Charles Clover, William Langley and Chris Cook
Jan 26, 2026 – 2.29pm
On his numerous visits to the factories of southern China, Oleksandr Yakovenko finds that his hosts increasingly plan his arrivals and departures down to minutes and seconds. They sometimes ask him to wait nearby for a while, or usher him through side doors, down service corridors, or into empty conference rooms.
It took the founder of TAF Industries — now one of Ukraine’s biggest drone producers — a while to realise why his arrival at the head office of a camera developer or a battery maker required such opaque rituals of schedule juggling and extreme punctuality. It was because the Russians had just been there. Or they were on their way. Or both.
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Financial Times