- August 25, 2026
- 10:44 pm
- Israel
From the editors of NAnews: The ties between Israel and Ukraine are not built only through diplomacy, aid, or security cooperation. Since 2022, thousands of people have carried professional experience, business connections, and technological knowledge between the two countries. In this guest column for NAnews, Mark Ginsberg looks at how Ukrainian immigrants have become part of Israel’s tech ecosystem — and whether that human bridge could outlast the wars that created it.
By Mark Ginsberg
Mark Ginsberg is an Israel-based digital marketer and commentator on technology and artificial intelligence, with over two decades of firsthand perspective on the country’s innovation economy. Originally from South Florida and now based in Efrat, he analyzes the growth of Israel’s tech ecosystem and the broader implications of AI on business, policy, and society.
Two Wars, One Arrival Hall
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Israel absorbed tens of thousands of Ukrainian immigrants alongside a larger wave from Russia. Immigration hit a 23-year high that year, with more than 70,000 new arrivals, many of them engineers, developers, and founders who packed careers into suitcases. The community of Israelis with Ukrainian roots, which NAnews has covered for years, suddenly included thousands of technologists who could build companies in two languages and handle two business cultures without a translator. They arrived into an Israeli tech sector that was itself entering a period of contraction and then war.
That collision produced something neither country planned for, a working bridge between two economies under fire.
The bridge is real, and it runs in both directions.
Engineers Who Understand Both Battlefields
Israel’s technology sector has spent the past decade selling the world defenses it built for its own threats, and the past two years showed how that experience travels.
Ukrainian engineers who joined Israeli firms brought fluency in the realities of drone and electronic warfare, the daily testbed of the Ukrainian front. Israeli companies, blocked by regulation from selling defense products directly to Kyiv, have still built channels into Ukraine’s defense-tech scene, and the Jerusalem Post reported that Jerusalem is now shifting from humanitarian aid toward forward-looking defense tech cooperation between the two countries. Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha confirmed in July 2025 that Kyiv and Jerusalem intend to launch joint projects in security and technology. The people best positioned to staff those projects are the immigrants who hold both contexts in their heads.
A defense technology sector that has become a shield for others grows stronger when it absorbs engineers who spent years thinking about the threats on the other side of the continent. None of this was the plan when these families boarded flights in Warsaw and Bucharest. It is the result.
What the Bridge Carries Now
The traffic is wider than defense. Ukrainian-Israeli teams work in cybersecurity, agricultural technology, and medical systems, fields where Israeli firms had already built a global reputation and where Ukrainian STEM graduates are historically strong. Innovation flowing out of Israel has become one of the country’s main strategic exports, and the diaspora engineers now inside that pipeline give Ukrainian product thinking a seat at the table. American firms have noticed.
US defense planners talk openly about wanting integration with allied innovation, and the list of allies producing battlefield-tested technology now includes both Israel and Ukraine.
Both wars are winding down at different speeds, and the bridge now faces its real test. Some immigrants will return to rebuild Ukrainian industry, and Israel should wish them well, since the strongest version of this relationship is two healthy tech sectors with dense personal ties between them. Others will stay, build companies in Herzliya and Haifa, and keep the corridor open from the inside.
The scenario to watch is the middle one, the founder who commutes between Kyiv and Tel Aviv with investors in both. Ten years from now, the most important tech relationship in the region may not be traced back to any treaty. It will be traced back to the 2022 arrival hall, and the thousands of engineers who walked out of it into both futures at once.
From the editors of NAnews: Ginsberg’s argument points to a relationship that is still taking shape. The technological connection between Israel and Ukraine is not yet a single organized system, and its long-term scale remains uncertain. But the people who moved between the two countries after 2022 have already created professional networks that did not exist in the same form before the war.
For NAnews, that is the part worth watching next: whether these personal and professional ties turn into lasting companies, joint projects, investment channels, and research partnerships. If they do, one of the most durable consequences of the 2022 migration wave may be something neither government originally designed — a working technological bridge between Israel and Ukraine.