Mykhailo Fedorov has offered to help the United States build a fleet of attack drones if Washington releases the Patriot interceptor missiles Ukraine needs to get through winter. He made the offer in Washington, in an interview published Sunday, six weeks after President Volodymyr Zelensky fired him as defense minister. He holds no government position that would let him negotiate anything on Kyiv’s behalf.

Two days earlier, Fedorov accepted an unpaid advisory role with Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto.

When DroneXL covered his removal on July 16, the open question was what the architect of Ukraine’s drone war does once the ministry is gone. The answer, so far, is foreign defense policy without a portfolio, in two capitals, inside a single week.

Fedorov Put A Price On Ukraine’s Drone Expertise

The proposal is a straight swap. Fedorov would help the United States build attack drones at scale, and Washington would send Ukraine the Patriot interceptors it is short of. This is his own idea rather than a deal between governments, and nobody in Kyiv authorized it.

“I’m ready to make that trade,” he told the Financial Times in an interview published Sunday.

The interceptor shortage is the reason the offer has teeth. Russia is hitting Ukrainian factories and warehouses with dozens of ballistic missiles a month, and Ukraine mostly cannot stop them because its Patriot batteries are running low on rounds.

Fedorov is in Washington mainly to raise American capital for an investment fund that would back Ukrainian defense technology companies and start new ones around three gaps: battlefield robots to replace infantry in the worst positions, jet-powered interceptors fast enough to catch Russia’s newer attack drones, and cheap missiles guided by artificial intelligence. He has not said what his own role in the fund would be, or whether he would profit from it. He also declined to say whether he would meet anyone from the Trump administration.

Rome Signed Him First, And Pays Him Nothing

Crosetto called Fedorov the day after his dismissal and offered him the job. Fedorov accepted on August 28, and will serve without salary, outside the Italian ministry’s staff, and without leaving Kyiv. His press office says the role gives him no access to state secrets or technical documentation.

Announcing the appointment, Fedorov said “Ukraine’s experience can become the foundation for a new European defense model,” according to the Kyiv Post. The two men discussed drones, air defense, autonomous systems and defense technology investment.

His press office addressed the legal question directly: his former post imposes no restriction on advising another government, the role involves no disclosure of state secrets or technical documentation, and hiring former senior officials as advisers is ordinary international practice.

Rome supplied a title but not a job description. The Italian defense ministry called the appointment an important opportunity, named Fedorov its Innovation Advisor, and said Italy welcomed partners experienced in autonomous systems and air defense. So both governments have now described the subject matter. Neither has said what Fedorov is actually permitted to hand over. Gregory Alegi, a historian at Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome, framed that gap for The New York Times as whether Fedorov is “at liberty to share actual technology, or just broad philosophical insights.”

Italy Needs Up To 18 Months To Clear A Drone For Military Use

Authorizing a drone for Italian military use takes between nine and 18 months. That figure comes from Lieutenant General Pietro Serino, a former chief of staff of the Italian Army, who told The New York Times he hopes Fedorov can speed up how the ministry buys equipment.

Ukraine’s answer to the same problem is Brave1 Market, the state marketplace Fedorov built as digital minister and then institutionalized after taking over the defense ministry in January. It has processed more than $235 million in orders. In August, Ukraine’s defense ministry added a tool that lets a unit specify a drone across more than 17 characteristics, hides which unit is asking, and runs an automatic auction so the cheapest matching offer wins.

Nine to 18 months against a marketplace where a brigade defines its own airframe and manufacturers bid on it. Crosetto is not buying drones from Fedorov. He is buying the clock.

Whether Italy can act on any of it is a separate matter, and one Italian voters will settle. Elections are due next year, which caps how much of this Crosetto can push through his own bureaucracy. Europe’s record here is not encouraging: ten months after Ursula von der Leyen promised it, the EU drone wall still did not exist.

The Pentagon Already Decided Speed Was The Problem

Washington reached Serino’s conclusion more than a year ago. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s July 2025 directive reclassified small drones as consumable commodities, pushed purchasing authority down to combat units, and set a target of putting cheap attack drones in every squad by the end of fiscal 2026.

Execution followed. The Blue List of approved systems moved to the Defense Contract Management Agency, the services ran competitive fly-offs, and the department began taking delivery against roughly $1 billion of planned drone buying across two years. DroneXL covered how far down the supply chain that search went, reaching racing pilots, hobbyist builders and two Ukrainian firms.

What the Pentagon has been assembling is a vetted list of things units are allowed to buy. What Fedorov built is the other half: the mechanism by which a unit says what it actually wants, and the manufacturer gets paid fast enough to build it. That second half is the part he is now marketing in two countries at once.

DroneXL’s Take

Ukraine’s most valuable export right now is not a drone. It is the machinery for buying one quickly, and Fedorov is handing that machinery to Rome for nothing while asking Washington to pay for it in Patriots.

When DroneXL wrote about his firing in July, I named one thing to watch: whether the 70% advance payments to manufacturers and the Drone Line’s funding survived a handover to people who had no hand in building them. They survived. Brave1 has since cleared $235 million and added made-to-order procurement. The architecture outlived the architect, and that is a stronger sales pitch for the Ukrainian model than anything Fedorov could say about himself.

The case against him is real, so here it is. He promised to fix recruitment and mobilization and he did not. Zelensky’s office says his front-loaded spending left a $27 billion hole in the ministry’s budget, a number Fedorov disputes and puts nearer $5 billion. The presidential office also noted that he was upbeat about the war right up until his own status changed, which is a fair thing to raise about a man who told Reuters last week that Ukraine looks to be “gradually, slowly losing”. None of that touches the procurement record. A ministry is judged on whether the front line gets what it asked for, and on that measure his six months are what every Western defense ministry is currently shopping for.

I read the Patriot offer as aimed at two audiences. Washington is one. Kyiv is the other, and the message there is that the man Zelensky removed can still open doors his successor cannot. That is politics, and Fedorov became the first senior Ukrainian figure to demand wartime elections less than a fortnight ago, so nobody should pretend otherwise.

Italians vote next year, and that vote ends Crosetto’s mandate along with this experiment. The measurable test is simple: is that nine-to-18-month authorization clock shorter on election day than it is today. On the American side, watch for a term sheet rather than a headline. An offer reported in the FT costs Fedorov nothing. Money closing into his fund would cost someone a great deal, and that is the point at which any of this becomes real.

Sources: Financial Times, Kyiv Independent, Kyiv Post, Ukrainska Pravda, The Local (AFP), Euromaidan Press, Defense News, Breaking Defense, The New York Times

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.