirmed what Fedorov had only gestured at two days earlier in an interview with the Financial Times: that what he was selling investors was never really drones.

In that interview, he also suggested he was ready to trade drone-warfare...