Four years into the full-scale war, the world’s most capable militaries are coming to Ukraine to buy weapons. Ukraine and the Pentagon are moving to finalize a deal that would send Ukrainian-made drones to the United States for testing on American soil.
Meanwhile, last week in Kyiv, Germany’s defense minister signed an agreement to launch “Brave Germany,” a joint program to codevelop innovative armaments with Ukrainian firms.
It’s a remarkable reversal. Until recently, Kyiv was seen as the supplicant in Western capitals. Today, Ukraine is more sovereign, more capable and more independent than at any point since it declared statehood in 1991. It has made itself both unconquerable by Moscow and indispensable to Washington, Berlin and others.
Ukraine’s exploits on the battlefield are reshaping 21st-century warfare.
For centuries, military doctrine rested on a simple principle: Bigger nations win wars. More precisely, the nation with the wealth, population and will to field the larger army would inevitably dominate its adversary. Ukraine has buried that principle.
Russia’s military budget has grown several times since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, reaching 10 percent of gross domestic product in 2025, or half of Russia’s public expenditure. And it will likely expand further as Russia’s public finances receive a boost from high oil prices.
The size of its active-duty personnel has also increased, from around 1 million to 1.5 million.
Yet the pace of Russian advances has been in steady decline this year. In April, Russia even recorded a net loss of territory it controls in Ukraine — in part the result of replacing its wounded and fallen with hastily trained recruits.
Since the beginning of this year, Russia has been losing around 35,000 troops per month, outpacing its declining capacity for recruitment. Increased signing bonuses and a range of other benefits such as loan forgiveness, free tuition and even free land have not changed the grim calculus.
Ukraine’s regular armed forces numbered around 260,000 in 2022, at the start of the full-scale invasion. Today, approximately 1 million Ukrainians are at arms.
But the 750,000-plus civilians who put on the uniform aren’t conscripts in a Russian sense. They are engineers, coders and entrepreneurs running drone workshops out of garages and writing targeting software between artillery shifts.
Necessity is the mother of invention, and war conjures up all sorts of necessities. Ukraine has its own problems with mobilization. But all told, it has successfully met the moment by leveraging its capacity to innovate.
The contact line with Russia is some 745 miles long, and the so-called kill zone is 15 to 30 miles deep, controlled on both sides by unmanned ground vehicles, aerial drones and maritime platforms. The mathematics of this kind of war are unforgiving. A $500 first-person-view drone can destroy a multimillion-dollar Russian tank. A $1,000 3D-printed interceptor can knock down a $35,000 Shahed drone. Whoever can manufacture cheaper, faster and at scale wins. Currently, Ukraine is winning that race.
The massed breakthrough that defined 20th-century land war is today all but impossible.
The Iran war has already taught some of these hard lessons to the United States. U.S. allies manning Patriot missile batteries spent millions of dollars per shot to swat down Iranian drones that cost tens of thousands apiece. Their interceptor stocks started running low long before Tehran’s did.
But the math alone is just a signal that the old way of doing things will no longer suffice. True adaptation will mean learning to fight in a different way. And Ukraine has much to teach its partners.
