Italy reaches toward Ukraine's war, and toward its own future

Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine's ousted defence minister, has accepted a position as adviser to Italy's defence minister. The New York Times reports that his appointment reflects how other militaries are racing to adapt to battlefield changes accelerated by the war in Ukraine. It is a small but telling move: Italy, a NATO member and G7 power, is now looking to Kyiv for instruction on how to wage modern war.

For decades, Italy's defence establishment looked westward and northward—to NATO's traditional architecture, to German and American doctrine. The assumption was that security flowed downward from the established powers. Ukraine has shattered that assumption. A smaller nation, under existential threat, has innovated faster than the large bureaucracies of the West. Drones, asymmetric tactics, rapid adaptation: these are now the grammar of conflict, and Ukraine wrote the dictionary.

Fedorov's appointment also carries a symbolic weight. He was sacked by Kyiv last month, prompting rare wartime protests. That Italy would hire him signals something to Europe: that the continent's future security cannot be outsourced to Washington or to the comfortable assumptions of the Cold War's victors. It must be built on the hard lessons of those now fighting.

Italy, a country often portrayed by the foreign press as politically unstable and economically sluggish, is making a pragmatic choice. It is saying that security matters more than prestige, and that learning from those in the fight is wiser than clinging to inherited hierarchies. In a continent increasingly anxious about its own defence, that is not a small thing.