A theoretical physicist by training, BENJAMIN WOLBA co-founded the European Defense Tech Hub (EDTH) in April 2024 to bring the continent's best engineers into the urgent work of defending it—starting with Ukraine.
EDTH runs hackathons across Europe—Munich, Copenhagen, Paris, London, Vilnius, and with military brigades in Ukraine. The Berlin-based network takes no EU grants and operates on event sponsorship alone.
It is a bet that Europe’s defense will be built by engineers, not declared by ministers.
Welcome to Voices of the Fight—a Saturday Q&A series featuring the warriors, innovators, advocates, and volunteers standing under fire for free people.
1 | Who are you, and what’s your mission?
I’m Benjamin Wolba and I’m the co-founder of the European Defense Tech Hub. We’re building a truly pan-European network for defense innovation. We have a strong alliance to make Europe and our allies stronger, to help Ukraine win the war, and in the end to give democracy the upper hand by developing defense tech that will deter future conflict through technological superiority.
“We’re rebels. We’re not an EU institution. We write defense with ‘s,’ [not ‘c’]”
We help those fighting for our lives at the Ukrainian frontline every day to save their lives and help us really win this war.
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2 | Tell us one powerful story from your experience in war, as you would tell someone over a drink.
Gosh, there’s so many stories and experiences since we started two years ago to build this network. But for me, it has just been incredible to see people move beyond our hackathons that we’re running from Europe to develop stuff in real life.
And to maybe give you one example as a story, we had one guy come to our very first European Defense Tech Hackathon in Munich in June ’24, winning second place with the idea to develop very low cost micro missiles to take out enemy drones.
He came to our Copenhagen hackathon half a year later. He then came to our London hackathon six months after that. He’s right now in Ukraine working with several army units to refine this prototype to a point that they can actually use it in combat. We’re so proud to see this development over the past two years.
“We help those fighting for our lives at the Ukrainian frontline every day to save their lives and help us really win this war.”
3 | What decision, habit, or principle has mattered the most for you for surviving or staying effective under pressure?
Absolutely to focus on things that are effective, that move value forward, and really going grassroots. Together, we’re really moving things bottom up and actually organizing events pretty much throughout Europe, country by country, because all of those top level government initiatives have largely failed.
There’s no European army, no joint procurement, no joint standards. Instead, what we did was really to go bottom-up country by country to organize events with hackathons, meetups, and drone-building workshops to get the best builders in Europe into Defense Tech to work on the most urgent security challenges. And in that, we have built an actual company being funded by event sponsorship and to basically ignore all of the EU grants. We have not received any government grants, but instead focus on providing actual value.
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4 | How can people support your work?
First off, we’re always looking for help in sharing what we do, be it co-promotion, be it telling others just by word of mouth, really just sharing about what we do.
Second, we really appreciate partners who help us with equipment, with testing facilities, with pretty much anything that helps our alumni move forward, move beyond the hackathon to build stuff in real life. And lastly, we’re entirely self-funded. We’re always looking for sponsors and partners who want to make events happen or with whom we can help build companies in real life.
5 | Where can people follow you?
You will find me online everywhere by my actual name and I’m very active on LinkedIn. Please follow us. Please follow the European Defense Tech Hub. We also have a Substack newsletter: Benjamin Wolba.
Our website is https://eurodefense.tech.
Importantly, that’s “defense” with ‘S,’ [not a ‘c’]. We’re rebels. We’re not an EU institution. We write defense with ‘S.’
You can also send me an email: Benjamin[at]eurodefense.tech.
UFN Daily Notebook
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Iran’s Exiled Crown Prince Attends Ukrainian Mil-Tech Forum in Odesa—Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, the most visible figure of the Iranian opposition and son of Iran’s last Shah, has arrived in Odesa Saturday to take part in the Black Sea Security Forum. His presence gives the gathering a wider meaning than another regional security conference: Ukraine is not only speaking to NATO partners and European officials, but also to opposition forces from regimes aligned with Moscow.
The forum brings together politicians, diplomats, military figures and experts, while Pahlavi’s appearance signals that Iran’s anti-regime movement remains politically active despite repression at home and the wider military crisis around Tehran.
The Kremlin Was About to Bomb All of Ukraine But Then Two of Russia’s Key Planes Went Up in Smoke Before They Could Take Off.—Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces say they destroyed two Russian Tu-142 long-range maritime patrol and anti-submarine aircraft at a military airfield in Taganrog, along with an Iskander tactical missile launcher positioned in marshland near the city. The strike was carried out overnight on May 30 by drones from the 1st Separate Unmanned Systems Center, according to commander Robert “Magyar” Brovdi.
The Tu-142 is not just another parked aircraft: it is a rare Soviet-era naval aviation platform derived from the Tu-95 bomber family, used for long-range patrol, submarine hunting and maritime surveillance.
Gotland Becomes NATO’s Baltic Lock—NATO is racing to turn Sweden’s Gotland into a Baltic stronghold, because the island has become one of the alliance’s most exposed and strategically valuable pieces of terrain. Sitting in the middle of the Baltic Sea, roughly 300 kilometers from Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave, Gotland is the kind of place that looks quiet on a tourist map and decisive on a military one.
Control of the island would shape air defense, sea lanes, reinforcement routes, and NATO’s ability to protect Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in a crisis. Sweden’s entry into NATO changed the map, but it also gave the alliance a new responsibility: fortify the space that now turns the Baltic from Russia’s playground into a NATO lake.
Putin Tries to Bomb His Way Out of Stalemate—Putin is trying to turn a stalled war into a renewed show of force, as Moscow’s rhetoric and actions are increasingly escalating. With Russia’s advance along the front slowing or being reversed, while Ukraine’s long-range strikes are reaching deeper into Russian energy sites and arms factories, the war is becoming harder for the Kremlin to keep distant from ordinary Russians. Drone attacks near Moscow, internet shutdowns, rising taxes, manpower strain and a cooling war economy are all eating into the old image of effortless control. So the Kremlin is reaching for what it knows best: missile pressure, nuclear theatrics, and warnings to Europe.
Kyiv Puts Billions Behind Mid-Strike Drones—Ukraine is putting another UAH 5 billion (roughly $110 mln) behind a new “Logistics Lockdown” program designed to scale mid-strike drones and intensify attacks on Russia’s rear. The money will go first to the most effective units under the ePoints system, meaning brigades that have already shown results in destroying enemy logistics, depots, equipment, command posts and supply routes at operational depth.
A second phase will launch state tenders for larger centralized purchases, with the first results expected to reach the front this summer. According to defense minister Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine has already quadrupled the destruction of Russian rear-area logistics in recent months, helping reduce the number of enemy assault actions.
The Pacific’s Most Dangerous Flashpoint—A new defense study warns that a war over Taiwan could move dangerously fast from a conventional fight into a nuclear crisis. The problem is not simply that the U.S. and China both have nuclear weapons, but that any serious conflict would likely involve strikes on command centers, communications networks, satellites, sensors, and intelligence systems, exactly the machinery each side would also rely on to understand whether its nuclear forces were under threat.
The report notes that the Asia-Pacific is becoming the center of a new arms race, with China rapidly expanding its nuclear arsenal and regional powers investing in longer-range strike capabilities. The most worrying part is the absence of Cold War-style guardrails: Washington and Beijing do not have the same dense web of nuclear risk-reduction talks that once existed between the U.S. and Soviet Union.
The Simulator Behind Better Air Defense–Ukraine’s SKIFTECH has revealed the technical details of its newly cleared Stinger MANPADS simulator, giving air-defense training a cheaper and more repeatable way to prepare operators without burning through precious live missiles.
The system uses a laser training kit mounted non-invasively onto a real Stinger, preserving the weapon’s weight, dimensions, and operating logic, while a sensor-equipped target drone flies within a 100-meter training range. Instructors can monitor live telemetry, record hit statistics, and adjust training based on performance data, while the entire package can be deployed in the field in about 10 minutes and run autonomously for up to 28 hours.
Beijing Builds for the Second Strike—China is building a vast support network around its nuclear missile silos in the remote desert near Hami, with satellite imagery showing more than 80 launch pads, hardened bunkers, communications nodes, roads, airfields and rail links spread across thousands of square kilometers.
The infrastructure appears designed to make Beijing’s land-based nuclear force harder to destroy in a first strike, giving China more ways to move launchers, protect silos, disperse air defenses and preserve command links under pressure. Analysts say the network may support mobile missile launchers, electronic warfare, satellite communications and command-and-control operations, while China is also expected to keep expanding its nuclear arsenal toward roughly 1,000 warheads by 2030.
Moscow’s Safe Space Keeps Shrinking—Russia has declared a missile-danger alert in Yamal for the first time since the start of its full-scale invasion, meaning that Ukraine is now threatening Russian areas more than 2,000–2,500 km from Ukraine’s borders, as Ukrainian offensive capabilities continue to increase. The alert was also triggered across the wider Urals Federal District, including Chelyabinsk, Sverdlovsk, Kurgan, Tyumen, Khanty-Mansi and Yamal, while airports in Yekaterinburg, Chelyabinsk and Perm were temporarily closed.
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“The Entire War Distilled Into One Quiet Exchange”
As Russian missiles and drones fall around her, the goddaughter of Charles III distributes the quiet essentials of survival.
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