Baltic startups deter Russia on NATO’s eastern flank
VILNIUS - When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Rapolas Markevicius was managing a private equity fund in Lithuania – a country on NATO’s
International
2026-08-032026-08-03By Correspondent
VILNIUS – When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Rapolas Markevicius was managing a private equity fund in Lithuania – a country on NATO’s eastern flank that fears it might be Moscow’s next target.
Four-and-a-half years later, his new startup PDKinematics builds precision guidance systems that help drones strike targets more accurately even when GPS signals are jammed, which are supplied to both Ukraine and its European allies.
He is one of several startup founders in the Baltics trying to invigorate the region’s defensive capabilities, as NATO’s eastern members face their own hybrid threats from Russia and its close ally Belarus.
“The beginning of the war was kind of a call for action for us,” Markevicius told AFP.
After Russia’s February 2022 invasion, he launched a research and development programme to “understand what kind of technologies we could actually deliver to the battlefront”, working with his co-founder from the space-tech sector.
