Ukrainian defense firm calls for Palantir review over Nebius deal

Palantir Technologies ↗ 3.48% announced on September 8 a strategic partnership with Nebius Group ↗ 7.58%, naming the AI cloud company its preferred sovereign AI infrastructure partner — a deal that has drawn pointed criticism from a prominent Ukrainian defense executive who argues it puts sensitive battlefield data at risk.

Under the agreement, Nebius compute and inference infrastructure will be integrated directly into Palantir's enterprise platform, giving commercial customers dedicated GPU capacity to train and deploy their own models without routing proprietary data through public clouds. Nebius shares rose roughly 8 percent following the announcement.nebius+2

A Ukrainian Warning

Denys Shtilerman, chief designer and co-owner of Ukrainian defense firm Fire Point, responded to the partnership with a call for Ukraine to reassess its cooperation with Palantir. Shtilerman noted that Palantir is deeply embedded in Ukraine's defense infrastructure through the Brave1 Dataroom, a secure environment launched in January 2026 where AI models are trained on real-world combat data including drone footage, air defense operations, and target recognition.glavnoe+2

"Our battlefield data is not free raw material for Western technology corporations. It is a strategic state asset. Ukraine paid for it in blood," Shtilerman wrote on X.glavnoe

His concern centers on Nebius's origins. The company is the successor entity to Yandex N.V., the Dutch-registered parent of Russia's largest search engine, and is led by Yandex co-founder Arkady Volozh. Volozh was placed on the European Union sanctions list in 2022 over Yandex's role in amplifying Kremlin narratives and suppressing content critical of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. He was removed from the list in March 2024 after publicly condemning the war, renouncing his Russian citizenship, and overseeing the sale of Yandex's Russian assets.ad-hoc-news+2

Geopolitics Meets AI Infrastructure

The partnership lands at the intersection of two fast-moving dynamics: the global race to build sovereign AI capacity and the ongoing entanglement of Western technology companies in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Palantir co-founded by Peter Thiel opened a Kyiv office and has become a core technology provider to Ukraine's military, with its MetaConstellation software used to gather and visualize enemy positions via satellites, sensors, and drones.defensenews

In Moscow, the partnership has also provoked reaction. According to reporting by Ad-Hoc News, publicist Konstantin Malofeyev has called for treason proceedings against Volozh, while Russian war correspondents have described Palantir as "combat AI that has been fighting Russia for five years".ad-hoc-news

Shtilerman framed his objection as a matter of leverage, not opposition to Western partnerships outright, arguing that Ukraine should either receive proportionate benefit from its data or end the cooperation.glavnoe