The New Dark Age

AI war-tech firm Palantir has embedded itself deeply within Ukrainian military systems and civil society, turning the country into a laboratory for its dystopian technologies of tracing, surveillance and kill-targeting.

Palantir, founded by technofascist warlord Peter Thiel and currently run by Jewish supremacist Alex Karp, began providing Ukraine with data systems that control and accelerate the military “kill-chain” shortly after the outbreak of war with Russia in 2022. The kill-chain, which aggregates huge amounts of data to track a target to the point of a strike, or death, is controlled by an AI system made by Palantir called maven. Another Palantir system, prisma, direct drone attacks, while metaconstellation, assigns low earth orbit satellites to survey a designated area anywhere on the planet before calling in a strike.

Following this initial military partnership, Palantir rapidly expanded its influence in the country, becoming integral to the functioning of the Ukrainian state itself. In 2023 Ukraine announced that Palantir had established a “point of entry” through Ukraine’s digital transformation ministry and had begun working with “many Ukrainian governmental institutions.” Today, Palantir software helps power Ukraine’s domestic security services, its education system, and is at the forefront of the country’s efforts to digitise all government functions and create what Ukraine calls the world’s first AI-powered “agentic state.”

The most dystopian expression of Ukraine’s transformation into an “agentic state” is its tracking and tracing of military-age men to snatch off the street and feed into the meat-grinder. To achieve this, Ukraine digitised its national military database, known as Oberih, and consolidated the data into a system known as Reserve+. This system merges Oberih data with data from the country’s state registries alongside a wealth of other personal information, including tax and employment records, residence information, and medical records. Once a complete picture of a person has been established, the system uses AI to determine a person’s fitness and status for military conscription.

And it is this Reserve+ system which powers Ukraine’s detested programme of forced mobilisation. The videos documenting Ukraine’s mobilisation units kidnapping men while shopping in supermarkets, or off the streets, often in front of their families, bundling them into minivans before sending them to an almost-inevitable death on the front-lines, have become ubiquitous, daily occurrences on Ukrainian Telegram channels.

While neither Palantir nor Ukraine have confirmed the company is behind the digitisation of Ukraine’s military systems, the circumstantial evidence is extremely strong, given that Palantir’s technology is designed specifically to connect multiple databases and derive relationships and patterns from them. This is precisely what the Reserve+ system does. And Palantir has an open door into all of Ukraine’s governmental institutions.

It is also no coincidence that these mobilisation units bear a striking resembling to the ICE snatch squads which roam the US with impunity, given that Palantir has been working with ICE and supplying it with AI and data tools for over a decade. Palantir’s Investigative Case Management platform is used by ICE to scrape and aggregate massive amounts of data on individuals including school status, family relationships, employment information, phone records, personal connections, biometric information and residential addresses. In both Ukraine and the US, then, the underlying software leading to the physical apprehension of a person is almost identical. And Palantir is the thread connecting the two.

Palantir is also bringing misery on Ukrainians by directing the so-called “deep strikes” into Russia. This campaign, much heralded and hyped in western media and by western elites, has achieved no gains of strategic note but instead has provoked Russia into far more devastating counterattacks which have brought even greater misery on Ukrainians. These counterattacks have closed the Odessa ports, effectively turned Ukraine into a land-locked country, depriving Ukrainians of vital imports, and have also targeted critical warehouses and power infrastructure. According to recent statements from Ukrainian officials, Russian strikes have destroyed about 90% of Ukraine’s food-logistics infrastructure and 80% of Ukraine’s power generation.

But Karp and Thiel don’t care about the suffering of Ukrainians. The strikes may have been counterproductive and led to greater misery for ordinary people, but the data gleaned from the campaign will be fed back into Palantir systems and allow the company to refine and market future AI war-tech products.

Palantir, in case you needed reminding, is not on the side of the good. It is not helping Ukraine because it cares about democracy or human rights or any of the propaganda that we’re sold about why the west must support Ukraine against Russia.

This, after all, is the company which helped Israel commit the genocide of Gaza. Palantir, which has been active in Israel since 2014, held its first board meeting of 2024 in Tel Aviv to celebrate Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, and shortly after began supplying the IDF with AI tools to help the colony execute its mass slaughter. This is the company whose maven AI system is the core system for the US military and was used to massacre 120 children in Minab, Iran, on the first day of the US-Israeli attack on the country.

It is the company run by a man who says that “the west has a superior way of living and organising itself” and in a letter to Palantir shareholders said that “the rise of the west was not made possible by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.” This is a deeply violent man dedicated to employing techno-militarism to advance American barbarity and hegemony.

It is the company founded by Epstein associate Peter Thiel, an arch Zionist and significant funder of Israeli tech and whose rise was aided by neo-Nazi groups. It is the company Thiel founded alongside Joe Lonsdale who said recently that Palantir was set up to kill communists.

So no, these aren’t good people helping Ukraine for altruistic reasons.

Palantir has latched on to Ukraine because it is the perfect test-bed for the new technologies of mass death, subjugation and control.

Ukrainian officials regularly sell their country in this grotesque way. The ousted defence minister Mykhailo Fedorov said in 2024 that Ukraine “is the best test ground for all the newest tech because here you can test them in real-life conditions.”

This theme was echoed recently by Palantir’s UK head Louis Mosley who said Ukraine “has been the R&D lab for AI in a military context and is at the absolute bleeding edge of military technology.” Mosley says the war in Ukraine is responsible for an “extraordinary acceleration in military technology” because there is “no substitute for a real battlefield.”

Palantir needed (and continues to need) the war in Ukraine. And its stock price demonstrates this. Hovering between eight and ten dollars before the war began, Palantir’s stock price has surged over 2000% since then, hitting a high last year of $200.

By demonstrating proof of concept in the real world, Palantir executives have positioned their products as indispensable to modern European militaries in the fight against the Russian bogeyman and made lots of bloodsoaked money. In 2025, NATO bought Palantir’s maven system (despite objections from some EU countries) and the system became fully operational in June this year.

But it’s not just Palantir. All the big tech firms, from Microsoft to Amazon to Google, have swarmed around Ukraine since 2022, hoping to take a profitable bite from the war-torn carcass of the state.

Most recently, Google founder Eric Schmidt started a drone company providing large amounts of disposable drones to Ukraine for the “deep strikes” on Russia. Schmidt, according to reporting in Ukrainian media, “needed a real battlefield to test his new systems.” These drones won’t help Ukraine defeat Russia, they will only prolong the war while enabling Schmidt, safe in his California mansion, to demonstrate proof of concept and grab contracts from other militaries. In the meantime, working class Ukrainians will continue to be packed off to slaughter.

Karp, Thiel and Schmidt are mercenaries and in Zelensky’s Ukraine they have found the perfect marionettes who’ve let them unleash their experimental technologies on an entire country while harvesting data that only exists at the scale and quality of a state.

To put it another way, Ukrainians have become lab rats for the megalomaniacal ambitions of billionaire tech warlords, all of whom have a deep-seated interest in ensuring that the war between Ukraine and Russia never ends. These people never want the killing and the death to end. The war-tech complex profits from a real-world laboratory, and it profits from dead people, whether Ukrainians, Russians or Palestinians, not alive people. And in Ukraine, there are so many dead people.

There are no reliable figures for the number of dead, with both sides having an incentive to downplay their losses, and NATO-aligned thinktanks almost certainly overestimating Russian casualties and underestimating Ukrainian losses. The best we can say is that the estimates for combined casualties of well over a million people are certainly correct, with hundreds of thousands of dead on both sides.

And a cruel, prolonged war of attrition significantly favours Russia over Ukraine.

Ukraine was facing a demographic crisis even before the war. It is now facing a demographic collapse. In 1991, Ukraine had a population of around 52 million people. By 2021, that had shrunk by more than 10 million to 41 million people. The IMF now estimates there are a little over 33 million people living in Ukrainian-controlled territory, one of the fastest population collapses in history. And the shrinkage is only going to continue. In 2025, there were approximately three times the number of deaths than births, while three million working age Ukrainians have fled the country, and the fertility rate is barely one child per female, far below the replacement rate.

Much of the mainstream coverage of Ukraine, of a young tech-savvy population whose inherent youth is winning against the stodgy old Russians, simply bears no resemblance to reality. This is a country in an accelerated process of collapse, and the longer the war goes on, the steeper and more brutal that collapse will be.

And it will go on.

It will go on because so few are invested in ending it on realistic terms, and so many are invested in its continuation, from Zelensky and his apparatchiks skimming kick-backs from military contracts, to the war-tech industry now surrounding the country. This was obvious most recently when Fedorov, the ousted defence minister who sold his country as a test-bed for new weapons, announced that Karp would be the lead investor in his new AI war-tech venture.

War provides the conditions for the development, deployment and fine-tuning of AI weapons of death. Without war, Palantir and the AI arms dealers have no business model.

In Ukraine we have seen the transformation of the state into a blank canvas for technofascist warlords and their AI experimentation. And this experiment, because it is so profitable, looks likely to run until it collapses under its own weight, at which point Karp, Thiel, Schmidt and the AI merchants of death will simply move on to their next canvas.

And that canvas could, unless these psychopaths are defeated, be your country or your neighbourhood next.