Ukraine is mastering 21st-century warfare

The first months of Russia’s 2026 Spring Offensive have not been going well. Russian forces have gained much less territory than during previous years, while suffering many more casualties each month. At the same time, Ukraine’s strategic strike campaign is accelerating and exerting increasing pressure on Russia’s air defence, military industry and oil production. Zelensky’s diplomatic efforts have  been aided, too, by Kyiv’s air defence support to Middle East nations. As such, Russian strategic momentum in the war appears to be draining away.

Is Ukraine’s war strategy turning a corner? There are a number of reasons to think it might be. They span diplomacy and alliance management, in addition to Kyiv’s new supporters, its effective ground operations, enhanced long-range strike capabilities, superior adaptation cycle and evolving defence industry. These reasons encapsulate the changing character of war in this conflict, which is a contest of will, attrition, national resilience and adaptation. Considered together, they describe a war whose strategic direction is changing and in a direction that is positive for Ukraine.

Diplomacy in this war has always been as much about denying Russia false legitimacy as it has been about achieving peace. In the past year, despite the American negotiators’ inclination to support Russian territorial aspirations, Ukraine appears to have gained the initiative, demonstrated good faith in negotiations, and forced Moscow into the role of the spoiler. The Geneva peace talks in February 2026 collapsed on the second day. Zelensky accused Moscow of deliberately stalling negotiations. Russia then demanded that Ukrainian forces withdraw from Donetsk as a precondition for talks – a position that the Russian diplomat Dmitry Peskov described as something that should have happened ‘yesterday’.

Ukraine, on the other hand, accepted President Trump’s unconditional ceasefire proposal in Riyadh in March 2026. The record of the past year demonstrates that it is Russia which has rejected ceasefire after ceasefire. That is a significant diplomatic achievement for Ukraine, even if it is yet to entirely ease Trump’s hostility towards Ukraine and Zelensky.

Another component of this potential turning point for Kyiv is that western alliance support is now institutionally embedded. A key strategic vulnerability for Ukraine has always been that its coalition of supporters could decline precipitously due to diplomatic pressure, western election cycles or war fatigue. Yet the European Council conclusions of March 2026 reaffirmed EU readiness to contribute to security guarantees through the Coalition of the Willing, now numbering 35 states. The UK and France have signed a Declaration of Intent to deploy forces in the event of a peace agreement, with a proposed Multinational Force-Ukraine designed to conduct deterrence operations across all domains. The EU has agreed a €90 billion loan framework for 2026-27, backed with the borrowing by EU capital markets, alongside a €1.5 billion European Defence Industry Programme. Ukraine has also achieved Enhanced Partnership status with the Joint Expeditionary Force — the first non-member state to do so. Alliance cohesion has not been seamless, and the role of the US remains uncertain, but it is more institutionally embedded than at any previous point in the conflict.

In another significant development for Kyiv, Gulf States have emerged as a new set of partners. One of Russia’s enduring strategic assumptions, stated clearly by Putin in 2023, has been that Ukraine’s support base is limited to a western coalition that will eventually tire. The emergence of Gulf Arab states as partners in early 2026 was not widely anticipated. The trigger was the US-Israeli strikes on Iran and the subsequent Iranian drone and missile campaign against Gulf infrastructure. Ukraine – with four years of combat experience against Iranian-style drone swarms – possessed battle-tested capabilities that Gulf states urgently needed.

In March 2026, Zelensky visited Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar, and Ukraine signed 10-year defence export agreements with all three states, covering drone technology, air defence systems and security cooperation. Ukraine deployed over 200 air defence advisors to the region. Moscow’s response was to send drone shipments to Iran even as Gulf states were being attacked — an alignment that has only accelerated Gulf engagement with Kyiv.

Russia launched its anticipated Spring-Summer 2026 offensive in mid-March, targeting the Ukrainian eastern Fortress Belt, which is the fortified urban concentration of Kostyantynivka, Kramatorsk, Slovyansk and Druzhkivka in Donetsk Oblast. The results have been poor for Russian ground forces. In just three days of intensified operations from 18-20 March, Ukrainian forces inflicted approximately 5,000 Russian casualties. March 2026 saw record Russian losses of 35,000 personnel in a single month – the highest since the full-scale invasion began. Russian military commanders were forced to redeploy elite Airborne and naval infantry units from Donetsk to respond to Ukrainian counterattacks in the Hulyaipole and Oleksandrivka directions, where Ukraine liberated over 154 square miles between January and late-March. 

Russia has gained approximately 150 square miles of territory so far this year, about half of the gains it made over the same period in 2025. The cost per square mile has risen from approximately 120 Russian personnel in 2025 to 780 in the first four months of 2026. Ukrainian analyst Mykola Bielieskov has recently assessed that Russia’s offensive capacity and its tactical learning appears to have plateaued in 2026. Despite the positive early signs for Kyiv, it must also be acknowledged that, over the last three years, the largest Russian territorial gains have occurred in the June to September periods.

Bielieskov also notes that Ukraine still faces manpower and command issues: ‘The manpower deficit still plagues Ukraine’s war effort, imposing severe limits in terms of the simultaneous employment of diverse effects and forcing strict prioritisation. This problem is combined with ongoing attempts to improve command and control through corps reform.’

Returning to a more optimistic note, another tentative sign that the war’s trajectory is shifting in Ukraine’s favour is that its deep-strike campaign has crossed a threshold in effectiveness. In March 2026, for the first time in the war, Ukraine launched more long-range drones at Russia than Russia launched at Ukraine in a given month – employing over 7,000 systems reaching as deep as 1,500 kilometres into Russian territory. Between June 2025 and March 2026, Ukraine conducted confirmed strikes against 237 air defence targets and 196 electronic warfare systems, systematically degrading Russia’s air defence coverage across vast areas of Russia. Russia’s Ministry of Defence threatened European companies against funding Ukraine’s drone production following the strikes. More recently, the Russian government has moved to enforce state control of oil production and fuel distribution due to the effectiveness of Ukraine’s campaign against the Russian oil industry. Kyiv’s deep-strike campaign will not end the war by itself, but it imposes major economic costs on Russia that compound its manpower losses and degrade its overall war-fighting capacity. And, it brings the war home to the Russian people in a way that Ukraine could not do just a couple of years ago.

Ukraine’s adaptation cycle is also outpacing Russia’s. War is ultimately a learning competition. The side that observes, analyses and adapts faster than its opponent gains an advantage that mass alone cannot offset. In this contest, despite Russia’s demonstrated ability to learn and adapt, Ukraine has established a clear lead in 2026. Ukraine’s battlefield learning ecosystem has matured into one of the most capable, if not the most agile, in the world. 

As of early 2026, thousands of ground robots were operating across the grey zone along the front line. Some are performing supply and evacuation tasks, while other newer variants are engaging Russian infantry with AI-enabled weapons. AI-driven lock-on technology now allows interceptor drones to pursue targets autonomously through intense electronic jamming. This is a response to Russian strengths in electronic warfare that has degraded conventional radio-controlled interceptors. 

The integration of battlefield experience into design cycles is shortening rapidly: new drone variants are reaching frontline units within weeks of an identified gap, not months. New combined arms-drone tactics and training are similarly being developed and employed. Ukraine has produced counters to Russian infiltration tactics and the new drone tactics pioneered by Russia’s Rubikon drone centre. Underpinning this, Ukraine is planning to construct approximately seven million drones of various types in 2026, building on four million produced in 2025. At the same time, the battlefield is generating the data needed to improve AI targeting algorithms. This data is being used by Minister Fedorov’s new AI Defence Centre programme, in turn creating a reinforcing cycle in which battlefield experience steadily improves the technology, and the improved technology enhances battlefield performance. Russia has not matched this cycle. It is adapting, but more slowly, and in 2026 the gap appears to be widening.

Crucially for Kyiv, Ukraine’s new era defence industry is now a strategic European asset. After the Cold War, Ukraine shut down or converted to civil use much of its extensive military design and manufacturing capacity. Since 2022, it has reconstructed a new, 21st-century version of its defence industry. Domestic production now meets more than 50 per cent of the Armed Forces’ equipment and weapons needs. 

Manufacturing capacity has increased 50-fold to a 50 billion dollar valuation since the invasion began. According to a recent survey of the Ukrainian defence industry by the Snake Island Institute, there were around a dozen defence industry players in Ukraine at the start of 2022; there are now over 1,500 companies. Over four million drones were produced in Ukraine in 2025. First contracts for Ukrainian weapons exports – beginning with unmanned aerial and maritime systems – are expected in the second half of 2026, marking the first time Ukraine has exported weapons since the invasion. The co-production model, with the manufacture of arms at facilities in Ukraine and European partner nations, is integrating Kyiv into the European defence industrial architecture in ways that are difficult to unwind regardless of diplomatic outcomes. As the Council on Foreign Relations observed in February 2026, Ukraine’s defence industrial base has evolved into a pillar of Europe’s future security. 

The reasons listed above for cautious optimism do not amount to a prediction of victory. If what we are witnessing does amount to a turning point for Kyiv, it is still early days. Any realistic assessment of Ukraine’s war trajectory must also consider what could still go wrong. 

Four strategic risks deserve close watching. First, Russia’s manpower model, though strained – recruitment has fallen to around 940 personnel per day against losses that exceed that rate – retains depth. It would be premature to declare the attrition arithmetic of this war settled in Ukraine’s favour. At the same time, Ukraine still has challenges fully manning its frontline units. Reforms announced by President Zelensky in early April 2026 are designed to address this manpower issue but are likely to take time to have an impact.

Second, the US position under the Trump administration remains the critical variable in western support. Trump’s approach to the Ukraine war continues to be defined by a key asymmetry. He has labelled Zelensky ‘a dictator without elections’, falsely accused him of starting the war, while never once calling Putin a dictator. Though his patience with the Russian leader has frayed somewhat since mid-2025, Trump continues to insist that Putin is ‘very serious’ about ending the war – consistently describing Russia as a good-faith partner rather than an aggressor. As such, the risk of a brokered settlement that reflects Russian war objectives more than Ukrainian interests and a rejection of authoritarian aggression has not disappeared. 

A third risk is that, after more than four years of full-scale war that has imposed huge costs on Ukrainian society, any significant degradation of institutional cohesion, civil-military relations, or popular will to fight might be as strategically decisive as a Russian military breakthrough. This remains a theoretical risk, however. According to an April 2026 survey conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, around half of Ukrainians surveyed are willing to continue enduring the war, with just as many expecting the war to continue into 2027. 

Finally, Russia’s cognitive warfare continues to find some traction in parts of European and American public opinion. Ukraine’s new strategic momentum on the battlefield and in deep strike operations must be matched by momentum in the information environment. It is not enough for Ukraine to be turning a corner if the world does not see it.

The picture that emerges from this assessment is one of tangible but fragile Ukrainian strategic advantage. Russia still occupies significant Ukrainian territory and is still striking Ukrainian cities almost every night. Putin’s theory of victory for the war – that of outlasting western political and societal patience and thus demonstrating greater will – is yet to be substantially refuted.

But the evidence of 2026 thus far suggests that Russia’s prospects for military success have been significantly dimmed. Russia is now paying more for less territory, losing more troops than it can replace, seeing its oil infrastructure destroyed and damaged at an accelerating rate, its economy under greater pressure, and its international position eroding as Gulf states pivot toward Ukraine. Ukraine is producing high quality, 21st-century military materiel at large scale, beginning to export it to new partners, and is learning and adapting faster than its invader.

The seven areas explored in this article suggest that Ukraine’s national warfighting efforts, and its partnerships with European and other nations, are resulting in a shift of the war’s direction in Ukraine’s favour. These remain early indications of a turning point and there is a long way to go in the Spring and Summer fighting seasons for 2026. 

In war, however, even the slightest glimpse of potential victory is crucial to sustain morale – and hope. Ukraine has denied this to Russia for over four years. Perhaps 2026 may be the year in which the grand vision of a Russian defeat is something that Ukraine and its supporters at long last can realistically contemplate.