THE ITALIAN GOVERNMENT’S NEW ADVISER — AND THE ROAD TO PALANTIR
Sometimes power does not hide. It fragments. One piece appears in a press release, another in a payment table, another in a classified contract, another in a video recorded inside a technology company’s offices, and the last in a corporate register that has not yet been filed.
Fedorov, Washington and the private architecture of the next war
n 28 August Mykhailo Fedorov became an unpaid adviser to Italian Defence Minister Guido Crosetto. Three days later he was at Palantir’s Washington offices; the following day Alex Karp was announced as the first major investor in Fedorov’s new defence venture. There is no evidence of wrongdoing. There is, however, a documented overlap between public advisory power, private defence capital and the digital architecture of war — and it deserves answers.
THERE IS ONE DETAIL THAT DOES NOT QUITE FIT
There is one detail in this story that, taken on its own, looks almost trivial: a reassuring bureaucratic word, the kind of word that normally closes a controversy before it has even begun — “unpaid”. On 28 August 2026 Italy’s Defence Minister, Guido Crosetto, received Mykhailo Fedorov in Rome, at Palazzo Baracchini, the headquarters of the Ministry of Defence; Fedorov had previously served as Ukraine’s minister for digital transformation and, for six months in 2026, as defence minister in Kyiv. At the end of the meeting, the Italian ministry announced that Fedorov had agreed to become an “Adviser for Defence Innovation”, with a remit touching drones, unmanned systems, air defence, the evolution of the defence technology ecosystem and, above all, the ability to turn experimentation into operational capability at speed and at scale. Fedorov’s spokesperson later told the Financial Times that the role would be external and unpaid, while the former minister would continue to live and work in Kyiv.
On the surface, the arrangement is almost impossible to criticise: Italy acquires, at no direct cost to the taxpayer, the experience of one of the officials most closely associated with Ukraine’s transformation into a real-world laboratory of digital warfare, a country where the distance between prototype, battlefield failure, correction and the next iteration can be measured in weeks, sometimes days. That is precisely where the investigation has to change its question, because the issue is not whether Fedorov is competent — he plainly is, and even observers hostile to Kyiv have acknowledged the importance of his role in accelerating drones, robotics, digital procurement and data-driven systems — but what it means to place a figure of that kind beside Italy’s defence minister at the exact moment when he is leaving Ukrainian public office and building a private ecosystem in the same military technology sector.
The real issue, in other words, is not the fee. It is access — not in the sensational sense of opening classified archives, because there is currently no public evidence that Fedorov has access to Italian classified information, but in the more ordinary and potentially more consequential sense of proximity to the place where priorities are defined, operational problems are translated into technical requirements, interoperability standards are chosen, industrial directions are discussed and organisational models are redesigned. In defence markets, where a product often begins with a requirement and the requirement can precede a tender by months or years, advice can have enormous value even when the adviser signs no contract, sits on no procurement committee and receives no salary. That is why the word “unpaid” does not close the file; it opens another one, requiring us to ask where the boundaries of the role lie, which areas are excluded, which private interests must be declared and what firewalls separate the public advisory function from the commercial interests that, within a matter of days, become visible.
FOUR DAYS, THREE CITIES, A TRAJECTORY ALREADY IN MOTION
The chronology has to be handled carefully, because the dates themselves prevent the easiest narrative shortcut. On 21 August Reuters reported that Fedorov was already preparing a trip to the United States to raise capital for new defence and Ukrainian start-up projects; Rome therefore did not create the relationship between the former minister and American capital, and Crosetto’s appointment did not cause the meeting with Alex Karp. That path was already being prepared, and Fedorov’s relationship with Palantir went back years. Yet that is exactly what makes what happens after 28 August more interesting: Italy does not start this trajectory; it steps into it while it is already moving.
On 28 August Fedorov is in Rome and accepts the advisory role on Italian defence innovation. Three days later, on 31 August, he is in Washington at the offices of Palantir Technologies with Alex Karp. On 1 September Reuters makes the next step public: Karp is to become the first major investor in the new military technology company founded by the former minister. At roughly the same time a second vehicle emerges, distinct from the company and potentially more significant over the longer term: a defence-tech fund which Fedorov describes as something more than a conventional venture capital vehicle, because it would not merely finance existing start-ups but could build companies from scratch around technologies judged to be most urgent on the battlefield. The first three priority areas he identifies are ground robotics designed to remove soldiers from the most exposed zones, jet-powered interceptor drones capable of countering faster generations of Russian Shahed-type attack drones, and low-cost missiles guided by artificial intelligence.
That distinction matters. The company and the fund are not the same thing; the available sources do not allow us to attribute the fund’s entire technology programme to the start-up backed by Karp, nor do they allow us to say that Palantir Technologies, as a corporate entity, has acquired a stake in Fedorov’s business. What we can say is sufficiently precise to justify scrutiny: within four days the same individual accepts an external advisory role beside the minister responsible for Italy’s defence policy and publicly launches a private venture in the same industrial field, whose first major investor is the chief executive of a company that has maintained contractual relationships with the Italian defence establishment for years. This is not evidence of a conflict of interest; it is the factual condition that makes it necessary to ask whether such a conflict was anticipated and how it is being governed.
BEFORE ROME, KYIV: THE WAR WITHIN THE WAR
To understand why Crosetto wanted Fedorov in the first place, we have to return to Kyiv and look at what happened in the months before Rome, when the most revealing conflict was not yet between Italy and Russia but inside the Ukrainian state itself. Fedorov, appointed defence minister in January 2026 after years running Ukraine’s digital transformation, attempted to transfer into the military machine the method he had already applied to the digital state: shorter decision cycles, open and competitive procurement, direct collaboration with start-ups, systematic use of data, battlefield testing and the ability to turn an operational problem into a technical specification without losing months in bureaucracy. Reuters, reconstructing his removal on 15 July, documented a deep rift with the military leadership under Oleksandr Syrskyi; Fedorov accused that system of obstructing initiatives, reforms and procurement changes, while his dismissal triggered unusually visible street protests and a public mobilisation that was far from marginal.
It would be too crude to describe the dispute as a clash between “total automation” and traditional warfare; the better-supported picture is more interesting than that. Fedorov represented a data-driven, technological and entrepreneurial model of war that collided with a more hierarchical and slower command culture. It is precisely this experience that arrives in Rome, and Crosetto himself makes that explicit when, answering Russian criticism of the appointment on 1 and 2 September, he argues that Italy’s armed forces need to understand how conflict, drones, unmanned systems and air defence are changing from someone who has managed that transformation under real battlefield conditions. The defence of the appointment therefore sharpens the investigative question rather than dissolving it: if Fedorov’s value lies precisely in knowing how to convert wartime experience into architectures, products and processes, which parts of that knowledge will enter the Italian system — and under what rules?
THE PRODUCT IS NOT JUST A DRONE: IT IS THE EXPERIENCE OF WAR
The war in Ukraine has produced an asset more valuable than any single prototype: a vast body of real combat data. Targets, trajectories, false positives, reaction times, system failures, enemy countermeasures, weather conditions, electronic signatures, sensor performance and interceptor behaviour — every day of war generates information that a conventional industrial environment might require years of simulation to reproduce. In May 2026, while still defence minister, Fedorov announced with Palantir the creation of the Brave1 Dataroom, a platform through which selected developers could use battlefield data to train artificial-intelligence models for tasks including the detection and interception of aerial targets. Reuters reported that more than one hundred companies were training over eighty models; Fedorov himself said the relationship with Palantir had already produced tools for detailed analysis of air attacks, AI systems capable of handling large volumes of intelligence and integrations supporting the planning of deep-strike operations against targets far behind the front line.
This is where the phrase “laboratory of modern war” stops being a metaphor. A laboratory is a place where data accumulate, hypotheses are tested, failures are removed and products are improved; Ukraine has tragically done all of that under real wartime conditions, and Fedorov helped construct the bridge between that experience and private industry. When Karp, in the video released during the US trip, speaks about a relationship built over years and about turning Ukrainian know-how into products for allied countries, the commercial logic becomes visible: what can be exported is not merely a drone or an algorithm, but an entire cycle of learning generated by war.
That is also why Fedorov’s newly announced fund deserves to be followed as an actor in its own right. If it is genuinely able to create companies from scratch, we are no longer looking at the birth of a single start-up but at the possible creation of a military incubator capable of taking a problem identified at the front, converting it into a technical solution, capitalising it and offering it to allied markets. It is a powerful model, consistent with Palantir’s broader philosophy and with the transformation of Western defence, where the boundaries between software company, venture capital, intelligence ecosystem and arms industry are becoming progressively harder to draw.
FEDOROV AND PALANTIR: THIS RELATIONSHIP DID NOT BEGIN IN 2026
The Washington meeting was not a sudden encounter. The first significant public record dates to 2 June 2022, when the Ukrainian presidency documented a meeting between Volodymyr Zelensky, Fedorov — then deputy prime minister and minister for digital transformation — and Alex Karp. Defence, security and digitalisation were discussed, and Zelensky emphasised Palantir’s readiness to invest in Ukraine and support the country on the “digital front”. In May 2023 the Ministry of Digital Transformation and Palantir signed a memorandum on cooperation in defence and reconstruction; by May 2026, with Fedorov now defence minister, another meeting with Karp openly concerned artificial intelligence, data analysis, the scaling of technological solutions and military strategy.
The relationship therefore changes character over time: first institutional cooperation, then integration into the machinery of war, and finally private investment. That evolution does not retroactively make the earlier agreements improper, but it creates a transition zone that journalism has every reason to examine, because a public-private relationship developed while one party held ministerial office flows almost seamlessly into an investor-entrepreneur relationship at the same moment that Fedorov takes on an advisory role for another government. This is not the old revolving door in its simplest form, in which a former official leaves the state and is hired by a contractor; it is a more sophisticated corridor, where public experience, institutional networks, private capital and market access begin moving at the same time.
PALANTIR AND ITALIAN DEFENCE: THE RELATIONSHIP ALREADY EXISTS
At this point the third piece of the puzzle is Italian, and it predates the 28 August appointment by more than a decade. In March 2026 the Italian newspaper Domani reconstructed, through procurement documents and public payments, a continuing relationship between Palantir and Italian public institutions: a trial with Sogei, the state-owned IT company, in 2013; a contract handled by TELEDIFE — the Ministry of Defence directorate responsible for advanced information and telecommunications technologies — for the acquisition and expansion of systems to be completed in 2015; further programmes in subsequent years; payments in 2021; and, finally, a negotiated and classified procedure in 2024 for a Palantir Gotham licence worth €1 million. When contacted by the newspaper, the Ministry of Defence confirmed the classified nature of the procedure and stated that it had been reviewed by Italy’s Court of Auditors, without disclosing its duration or technical details.
At least part of that reconstruction can be anchored in primary documentation. TELEDIFE transparency records directly show payments to Palantir Italia S.r.l. in 2021 for “new functionalities” of the Palantir programme. The amounts are not enormous in the context of a defence budget; what matters is continuity, because it shows that Palantir does not appear in 2026 as a hypothetical future supplier but as a company already present, at different levels, inside the ministry’s technology ecosystem. The 2024 Gotham procedure adds another layer, because Gotham is not a simple administrative application: it is a platform designed to integrate heterogeneous sources, connect data about people, places and events, and support investigative or operational decision-making.
This is where precision becomes essential. We do not know which configuration Italy purchased, which datasets are involved, who can access them or the current status of the contract; there is no public evidence that AISI or AISE — Italy’s domestic and foreign intelligence agencies — or the Navy or Air Force handed classified databases to Palantir. What does exist is documentary evidence of a relationship between Palantir and the defence administration, and a classified Gotham-related procedure whose existence the ministry itself confirmed to the press. The investigation begins precisely in the distance between what the public record establishes and what remains hidden from view.
THE COUNTER-EVIDENCE: IF ROME WANTED TO KEEP PALANTIR AT ARM’S LENGTH, WHAT CHANGES NOW?
In June 2026 another piece of evidence emerged that any serious dossier has to place near the centre rather than bury in a footnote. HuffPost Italia, citing government and military sources, described an Italian executive cautious about deepening ties with Palantir: no new strategic contract, no indiscriminate expansion of the existing relationship, and a current defence arrangement described as limited to a connector for open-source data, without access to sensitive military information. The same account reported that a Palantir proposal for an anti-terrorism system for the police had not moved forward, in part because Interior Ministry sources said a competitive tender would be required.
This version does not erase the earlier contracts; it narrows and contextualises them, and above all it shows that technological dependency is not a fantasy invented by ideological opponents of Palantir but a problem already considered inside the Italian state. If the government had genuinely decided not to deepen the strategic relationship, Fedorov’s arrival raises a straightforward question: does that line remain unchanged? Will the adviser work exclusively on Italian and European architectures, or could he also shape interoperability models and solutions close to a technological ecosystem with which he has worked for years and whose chief executive is now investing in his private venture?
The issue is not to demand publication of classified material. It is to establish whether there are transparent rules on technological neutrality, recusal and the separation between strategic advice and private interests; because if such rules exist and are robust, the hypothesis of future influence becomes weaker. If they do not exist, the nature of the problem changes.
VENDOR LOCK-IN IS NOT A THEORY: THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT WROTE IT DOWN
Perhaps the most instructive document in the entire story comes from the United Kingdom. In December 2025 the British Ministry of Defence decided to award Palantir Technologies UK a £240.6 million Enterprise Agreement intended to support data-analysis capabilities for strategic, tactical and operational decision-making, interoperable with NATO and allied systems. The procurement was not competitive, and the justification appears in the government’s own transparency notice: the ministry’s data-analytics architecture already relied on Palantir technology that only Palantir could fully license and support; changing supplier would require rebuilding the underlying architecture, reaccrediting the replacement to the necessary security standards, retraining personnel and absorbing disproportionate technical and operational costs.
That is vendor lock-in in practical terms: not a company “stealing” data and making exit physically impossible, but a system in which the cost of leaving rises as software, procedures, training, security accreditation and interoperability are built around a single architecture. Economically it can be rational and perfectly lawful, but strategically it becomes delicate when sovereign functions are involved, because a technical decision made today can narrow political freedom tomorrow. The British precedent matters precisely because it is not an activist’s hypothetical warning; it is the public customer itself explaining that, once a certain level of integration had been reached, replacing Palantir would carry disproportionate difficulty and cost.
France has taken a different route. The DGSI, France’s domestic intelligence service, has used Palantir since 2015, but the Interior Ministry told the Senate that its use had been regarded as transitional from the beginning and that a sovereign replacement platform had been under development since 2021. Germany, too, has publicly debated limits and risks surrounding industrial personnel and access to national military systems. Europe therefore has no single policy towards Palantir, but it does have a common question that any serious state should be able to answer: if we chose tomorrow to do without this technology, could we do so without paralysing parts of the system?
CUI PRODEST: WHEN EVERYONE HAS AN INCENTIVE TO MOVE IN THE SAME DIRECTION
Applying the old investigative question cui prodest — who benefits? — does not identify a culprit; it maps incentives that can converge without any secret agreement. Italy gains something real: access to the experience of an official who oversaw one of the fastest transformations of contemporary European warfare and who may help reduce the distance between research, bureaucracy and operational capability. Fedorov also gains something real: while building a defence company and a fund, he can present himself not only as a former Ukrainian minister but as an adviser to a major NATO country, a role that strengthens credibility, relationships and knowledge of European industrial needs without implying any improper access.
Alex Karp gains the opportunity to invest in the body of knowledge Fedorov developed during the war and, potentially, in the conversion of that know-how into exportable products. Palantir as a company cannot automatically be counted among the beneficiaries of Karp’s personal investment; yet it operates in the same ecosystem, works with governments and armed forces, has collaborated with Fedorov in Ukraine and has contractual relationships with Italian defence. The clearest systemic benefit for the wider Western defence sector is that Ukraine is turning wartime data and solutions into a new industry capable of entering allied markets at a speed that traditional European procurement processes often struggle to match.
This is where the issue becomes more subtle. Dependency does not necessarily begin in a secret room or with an unlawful decision; it can emerge from a sequence of perfectly reasonable choices — the most competent adviser, the already interoperable software, the most readily available capital, the most urgent military requirement. When every incentive pushes in the same direction, the real function of democratic oversight is to make sure that genuine alternatives remain open.
KARP IS NOT PALANTIR. BUT HE IS NOT AN ORDINARY INVESTOR EITHER
There is another point where one careless sentence could make the whole dossier vulnerable. Alex Karp is investing in Fedorov’s new company; at present there is no public evidence that the investor is Palantir Technologies itself. Karp and Palantir are not the same legal person, and a chief executive investing privately does not automatically mean that his company acquires rights, information or advantages. Until corporate filings, a cap table — the map of shareholders — and governance rights become available, the two levels must remain separate.
That corporate distinction does not, however, erase the significance of Karp’s profile. He leads a company that works with military and intelligence institutions, that built analytical and artificial-intelligence tools in Ukraine alongside the administration led by Fedorov, and that already has relationships with the Italian Ministry of Defence. Palantir also belongs historically to the US national-security technology ecosystem: among its early backers was In-Q-Tel, the venture-capital organisation created to identify technologies useful to the American intelligence community. Saying this does not mean that “Palantir is the CIA”, a slogan that is both simplistic and inaccurate; it means explaining the institutional market from which the company emerged and why, when its technology becomes embedded in sovereign infrastructure, public oversight cannot treat the matter as if it were an ordinary enterprise-software purchase.
THE QUESTIONS ITALY’S DEFENCE MINISTRY COULD ANSWER WITH DOCUMENTS
At this point the investigation does not need insinuation; it needs paper. Is there an appointment letter, mandate or equivalent document defining the duration, functions, limits, confidentiality obligations and access rights of the Adviser for Defence Innovation? Has Fedorov formally informed the ministry of the creation of his military technology company and of Alex Karp’s investment? Is there a recusal mechanism if the advisory work touches technologies, suppliers or programmes linked directly or indirectly to Palantir, Karp or companies created by the new fund? Can the adviser contribute to technical requirements or priorities that may later feed into tenders or multi-year defence programmes?
Then there is Gotham. Without asking the state to publish information that must remain secret, it should be possible to clarify at least the institutional perimeter of the 2024 arrangement: duration, present status, broad categories of data that can be processed, whether supplier personnel are present in operational environments, migration conditions and exit clauses. After the British precedent, this is no longer a niche technical curiosity but a question of sovereignty: if Italy decided tomorrow to change platform, how much would it cost, how long would it take and which capabilities would be temporarily degraded?
Finally there is Fedorov’s new entrepreneurial ecosystem, which over the coming months will inevitably generate corporate registrations, investors, board members, patents, partnerships and target markets. This is the dynamic part of the investigation: following the money not because every investment should be treated as corruption, but because it reveals which industrial interests are forming around a person who, while building them, also holds an advisory role beside Italy’s defence minister. Is that a potential conflict? The documents will tell us. But precisely because the answer has not yet been written, journalism has to ask the question before it becomes retrospective.
THE RED THREAD: WAR IS NO LONGER BOUGHT ONLY BY THE TONNE
Perhaps the most important detail in this story is not Palantir at all. It is the way war itself is changing. For decades we imagined the defence industry as steel, shipyards, missiles, radar, tanks and aircraft; that world still exists, but above it another infrastructure is being built from data, artificial-intelligence models, sensors, cloud systems, algorithms, command software and platforms capable of turning millions of pieces of information into an operational decision within seconds. Whoever builds that infrastructure does not merely sell a product; they help define what a state can see, connect and decide.
The Fedorov case arrives at exactly this historical transition: a former minister who built Ukraine’s digital-state model becomes a defence entrepreneur, receives capital from the chief executive of one of the West’s most important military technology platforms and, at the same time, advises a NATO country that has known and contracted with that platform for years. There is no need to imagine a hidden control room for the picture to be powerful; in fact, the more interesting feature is that almost everything happens in plain sight, scattered across ministerial press releases, payment registers, memoranda, classified procurement notices, investor announcements and parliamentary records.
The red thread, therefore, is not “Palantir controls the Italian military”, a claim that the available evidence does not support and that would turn an investigation into propaganda. The red thread is subtler: military sovereignty is becoming a problem of digital architecture, interoperability and private capital, inside an ecosystem where the roles of adviser, entrepreneur, investor and supplier can overlap far faster than old public-sector procedures were designed to manage.
28 August, Rome. 31 August, Washington. 1 September, the investor announcement. Behind those dates lies a Fedorov–Palantir relationship documented since at least 2022, a Palantir–Italian defence relationship extending over more than a decade and, now, a new fund promising to convert wartime experience into companies and products for allied markets. This is not evidence of state capture, favouritism or improper influence. It is something more useful to investigative journalism: a verifiable sequence from which precise questions can be asked, and a map of the documents that could confirm or destroy the hypothesis.
Sometimes power does not hide. It fragments. One piece appears in a press release, another in a payment table, another in a classified contract, another in a video recorded inside a technology company’s offices, and the last in a corporate register that has not yet been filed. The task of an investigation is not to fill those gaps with whatever we would like to find, but to put the pieces on the same table and ask institutions to explain the pattern that emerges. The question therefore remains open: is Italy importing only the experience of war, or is it also choosing — perhaps without yet saying so publicly — the technological architecture within which it will fight the wars of tomorrow?
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METHODOLOGICAL NOTE
This dossier was built by cross-checking Italian and Ukrainian primary sources, parliamentary and procurement documentation, mainstream international reporting, independent European, Asian and Middle Eastern sources, Russian sources, and openly propagandistic or conspiratorial channels used only as generators of leads. Documented facts were kept separate from inference and investigative hypotheses; claims originating in partisan or fringe ecosystems were retained only when independently corroborated, while unverified assertions were excluded. On the evidence available at the time of publication, there is no proof of unlawful conduct by Mykhailo Fedorov, Alex Karp, Palantir Technologies or the Italian Ministry of Defence. What the record does show is a documented overlap between public functions, technological relationships and private interests significant enough to justify further questions, freedom-of-information requests, parliamentary scrutiny and independent investigation.
KEY SOURCES AND DOCUMENTS
Italian Ministry of Defence — statement announcing Mykhailo Fedorov as Adviser for Defence Innovation, 28 August 2026; TELEDIFE transparency records and Palantir programme payments.
Italian Senate and Chamber of Deputies — parliamentary questions and scrutiny concerning public-sector relationships with Palantir Technologies, March 2026.
Domani — Michelangelo Mecchia and Chiara Sgreccia, investigation into Palantir and Italy’s defence establishment, 15 March 2026; interview with Francesca Bria, 17 March 2026.
HuffPost Italia — Federica Olivo, reporting on the Italian government’s cautious approach to Palantir, 17 June 2026.
Office of the President of Ukraine and Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine — Fedorov/Karp meeting, 2 June 2022; cooperation memorandum, 25 May 2023.
Ukraine Ministry of Defence — Fedorov/Karp meeting and cooperation on AI and defence strategy, 12 May 2026.
Reuters — reporting on Fedorov–Palantir cooperation, Brave1 Dataroom, the Fedorov–Syrskyi dispute, the US fundraising trip and Alex Karp’s investment, May–September 2026.
Financial Times — reporting on Fedorov’s new defence-tech fund and its technology priorities, 31 August 2026.
Interfax-Ukraine and Defense News — details on the fund, the new company and Karp’s investment, August–September 2026.
Al Jazeera, Kyiv Independent and Euromaidan Press — reporting on Fedorov’s political and technological profile, protests and internal Ukrainian dispute, July–August 2026.
ANSA, Corriere della Sera and TASS — Russian reaction to Fedorov’s Italian appointment and Crosetto’s response, 1–2 September 2026.
UK Government — Find a Tender and UK Parliament, MOD Palantir Enterprise Agreement, 2025–2026.
French Senate / Ministry of the Interior — response on DGSI use of Palantir and development of a sovereign replacement, 14 May 2026.
Business Insider Deutschland / Handelsblatt — German debate over Palantir and Bundeswehr systems, May 2026.
CIA — institutional documentation on In-Q-Tel; Reuters — reporting on In-Q-Tel’s historical role in Palantir’s early ecosystem.
SouthFront and other propagandistic channels — consulted only for stress-testing and lead generation; uncorroborated claims were not used as facts.
