Let’s suppose it’s three weeks after Russia’s war on Ukraine has ended, and a Telegram post has just gone viral.
On one side of the image: a middle-aged Ukrainian sergeant, trouser leg neatly pinned above a metal prosthetic. He’s standing in line outside a regional employment office.
On the other side, the well-known founder of a drone company is celebrating a $200m investment windfall. He’s holding a champagne flute, aboard his 120-foot yacht, with Mediterranean sunlight glinting off the waves.
The caption is short and acidic: “Some paid a price. Others cashed in.”
Within hours, the post is copied, translated, and amplified across Ukraine. Bot networks accelerate it. Proxy influencers add commentary. Fringe political groups magnify it further. The message spreads everywhere: the soldiers sacrificed, the elites profited.
This hypothetical Russian information operation, if it were real, would be carefully designed to foster resentment—or better yet, rage. The goal would be to fray the social bonds that hold Ukraine together.
The unsettling part is that the scenario is plausible. It is also avoidable.
Before turning to how it can be avoided, consider why it could be so powerful.
Across Ukraine, defense firms — particularly drone manufacturers — have grown at astonishing speed. According to Gen. David Petraeus, former CIA Director and now a partner at KKR, Ukraine’s drone industry is projected to produce seven million drones this year. One company reportedly has revenue of over $1bn. Several founders are on track to become billionaires.
This is not to begrudge them their success. It should be celebrated. Ukraine’s battlefield progress has been possible in large part because entrepreneurs were able to innovate quickly, decisively, and under extreme pressure.
Yet the same dynamism that fueled wartime survival creates risks in peacetime.
Hundreds of thousands of soldiers will demobilize. The government will struggle to reintegrate them into industries whose factories were bombed and supply chains disrupted. Careers will have been interrupted. Savings depleted. Homes destroyed.
If, at that same moment, newly minted drone billionaires are purchasing London townhouses or securing berths for superyachts in Monaco, even as their lifestyle is splashed across social media and high-end magazines, then Ukraine’s enemies will have an opportunity to do it harm. Those hostile elements will, as a Ukrainian cyberwarfare police specialist told me, “get everyone all riled up.”
If the imbalance between frontline sacrifice and concentrated wealth becomes too visible — and if adversaries amplify it, as they surely will — Ukraine’s social fabric could begin to fray just when it most needs strengthening.
The good news is that there is a practical way to reduce that risk.
Gen. Petraeus has pointed to employee ownership as one promising approach. He has highlighted the work of Ownership Works, a US-based organization partnering with more than 150 companies and roughly 250,000 employees. It suggests offering workers shares in their employers, giving them a real economic stake in the companies they help build.
This is not about voting shares that could interfere with corporate governance; it is about ownership through non-voting shares that provide a stake in financial success.
The principle is simple: strive to create many millionaires rather than a handful of billionaires. Shared ownership aligns rewards with contributions. In postwar Ukraine, that alignment would do more than build wealth. It would reinforce cohesion at the very moment adversaries are searching for ways to weaken it.
It would also mark a decisive break from one of the most corrosive economic legacies imposed during the Soviet era: a system in which a narrow elite extracted maximum value while workers received the minimum. Ukraine now has a rare opportunity not just to rebuild, but to redesign — toward broader prosperity rather than concentrated wealth.
In many respects — perhaps most — it is Ukraine that has been instructing the United States: in agility under fire, in rapid civilian-military collaboration, in distributed innovation, and in resilience under sustained attack. Yet on the question of broad-based ownership, the direction of learning could run the other way. Here, the American experience could offer a model worth examining.
Some Ukrainian entrepreneurs are already thinking along these lines.
Yehor Dudinov, founder and CEO of the military tech company Falcons, notes: “I know many co-founders who are thinking carefully about how to structure stock option pools. Equity becomes the way to attract and retain talent. In military tech, salaries are already competitive by local standards, so the next level of motivation comes from giving people a real stake in the company.”
He adds, “For many, it’s not just about salary, but about being part of something meaningful, valuable, and potentially transformative.”
Deborah Fairlamb, a venture capital investor who lives and invests in Ukraine, observes that companies offering employees an ownership stake “are more likely to retain top talent, strengthen recruitment, and become more attractive to Western investors.”
In a recent talk in Kyiv, Gen. Petraeus captured both the moral and strategic stakes. After honoring “the soldiers who held the line so that others could go to school, go to work, care for families, and keep this nation functioning,” he added: “Those who stood in the trenches should share in the rewards their sacrifice made possible.”
That idea is not new. It echoes a warning voiced a century ago by Smedley Butler, one of the most decorated US Marines in history. Reflecting on his experience, Butler concluded that “war is a racket” — a system in which profits tend to flow upward while the greatest burdens fall on those with the least power.
His observation resonates uncomfortably with the risks Ukraine now faces. In a country where wartime innovation is generating immense wealth, there is a danger that those gains could become concentrated in a few hands. A soldier who lost a limb — or endured winters in a trench — might look at the imagined Telegram image from the opening of this story and conclude that he, not the entrepreneur, paid the true price of the war’s “racket.”
Shared ownership offers a way to change that calculation. It should extend not only to employees of successful firms, but also to those who bore the greatest cost—veterans, and families of the fallen.
Even a modest equity set-aside — $2m carved from a $200m enterprise — would be close to immaterial to founders and investors. But if structured to include veterans and frontline workers, it could anchor thousands in the middle class, reduce postwar volatility, and strengthen the social fabric at precisely the moment it is most fragile.
The strategic dividend would far outweigh the financial cost.
The question is not whether Ukraine can afford to broaden ownership.
It is whether it can afford not to.
Mitzi Perdue is a Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) and Co-Founder of Mental Help Global
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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