This year marks the fourth anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s ‘Special Military Operation’ into Ukraine. It was expected to take ten days. The professional Russian soldiers in the vanguard of the invasion were told they’d be welcomed with open arms. Consequently, leading battalions carried few rations, spare parts, or fuel. Officers were instead ordered to pack their best uniforms, swords and medals for the victory parade they were assured would happen shortly in Kyiv.

Within a year, Ukrainian forces had conducted two counteroffensive operations, rolling back Russian positions, in the south at Kherson and the northeast around Kharkiv. These cost the Kremlin men like 21-year-old Nikita Loburets, a professional squad leader in the special forces brigade of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence. He had always wanted to be a soldier, studied martial arts and learned how to parachute-jump before leaving school in Bryansk. One of his country’s irreplaceable elite soldiers, he perished in the fighting around Kharkiv, being awarded a posthumous award for bravery. Ukraine’s casualty lists, illuminated by flickering candles, have been erected inside every church, along with portraits of the deceased, proudly captured in their best uniforms. They contain many men of a similar age and background to their Russian counterparts. They might have been brothers in arms, in a different time and place.

Aside from willing volunteers who are answering their country’s call, a second category of soldiery in Russia and Ukraine includes mobilised civilians, who have been avoiding military service but are pulled off the streets, arrested at vehicle checkpoints, or netted during press-gang swoops on bars, restaurants and shopping malls. Tussles reminiscent of raids by ICE personnel in America, between militiamen about to drag the unfortunates away, and their friends trying to pull them back, are amongst the most widely viewed phone footage in Ukraine and Russia. Those seized are often clueless on arrival at the front, with little in the way of natural survival skills, and their poor training and equipment has led to higher-than-average casualties on both sides, with a low life expectancy. Endurance in the modern battlespace, as Valerii Zaluzhnyi, Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Kingdom and former top general, has emphasised, comes from mental resilience, a cultural shift NATO needs to study.

However, a third casualty category unique to Russia began to be encountered after a year. They included men like 34-year-old Alexander Zubov, a twice-convicted murderer and drug addict, who was recruited from prison by the Wagner Group for 100,000 roubles ($1,300) per month, with freedom after six months’ service. Regarded as ‘disposable,’ like the old Russian penal battalions of 1941-45, Zubov lasted five months before being shot storming the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, the scene of some of the war’s worst massacres.

After the professional men like Loburets were largely used up, Putin loyalists tried sending ‘meat grinder’ waves of infantry to overwhelm Ukrainian defences. Typically, they contained the poorly-trained sweepings from the streets and prison inmates, whose failure was predictable. Scraping the manpower barrel for Zubov and the oldest-known Russian to be killed, Fail Nabiev, a 60-year-old petty thief also recruited by Wagner, is an indication that the conflict has expanded well beyond a military operation. What outsiders regard as a limited regional conflict has come to be viewed in Moscow as a total war for national survival. The result? Russia has in Ukraine collectively suffered more killed and wounded than in all the wars it has fought since 1945.

Most in the world probably expected that the relatively new Ukrainian nation was about to fall to the 2022 illegal invasion. However, for war-weary Ukraine, this was already their eighth year of strife with Russia, which had first snaked its way into the Crimea on 26 February 2014. Much of the industrial Donbas region in the east was swiftly taken by Kremlin-backed forces the following month, which then shot down an innocent airliner flying over eastern Ukraine, killing all 283 passengers and 15 crew aboard. Russia never apologised. Instead, Kyiv was fortunate in having elected a young actor, Volodymyr Zelensky (born 25 January 1978), as its President in 2019. He immediately stepped up to the microphone in unflinching Churchillian fashion to defy his critics, and keep Ukraine in the war while marshalling international support.

According to UN figures, in 2022 some 5.7 million Ukrainians fled abroad, 90 per cent of whom were women and children, with 1.5 million settling in Poland and most of the remainder scattered across Central and Eastern Europe. Menfolk between 18 and 60 were forbidden to leave, and up to 2 million went on the run, avoiding military service. Lightning street round-ups captured some of the unwilling each week (mirrored in Russia), but these actions are proving controversial.

Some 1,460 days later, the full-on Russian invasion, which has cost the Kremlin an estimated 1.2 million casualties, including 325,000 deaths, continues. This is more than double the 500,000 losses of Ukraine as assessed by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), which gathers its data from information from military personnel, intelligence agencies and various governments. NATO assesses Moscow’s losses are running at 30,000 personnel per month, up to 80 per cent of them inflicted by unmanned systems. This means the combat drain on Russia’s army is now higher than its recruitment levels, including foreign levies and convicts.

The newly appointed Ukrainian Defence Minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, stated recently that his goal was to kill or wound 50,000 Russian troops per month, pushing Putin towards a price he cannot sustain. However, Ukraine’s losses have also been high, with the Wall Street Journal reporting an estimated 80,000 dead and 400,000 wounded. Many units are exhausted, operating with smaller numbers than they should, and short of ammunition. Against them, Russia just about retains a superiority in munitions and personnel, but it is worth noting that its population is four times Ukraine’s, with 18.9 million military-age males aged 20-39, compared to Ukraine’s 5 million. In essence, Kyiv’s losses are proportionally higher, measured by the percentage of its population lost. However, both sides have yet to conscript their entire 18-60 manpower resources, a development which might yet keep the conflict alive for years to come.

Ukraine alleges Kremlin casualties of kit at 37,000 towed and self-propelled artillery pieces, 24,000 armoured combat vehicles, 1,300 air defence radars and rocket systems, 430 aircraft, and nearly 350 helicopters. Military transportation losses are listed as 79,000 vehicles, creating a reliance on commandeered civilian trucks, vans and people carriers, with quad bikes popular. Even hardy Siberian ponies and sleighs are making a comeback. Much equipment was obsolete, based on the Russian/Soviet policy of never scrapping, but rather storing, old military kit. The lion’s share of its 11,000 tank losses have been mid-Cold War-era T-72 machines dating from 1973, or T-62s, first introduced as far back as 1961. If these reports are accurate, Putin’s military gamble has cost his army one in seven of the world’s entire stock of main battle tanks.

The destruction of an astonishing 136,000 military drones has been exacerbated by sanctions denying critical components to Russian companies, and which has seen the Putin state stripping microprocessors out of cars, television sets, washing machines and other domestic goods, to insert into their unmanned airborne fleet.

Mass production of unmanned aircraft had been arranged with allies Iran and Venezuela, but domestic circumstances in both those nations have intervened to halt this. However, Russian technologists are proving adaptable, in developing Geran-2 drones (Iranian Shahed-136s produced under licence) as carriers that can piggy-back smaller craft deep into Ukraine. Attacks from behind may stump Ukrainian air defences. Meanwhile, Kyiv’s agile generation of computer whizzkids have been devising new and better frontline equipment, using mobile 3D printing labs which can produce ten new unmanned devices every three hours. The ultimate disposable machine has been trialled, a simple paper drone, armed with an engine and camera.

None of these challenges to the Kremlin’s seemingly invincible war machine seemed possible four years ago, with the Russians in overwhelming numbers at the gates of Kyiv. Some Russian setbacks have been self-inflicted, with corruption absorbing vehicle spares, tools, even reactive armour packages, as well as rations and payments made to ‘ghost soldiers’. Kyiv has suffered extensive equipment losses, too, but every warehouse soon became a miniature garage for repairing combat-damaged Ukrainian kit, and repurposing captured Russian items. This was in addition to the donation or purchase of western Leopard, Challenger 2 and US-manufactured M1 Abrams tanks.

The war in Ukraine has transformed our understanding of the modern battlespace. Clearly defined front lines are a thing of the past, with a wider, shifting ‘grey zone’, hundreds of miles wide, where civilians as much as soldiers are the targets. Widespread looting and torture, prisoner abuse and execution, even genocidal massacres of the kind not seen since the 1940s, have returned to the very bloodlands of the east that witnessed the same under Stalin and Hitler.

Early on, hackers from across the world, including the Anonymous collectives, and the international volunteer intelligence group InformNapalm (whose website is fascinating), decided Ukraine needed their help and began disrupting Russian cyber operations. Enterprising members of Generation-Z have demonstrated their ability to crowd-fund from the world-wide-web the purchase of 4×4 trucks, quad bikes, ambulances, personal combat gear, computer terminals and satphones.

Meanwhile, men and women into their 50s, and even the disabled since fitted with artificial limbs, have proved they have as much of a role to play in military uniform as those in their 20s. Being a combat medic, communications expert, sniper, or drone operator is an age- and gender-neutral skill.

Much of the recent destruction has been caused by unmanned air, land, sea and sub-sea machines, which evolve in technological terms, on a daily basis. In the Black Sea, so many Russian naval vessels have been sunk or disabled that they are afraid to leave port. Both sides have learned that, by using Elon Musk’s Starlink network of satellites, strategic drones can fly many hundreds of miles to bomb remote targets with an accuracy of inches. Moscow has long been within range. AI will only fine-tune this terrifying capability.

Yet, their low speeds make drones vulnerable to unmanned interceptors, which literally ram their opponents out of the skies. Short-range (up to 10 miles) tactical First Person View (FPV) drones, flown by an operator using live-feed goggles or a monitor, have evolved, using gossamer-thin fibre optic cables which insulate them against jamming. Such unmanned devices have higher data rates, providing better imagery, and can settle and rest, like an insect, to conserve their battery power, and wait in ambush for targets of opportunity.

Reminiscent of the V-1 and V-2 blitz of 1944-45, long range, high-speed rockets and missiles are still difficult to intercept, with the result that both Moscow and Kyiv rely on the formula that if you launch enough, some will get through anti-missile defences. The latest is Kyiv’s home-produced FP-5 ‘Flamingo’, which resembles a V-1 buzzbomb and since last August has been destroying targets over 1,000 miles distant with its 1.15-ton warhead. Coming in at $500,000, it is a fifth of the price of an American Tomahawk cruise missile.

Ukraine is experiencing great success in hitting Russia’s railway infrastructure, ammunition warehouses, oil terminals and power stations. Attempting to undermine morale, the Kremlin is conducting terror attacks, using night-time surges of 400-600 drones and missiles on schools, hospitals, and residential housing. At one point, approximately half of Kyiv’s 12,000 apartment buildings lost their heating. This is usually Moscow signalling intimidation ahead of a peace conference, for Putin likes to bargain from a position of power, irrespective of any genuine commitment to de-escalation or peace.

In January 2026, strikes from missiles and drones left Ukraine’s energy system able to meet only 60 percent of national demand, forcing lengthy power blackouts on most days. In the mid-winter cold, climate itself is being weaponised. Yet, the Washington-based CSIS think tank at the same time assessed that Russian forces on the Pokrovsk front were more slowly than the British during the 1916 Battle of the Somme. At the current monthly rate of advance in Ukraine, CSIS argued, it would take Russian forces over 150 years to capture the remaining 80 per cent of Ukraine, if it could absorb the massive personnel losses indefinitely. Thus, contrary to Moscow’s narrative, Ukrainian collapse is not on the cards. Neither is Russian victory inevitable.

As a result, major offensives featuring even the armoured and massed infantry units of four years ago, coordinated with aircraft and helicopter gunships, are now rare and difficult to conduct. Tanks and other vehicles have gained anti-drone ‘shells’, initially made of chicken wire, latterly from shipping containers, and finally from spindly pieces of wire resembling dandelions or miniature pine trees. All are designed to trigger warheads in advance of striking the vehicle itself.

Drones have been equipped to carry cameras, thermal imaging, machine-guns, grenades and flame-throwers, whilst lasers are being trialled. Other unmanned drones haul logistics about combat terrain. The first battle casualties have been retrieved from behind enemy lines by unmanned land vehicles. Ukraine currently deploys about 9,000 of all types of drones daily, with both antagonists producing around four million each a year, and China capable of building more than double that number. These figures will only increase. All troops have to be trained in their use, but the slower-procuring military forces of the West have yet to react to the scale of these lightning-speed technological developments. The collective drone output of all the NATO nations is tiny by comparison, a gap which should terrify western planners.

Each side has refined its tactics, shifting away from human wave assaults towards small infiltration groups to probe minefields, conduct reconnaissance and take prisoners. While drones give combat a very modern look, huge swathes of the 600-mile front line are guarded by bunkers and sandbagged trenches, minefields and concrete anti-tank ‘dragon’s teeth’, familiar to students of the Second World War. The mainstay Ukrainian heavy machine-gun remains the water-cooled, belt-fed 7.62mm Maxim, first issued on little wheels to the soldiers of Tsar Nicholas II in 1910. Mounted singly, in double, triple or quadruple configurations, with modern optics it is still highly regarded as the preferred slayer of infantry – and drones. Sometimes there is no point to reinventing the wheel.

However, Putin is impatient for results. With many senior officers perishing at the front and prominent officials suffering a series of fatal encounters with faulty windows, aggressive stairs, bathtubs or swimming pools, not to mention Ukrainian hit squads, Putin’s compliant generals are afraid to stand up to him. The fate of his former friend, Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin, who led a mutiny and whose executive jet unexpectedly plummeted from the skies in 2023, illustrated what happens to those who defy him. This is why Russian combat losses, often of prison convicts, poorly-trained conscripts or third country nationals from Africa, Cuba or 15,000 North Koreans, have been so high. At the same time, centuries of autocracy have left the Kremlin unwilling to decentralise decision making, hence its lack of an effective NCO corps. Its glacial top-down, command-and-control system rarely provides timely direction to frontline forces. It is designed to tell its masters, including Putin, what they want to hear, rather than provide accurate strategic intelligence, and ultimately results in poor and wasteful choices.

Putin sees this clash as his version of the Great Patriotic War, where the USSR defeated Nazi Germany in 1941-45 at huge cost. He has fed Russia on stories of his family’s involvement in that war and the death of his elder sibling, Viktor, in Leningrad in 1942. Vladimir was born into the USSR’s repressive machinery, with his grandfather, Spiridon, a personal cook to Lenin and Stalin, while his father, also Vladimir, served in the NKVD. Domestic television is awash with documentaries and feature films on that struggle, many of excellent quality and highly informative, but the most recent have shifted into portraying Stalin, once seen as the cruel dictator who presided over a regime of terror, as a hero in Russian folk history. Putin is desperate to be seen in the same light, which explains why he has locked himself into a forever-war in Ukraine. Isolated from his people, he worships the idea of being a warlord. With sanctions against his oil companies, and capture of his shadow fleet tankers, his central bank has been forced to liquidate its reservoir of foreign currency and 71 per cent of state bullion reserves to pay for his Ukraine adventure. Manufacturing is declining, consumer demand weakening, bank rates (at 16 per cent) and inflation remain stubbornly high, and economic growth slowed to 0.6 per cent in 2025.

Though at present he may not be able to win the war, he equally fears peace. Bloody conflict has become an end in itself for the man in the Kremlin. Any American-negotiated peace plan is unlikely to satisfy him. Most negotiations over the last four years have been sabotaged by Putin and his henchmen refusing to concede one iota on their basic territorial and political ambitions of destroying, or at least neutering, Ukraine as a viable state. Their drone and missile attacks are attempts to erode the will of Zelensky’s people to resist. A Russia not at war would reveal the grieving relatives, angry veterans, declining living standards, tanking economy and questions about Putin’s leadership. For the man who could stop the conflict in an instant, peace would be more dreadful than war.

Although the combat is limited to two countries, this confrontation has spread beyond the original battlefield, as external nations have chosen sides. Other countries have supported Russia with personnel, tanks, drones, technology and money. The western ‘Coalition of the Willing’ is helping Ukraine with training, war-fighting doctrine, intelligence and weapons. NATO countries are learning at least as much from battle-hardened Ukrainian soldiers as they can teach them. Kyiv’s lions are not facing conventional battles of the type NATO prepares for, but mass artillery barrages, drone-saturated airspace, chemical munitions dropped from the air, and trench fighting.

They have a name for its brutal and chaotic nature – ‘cyberpunk warfare’ – which resembles bits of both world wars, blended with a Hollywood nightmare. Ukraine has responded with flair, creativity, resilience, and speed, something Western training programmes still need to embrace before the radical evolution of battlefield dynamics overtakes them. For Ukrainian infantry recruits, the UK Ministry of Defence provides each with a 51-day Basic General Military Training course. Other week-long courses are run in Poland by NATO and the EU Military Assistance Mission (EUMAM) Ukraine (which coordinates training missions) to ‘train the NCO trainer’, and for squads, platoons, and companies, plus 21-day exercises for brigade staff officers.

Operations have identified Ukraine’s dearth of staff-trained officers, vital for managing offensives at higher level, and to integrate the many combat processes and assets on offer, from reconnaissance and cyber initiatives to artillery and psychological warfare. However, battlefield changes and adaptations to these elements are occurring as frequently as every two to six weeks, overtaking how NATO trains its own forces for the wars of tomorrow. Other NATO-standard methods of doing battle damage assessment, electronic warfare and individual emergency medical training (because under drone threat, evacuation may take up to a week via a quadbike) are also eagerly received by Zelensky’s soldiers. This is before quartermasters tackle the nightmare of managing the bewildering array of spare parts needed for the many vehicle, weapon and system types donated by the well-meaning West.

Is there a chance the conflict might spread? As with the treaty of Versailles in 1919, a poorly-drafted peace for Ukraine might encourage Putin to stray in the direction of other territorial ambitions. US President Trump cares little for the political consequences, only the commercial opportunities this might open in Kyiv and Moscow. However, there is a crucial disconnect in American foreign policy. While stepping back from military leadership in NATO, the US still wishes to discourage European armaments manufacture, and must learn they can’t have it both ways.

Meanwhile, last month, the leading Russian TV propagandist Vladimir Solovyov called for his country to conduct more ‘special military operations’ in Central Asia and the Caucasus, meaning independent countries like Armenia, Georgia, oil-rich Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan. At the same time, Kremlin ideologue Alexander Dugin restated his view that ‘no post-Soviet state should possess sovereignty’. The man often called ‘Putin’s brain’ argued that his master ‘had no choice but to restore the Russian Empire.’ Closer to home, this might indicate a swift land grab in Estonia, Moldova from Transnistria, or Lithuania from Kaliningrad, if NATO attention was adequately distracted or the USA was sufficiently disinterested.

Distractions might include assassinations, espionage, arson and cyberattacks of the kind already seen across Europe. Putin has already proved he is no respecter of international borders. The threat, therefore, is very real.

The ramifications for Britain are several. While the UK has become the self-appointed cheerleader for Ukraine, none of the conflict’s warfighting lessons have been incorporated into the current defence budget. The current allocation of 2.4 per cent of GDP is inadequate. Eleven other NATO countries already spend more than this. Equally, 3 per cent by 2029-30 (said to be the latest prime ministerial ambition) will not do. This is still exceeded by seven NATO partners. Only a figure approaching 5 per cent might reverse the UK’s military decline, whose present arsenal allows a mere eight days of the kind of intense warfare seen in Ukraine, before ammunition stocks hit empty. There is no network of national factories to quickly replenish the shells and missiles, tanks, guns, ships and drones that would be expended. Too much is bought abroad, with long lead times. In its current malaise, the Ministry of Defence has got used to promising ‘jam, but only tomorrow’. Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, looks desperately out of touch. British generals, air marshals and admirals, increasingly vocal in their criticisms of the UK’s apparent drift, express their despair, and all the more so when President Trump is dangling a figure of $1.5 trillion as the possible US defence budget for 2027, a $500 billion leap on current levels. By comparison, the House of Commons Library records that, in the year 2025/26, the UK will spend £62.2 billion, increasing to £73.5 billion in 2028/29.

With the United States appearing to step back from international organisations like the UN and NATO, the UK remains robust about facing off to future aggressors like China and Russia. However, it has to recognise that frictions with allies and coalition partners, particularly over issues of leadership, risk and escalation, are inevitable. Perhaps Brexit and strained relations with Washington DC are part of this bigger wheel of history. In the short-term, Britain does not have the personnel numbers or budget to step up to the responsibilities beginning to be vacated by Washington DC, or even match those of principal European military colleagues in France, Germany and Poland.

This is important, because only a credible defence budget, backed by an adequate manufacturing infrastructure and strong personnel numbers can reinforce the UK’s stature on the international stage. These will make its security guarantees more credible, and, should deterrence falter, boost its escalation management skills.

Countries like Britain need to find the money to support Ukraine as well as expand their own national defences. Thus far, it has been too easy to rely on the nuclear umbrella of last resort. Yet the experience of the Ukraine War proves that, even under the nuclear shadow, protracted and highly destructive conventional conflicts remain possible.

Countries like China and India have watched how Russia, despite underperforming to a humiliating degree, has nevertheless regenerated its forces, improved its tactics, and sustained its economy to confound even the closest of observers. To its many allies and well-wishers, Ukraine has demonstrated an ability to defend its territory, innovate militarily, and rally a wide-ranging coalition to its cause, that has far exceeded any projections. America, subject to some very effective Russian information warfare, is busy talking itself out of the equation. However, the world’s spy agencies must also note how senior intelligence officials need to make their voices better heard in today’s era of geopolitical uncertainty. Apparently, there is evidence that the US and Britain uncovered Putin’s plans to invade Ukraine beforehand, but were ignored.

Kyiv is fighting for its very survival and cannot give in. Putin has too much of his personal machismo at stake to stop. Trump-led peace initiatives are tending to favour Russian gains without acknowledging Kyiv’s plight. Despite talks in the Middle East, Geneva and elsewhere, there is no credible peace on the horizon.

Yet a darker cloud is also looming on the horizon, warning that any failure to learn from the military and political experience of Ukraine will find the West dangerously ill-equipped to manage a greater war, at precisely the moment when the likelihood of such a conflict might be growing. The next confrontation, whether in the Baltic region, across the Black Sea, or around the Indo-Pacific rim, is more likely to resemble Ukraine’s current cyberpunk strife than NATO’s past simulations. In beleaguered Kyiv, whose incredible tenacity we celebrate at this moment, the eventual result will indicate the path of wider European security, including that of the UK, for the next fifty years.

Let us remind ourselves that this war is being fought on behalf of the wider global community. As such, it is the bloodiest illustration of tyranny versus democracy in action since 1945. There is nothing good for the world in Putin’s gangster-state. It is soul-destroyingly evil. Our saviour is Ukraine, which, by acting as a proxy force, is buying time for the UK and the rest of the West to rearm themselves. We must help all we can, and swiftly make ready for a new age of warfare. We cannot afford to fail.