In the foyer of the ‘National Museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War’ are three autonomous fast boats, one a ‘suicide’ vessel designed to explode as a surface mine, another carrying air defence missiles, and the third mounting a belt-fed grenade launcher.
Drones, land, sea or air, are not so much the future of war, but the present. The key question is where this technology is going – and how and when Russia’s war in Ukraine might end.
On the battlefield, drones have been the most significant tactical feature, along with the ability to launch disruptive deep-strikes. The front – referred to by Ukrainians as the ‘contact line’ – is defined by a strip of no-man’s land patrolled by reconnaissance and suicide drones. The Ukrainians alone expend around 10,000 FPV (first person view) drones daily on targets, the Russians at least this number. This no-man’s land is strewn with discarded fibre-optic cables, many of the logistics routes operating under net ‘tunnels’ to prevent the drones from intercepting troop and vehicle movements.
This is a ‘life of hell’ for the soldiers, the conditions a high-tech version of the Somme more than 100 years ago, with death coming less from machine guns and artillery than with pinpoint accuracy from a silent, hovering aerial enemy.
In February 2022, few imagined a war of this type, duration and terrifying scale, drones then mostly a tool for reconnaissance or stand-off missile strikes.
But war remains as ever sui generis, with the constants only that, as General Sir Nick Carter, the former Chief of the UK’s Defence Staff, reminds, it is ‘inherently chaotic and uncertain, and it is about close combat between human beings’. The character of war is like the technology, circumstances and timing, inherently mutable.
Even so, the most unexpected outcome of this war is in Russia’s inability, despite its numerical, nuclear and materiel advantage, to defeat Ukraine on the battlefield as much as the Ukrainians have been unwilling to surrender. People, motive, a sense of national purpose, and esprit de corps matter as much now as they did 100 years ago, perhaps more so when faced with these odds and the threat of national annihilation, at worst, or, at best, serfdom to Russian ambition.
And yet the performance of the Russian military at the outset was surprisingly poor, not least since they had taken care to assemble their forces and plan for conquest. While they have since much improved, they remain relatively hapless, perhaps because they are fighting for an imperial rather than a national cause. Their most recent summer offensive has been, in the assessment of Edward Carr writing in the Economist, ‘an abject failure. Russia’s tactic is to send small groups of men into the killzone. Yet, if some break through, the rest cannot take advantage of their progress. As soon as they mass, they are obliterated.’
While Russia wanted to assert its power over its neighbours, it has ended up showing the limits of that power and becoming all but a vassal to another neighbour, China, a key provider of dual-use technology from chemicals to micro-chips, and purchaser of Russian oil. If there is a victor in this war, it is Beijing, which has profited financially and undoubtedly learnt myriad lessons about Western military technologies and tactics.
The numbers inform this failure. Russian casualties hover somewhere between one million and 1.5 million men, the number of dead estimated around 25% of this figure, five times greater (probably) than Ukraine. As Carr puts it, ‘Russia is advancing, but to occupy the four oblasts it claims as its own would require five more years. If the killing continues at 2025’s rate, total Russian casualties will reach almost 4m.’ To conquer all of Ukraine in this manner would take close to 2100, as Kateryna Yuschenko, the former Ukrainian First Lady puts it.
The resistance encountered by Russia illustrates the extent to which Moscow underestimated Ukrainian resolve founded on 350 years of resistance to Russian hegemony. As Kyiv moved to assert itself through the 2003 Orange Movement led by Viktor Yushchenko and the EuroMaidan protests ten years later, Russia fought back, attempting to impose its own presidential candidates, a failure which led to the current situation.
At home, however, so far, Putin remains unchallenged, perhaps surprisingly given the high cost in lives. He has headed off the most serious challenge to his rule in the form of Wagner’s Yevgeny Prigozhin and the corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny. There appears to be no fallout, for now, at least as much as outsiders are aware, no Black Swans in sight.
If the lack of a Russian theory if victory is perhaps the most surprising aspect over the last three years and ten months, there are other unexpected turns.
Making virtue of necessity, Ukraine has delivered an army that fights tactically largely through local technology, enabled by a command control system that exploits AI and data. You still need people, if not nearly as many as has previously been the case, at least in defence. Drones are less useful in attack; this still requires artillery and armour, along with infantry.
Among other surprises is that Europe and the US have proven to have a political and security spine – Russia misreading the withdrawal from Afghanistan as a lack of foreign commitment. No one would, in 2022, have thought that Ukraine would be flying F16s, Mirage 2000s and, possibly, Gripen and Rafale, and be capable of deep-strike operations based on shared intelligence. At the same time, Europe’s economy has not collapsed without Russian energy as some foretold.
The Ukrainian economy has also not collapsed, and neither has the Russian one (yet). To the contrary, the war has proven a rapid facilitator of Ukraine’s economic integration with the EU despite the absence of membership, in part because of the flow of nearly six million people westwards. Despite Washington’s rethink on aid globally, foreign donors remain remarkably generous on Ukraine, realising the security consequences of the second-largest country in Europe under the control of Moscow.
While Ukraine is dependent on the West, European security and dependency on Ukraine are increasing, not least because of its prowess in drone technology. Contrastingly, earlier German attempts to draw Russia in through Ostpolitik and economic interdependence, led by energy, has not stood up to the test.
It is also surprising that, despite being the imperial aggressor, Putin has been able, through a combination of fear, money, historical Soviet legacy and disinformation, to cultivate international support in convincing much of the world that the war was NATO’s fault, and that Ukraine is a non-country run by Nazis.
Russia has also won allies in Africa, notably with military juntas across the Sahel. Even though in most cases this has been at local expense, it has been scarcely exploited by others. The imperial action of Russia contrasts with Ukraine’s fight for self-determination, a point that seems surprisingly or perhaps deliberately lost on much of the formerly colonised world.
In this, human rights and international law have proven (again) fungible. While democracy has suffered, authoritarian populism has been given a boost. This option has been given appeal to elites by the absence of attractive Western models and calibration of benefits, and President Donald Trump’s brash transactionalism has not helped.
China has in the process firmly inserted itself at the heart of global security. With Xi Jinping apparently of the view that the West is weak, a view fed by the global financial crisis of 2008/9, vacillation over Ukraine could have an impact on how Beijing acts in the South China Sea and with Taiwan.
While the threat of nukes remains, Ukraine’s successful resistance has made nuclear war less likely, though the invasion itself and a Ukrainian collapse would encourage proliferation, not least in the face of a multilateral system which has been found wanting and the UN an irrelevance. The UN has been supplanted by the BRICS and G20, though this version of multilateralism is focused on regime interests rather than human security and protection. NATO, too, has been substantially strengthened and expanded, reminding of the hollow reasoning originally provided by Putin for the ‘special military operation’.
And still, in spite of all of the above surprises, Russia is not (yet) interested in peace, or even trading territory for peace. Putin remains focused on dominating and turning Ukraine into something that looks rather like Belarus, as the former MI6 director Richard Moore recently commented.
Will the end also come as a surprise?
Peace is more than the absence of hostilities at a given moment. For peace to stick, there are several ground rules, as the scholar Timothy Snyder reminds us. Justice, fairness, international law, and security guarantees form part of the equation, not just territory and power. Overhastiness for personal reasons (touting for Nobel peace prizes included) can lead to unwise deals, based less on an appreciation of the relative merits, but on ego. Thus, negotiations to end the war cannot be, as Snyder terms it, a ‘real estate disagreement between two men’.
Anything which neglects these aspects can only prolong the conflict.
Such a deal would fundamentally have to understand that security guarantees are not an abstraction for Ukrainians, at the heart of which are issues around sovereignty. This war came about when Russia invaded Ukraine, after all, not vice versa.
Oleksandr Lytvynenko is a KGB-trained former head of the SBU, the Ukrainian secret police and, more recently, the Secretary of the National Security and Defence Council. He doubts that, ‘we will see the next aggression from the Russians. Three years for 100,000 square kilometres, 300,000 dead. They may be slaves, but they have minds. Putin will find it very difficult to return to war. So, this war is his legacy, one which demands an endgame. This explains why he is not in a hurry, as he is trying to obtain more and more for this legacy.’
Lytvynenko cites the nickname of Count Sergei Witte, who successfully negotiated the end to the Russo-Japanese War, culminating in the Treaty of Portsmouth. The treaty recognised Japan’s hegemony in Korea, awarded it Russia’s lease on the Liaodong Peninsula, control of the South Manchuria Railway, and the southern half of the island of Sakhalin. As a consequence, Count Witte became known as ‘semi-Sakhalin’.
‘Putin does not want to be “semi-Donbas”,’ says Lytvynenko.
Ukraine has already won this war. It continues to exist as a separate state, albeit battered and bruised. Putin has already lost since he has not rolled over Ukraine at the pace and with minimum fuss he envisaged and, in the process, turned his country into a Chinese vassal.
The question is how this all ends. Save a successful (by which read sustainable) peace agreement acceptable to all sides, and there is none in sight, there are two ways in which this is likely: Ukrainian military failure or Russian economic collapse. These are proxies, however, for an underlying equation: the stamina of Western resolve to keep supporting Ukraine versus Chinese assistance to Russia.
Is a Syrian-type collapse possible in Russia, along the lines of what Yevgeny Prigozhin’s rockstar drive northwards from Rostov on Don in June 2023 threatened?
In January 1917, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Vladimir Lenin, said in a lecture, ‘We of the older generation [he was 46] may not live to see the decisive battles of this coming revolution.’ This was delivered in Zurich while he was in exile in Switzerland, just a month before the actual revolution began in Russia, when the Tsar was deposed against the backdrop of the serial military defeats in the First World War. Lenin returned to Russia in April 1917, leading the Bolsheviks to power in the October Revolution that same year.
The same is true for the Ukrainian military, no matter the ongoing pressure and manpower shortages, that is, if Europe delivers the assistance required and Kyiv is able to generate additional soldiers, not least by incentivising recruitment and redeploying police.
This war will be won by resilience.
Greg Mills
Senior Associate Fellow
Royal United Services Institute
South Africa
Ray Hartley
Custodian
Platform for Democrats
South Africa
