UkraineAlert - Atlantic Council

Zelenskyy’s Gulf region tour was a masterclass in wartime diplomacy

Peter Dickinson — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 20:59:26 +0000

As the Iran War focuses international attention on the Middle East, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy traveled to the Gulf region in late March on a whirlwind tour that showcased wartime Ukraine’s rising military profile and growing geopolitical clout.

The Ukrainian leader’s flying visit involved high level stop-offs in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. Since the outbreak of hostilities in the Middle East almost a month ago, all three Gulf states have sought Ukraine’s help to defend against Iranian drones. Kyiv initially responded by sending a number of drone interception teams to bolster regional air defenses. Zelenskyy’s recent trip aimed to build on these fledgling partnerships.

Initial results are promising. While visiting the region, Zelenskyy signed a series of what he termed as “historic” security agreements with his Gulf counterparts. While no details have been released, it is believed that these agreements envisage Ukraine sharing the country’s anti-drone experience and technological expertise in exchange for benefits including financial support, secure energy supplies, and strategic investments. There is also thought to be considerable mutual interest in developing longer term partnerships across the defense and tech sectors.

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It is easy to understand why the Gulf states gave Zelenskyy such a warm welcome. Over the past month, it has become apparent that existing air defense networks are poorly suited to the novel challenges presented by large numbers of Iranian attack drones. While sophisticated air defense systems such as the US-made Patriot are able to shoot down drones, the high cost and limited availability of interceptor missiles make such systems impractical as a long-term solution.

Nobody understands this better than the Ukrainians. Throughout the past four years, the skies above Ukraine have become a vast laboratory for the development of drone warfare. Russia initially purchased drones from Iran, but has more recently established its own domestic production lines. This has made it possible to dramatically increase the scale of attacks. Russia now routinely launches five hundred drones or more at Ukrainian cities in a single night.

Ukrainian drone producers have responded to this growing threat by developing a range of interceptor drones capable of operating within Ukraine’s existing multi-layered air defense ecosystem. These interceptors are significantly cheaper to manufacture than the drones they are targeting and can be produced in bulk. With a number of wealthy Gulf states now apparently ready to finance Ukrainian drone companies, it is likely that interceptor output will soon skyrocket.

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Signing ten-year defense partnership agreements with three leading Gulf states is a significant outcome for Ukraine. However, the positive optics that surrounded Zelenskyy’s recent regional tour may have been even more important for the country.

Since the onset of Russia’s full-scale invasion more than four years ago, Ukraine has been widely seen as a recipient of military aid and a drain on international resources. Zelenskyy’s visit directly challenged this unflattering and outdated view. For the first time, Ukraine was presented as a potentially attractive security partner with much to offer in terms of unique military experience and innovative defense technologies.

For anyone who has been closely following the Russia-Ukraine War, this is hardly news. Over past four years, Ukraine has built Europe’s largest army and has emerged as a world leader in drone warfare. The country’s formerly stagnant defense industry has expanded exponentially and now produces millions of drones every year as well as a growing arsenal of domestically developed cruise missiles.

This has made it possible for the Ukrainian military to blunt Russia’s offensives along the front lines of the war. At sea, Ukraine has used domestically designed marine drones to chase Putin’s Black Sea Fleet away from Crimea. Meanwhile, Kyiv has brought the war back to Russian territory with a long-range bombing campaign that recently knocked out around 40 percent of Russia’s oil export capacity.

Ukraine’s emergence as a major military force is already transforming the balance of power in Europe and will define Kyiv’s relationships with the wider world for decades to come. Zelenskyy’s tour of the Gulf states has helped to highlight this new geopolitical reality.

The Ukrainian leader’s trip was in many ways a masterclass in wartime diplomacy. By moving so nimbly, Zelenskyy secured vital support for the Ukrainian war effort and laid the foundations for potentially game-changing strategic partnerships with the Gulf states. Crucially, he also debunked negative perceptions of his country and enhanced Ukraine’s global standing as a drone warfare superpower.

Peter Dickinson is editor of the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert service.

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Zelenskyy’s comments come following some of the most significant Ukrainian airstrikes of the entire war. In recent days, Ukrainian long-range drones have repeatedly struck Russia’s main oil export terminals on the Baltic Sea, causing extensive damage and disrupting one of the Kremlin’s most important economic lifelines.

These Baltic drone raids came just as rising global oil prices linked to the outbreak of hostilities in the Middle East threatened to produce a major economic windfall for the Kremlin. By hitting the most critical elements of Russia’s oil export infrastructure, Ukraine is seeking to limit Putin’s ability to translate higher oil prices into increased wartime revenue.

This tactic appears to be working. Speaking to the Current Time media outlet, independent oil and gas industry analyst Boris Aronshtein described the recent series of Ukrainian strikes as “the most serious threat to exports of Russian oil” since the onset of Moscow’s full-scale invasion in 2022. “The thoughtfulness, the scale and direction of the attacks, as well as the timing of their execution; all this together produced an effect that I personally cannot recall in the four-plus years of the war,” he commented.

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Ukraine’s recent attacks on Baltic Sea oil terminals are part of a strategic bombing campaign to weaken Putin’s war machine by targeting the ports, refineries, and associated infrastructure that drive Russia’s economically crucial energy industry. This has been made possible thanks to Kyiv’s decision during the initial phase of Russia’s invasion to prioritize the development of domestically produced long-range strike drones and cruise missiles. As more drones and missiles become available, the scale of Ukraine’s strikes is steadily increasing.

Zelenskyy has repeatedly emphasized that Ukraine’s expanding long-range strike capability is critical for the current war effort and equally important as a deterrent against future Russian aggression. While long-range weapons provided by Kyiv’s partners often come with limitations on how they can be deployed, there are no such restrictions on the use of domestically produced drones and missiles.

Kremlin officials have certainly noticed Kyiv’s growing reach. In recent weeks, former Russian defense minister and current Security Council secretary Sergei Shoigu warned that Ukraine’s domestic drone program had now advanced to the point where no Russian region is safe from attack.

Ukraine’s ability to conduct large-scale airstrikes deep inside Russian territory has sparked vocal criticism from within Russia’s influential war blogger community, while also generating widespread concerns over the effectiveness of the country’s anti-drone defenses. Many have questioned how slow-moving drones could pass through multiple Russian regions to hit targets often located more than one thousand kilometers from the Ukrainian border.

In fact, the stage for Ukraine’s recent successes was set by efforts to methodically eliminate Russian air defenses and create corridors for long-range strikes. This approach looks set to continue. With much of the Kremlin’s existing air defense capacity already deployed along the front lines in Ukraine or being used to protect major Russian cities along with the palaces of Putin and his cronies, there is now thought to be little left in reserve to counter the growing Ukrainian drone threat.

The scale and frequency of Ukrainian strikes on oil and gas infrastructure will likely continue to increase in the coming months as Kyiv seeks ways to bring Putin’s invasion home to Russia. The Ukrainian authorities are hoping these attacks can help bring the end of the war closer by depriving the Kremlin of vital funding and threatening the foundations of Russia’s economic stability.

So far, Putin has rejected calls for a compromise peace. However, he may finally be forced to rethink his invasion if confronted with the prospect of dangerous destabilization on the home front. The Kremlin dictator remains determined to achieve his goal of erasing Ukrainian statehood, but he is also haunted by fears of a new Russian collapse to mirror the catastrophes of 1917 and 1991.

David Kirichenko is an associate research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society.

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Over the past year, it has become evident that Russia is using US-led negotiations to stall for time and divide the transatlantic alliance. Putin has refused to join Ukraine in accepting an unconditional ceasefire and continues to insist on maximalist goals that would mean the end of an independent Ukrainian state. Meanwhile, the Kremlin underlines its lack of commitment to peace by sending low-level delegations led by figures such as presidential aide Vladimir Medinsky, who is best known for penning radically anti-Ukrainian history textbooks.

On the battlefield, Russia’s intentions are equally clear. Despite suffering catastrophic losses over the past four years, the Russian army remains on the offensive and continues to recruit tens of thousands of new troops each month to fill the depleted ranks of Putin’s invasion force.

In parallel, Russia is escalating attacks on Ukraine’s civilian population. During the recent winter months, millions of Ukrainians found themselves without access to heating and electricity amid Arctic temperatures due to a strategic bombing campaign targeting critical civilian infrastructure that aimed to freeze the country into submission. According to UN data, 2025 was the deadliest period of the war for Ukrainian civilians since the first months of the invasion, with the number of civilian deaths rising by 31 percent compared to the previous year.

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With the Kremlin ignoring calls for a compromise peace, the only way to advance negotiations is by putting more pressure on Putin. Failure to do so could have disastrous consequences that would be felt far beyond the borders of a subjugated Ukraine.

The current Russian plan is to drag out negotiations indefinitely while grinding down Ukraine’s resistance and sowing division among Kyiv’s international allies. Moscow seeks to entice the United States with promises of lucrative economic cooperation, while supporting populist political forces across the EU in a bid to weaken European support for Ukraine. If this strategy succeeds, Ukraine may at some point become unable to defend itself.

The collapse of Ukrainian resistance would not bring peace to Europe. Instead, a victorious Russia would take control of Ukraine’s formidable military and the country’s rapidly expanding domestic defense industry. Putin would then command the two most powerful armies in Europe, with unrivaled combat experience and knowledge of drone warfare. In such circumstances, it is dangerously delusional to think that Russia would not seek to go further. At the very least, European governments would be forced to increase defense budgets to levels that would dwarf the current cost of supporting Ukraine.

The steps necessary to secure peace through strength are no secret. First and foremost, this means adequately arming Ukraine. Trump suggested in 2025 that if Russia continues to reject peace efforts, he may provide Ukraine with Tomahawk missiles. This would be a welcome and meaningful step. Other partners including Germany have also spoken of increasing Ukraine’s long-range strike capabilities. Now is the time to do so.

In parallel, sanctions measures targeting Putin’s war economy must be expanded and tightened. This should include steps to increase the costs for international customers who continue to purchase Russian oil and gas exports, thereby funding the Kremlin war machine.

Western leaders have always had the tools at their disposal to counter the Russian threat. Unfortunately, however, they have so far failed to demonstrate the political will necessary to deploy these tools effectively. This excessive caution is counter-productive and only serves to embolden the Kremlin. Moscow believes it is already at war with the West and treats calls for compromise as signs of weakness. If Kyiv’s partners are serious about stopping Russia, they must abandon appeasement and increase the pressure on Putin.

Kira Rudik is leader of the Golos party and a member of the Ukrainian parliament.

Drone superpower Ukraine is an ideal tech partner for the Gulf states

Anatoly Motkin — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 20:43:08 +0000

In recent weeks, the Iran war has shone a spotlight on Ukraine’s emergence as a drone superpower. Kyiv’s decision to help defend the Gulf states against Iranian attack drones by deploying teams of Ukrainian specialists is now highlighting the scope for broader tech sector cooperation between Ukraine and the region. This potential for partnership was underlined by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s visit to Saudi Arabia on March 26.

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, few analysts predicted that the outgunned Ukrainians would soon fundamentally alter the global understanding of unmanned systems warfare. Yet that is precisely what has happened. From improvised FPV drones strapped with grenades to the long-range naval strike drones that have forced Russia’s Black Sea Fleet to retreat, Ukraine has demonstrated that asymmetric drone warfare can neutralize conventional military advantages in ways that expensive Western defense systems never quite anticipated.

What distinguishes Ukraine’s drone program is not simply its scale, but also the speed and adaptability of its development cycles. Ukrainian engineers, often operating in basements and converted workshops, upgrade drone designs in a matter of days rather than the year-long processes typical of conventional defense procurement. Software updates are pushed out overnight. Lessons from the morning’s combat inform the afternoon’s engineering innovations. The Ukrainian battlefield has become the most demanding product testing environment in the world.

This lean, decentralized, and ruthlessly practical model has not gone unnoticed in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and their Gulf region neighbors. All have been studying the Ukrainian experience carefully. For countries that have invested hundreds of billions of dollars in conventional military hardware only to find themselves operating in a world where a commercially available drone can threaten a warship, the Ukrainian approach represents both a warning and an opportunity.

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The Gulf states are not passive observers of technological change. The UAE’s Vision 2071, Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, and Qatar’s National Vision 2030 all share a common ambition to transform their economies from hydrocarbon dependency into diversified, knowledge-based societies where technology plays a central role.

Defense and security technology, long imported wholesale from the United States, United Kingdom, and France, is increasingly identified as a sector where these nations want enhanced domestic capacity. This is not merely a matter of patriotic pride; it is increasingly recognized as a strategic necessity.

For now, ambition and execution remain some distance apart. The Gulf states have capital in abundance and a genuine appetite for technology transfer. What they have found harder to cultivate organically is the specific combination of engineering talent, risk tolerance, regulatory flexibility, and competitive urgency that drives genuine innovation. This is precisely where Ukraine’s wartime technology ecosystem presents an intriguing counterpart.

The case for deeper Ukraine-Gulf technology cooperation rests on synergies that are easy to overlook amid the noise of geopolitics. Ukraine possesses what the Gulf states most covet: Battle-proven engineering expertise; a deep talent pool in software, electronics, and materials science; and a development culture forged under conditions of extreme pressure.

Meanwhile, the Gulf states can offer what Ukraine most urgently needs: Capital, global commercial networks, and the ability to provide a stable platform for technology commercialization at a time when much of Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure and economic base remain under threat.

Drone technology sits at the most visible intersection of these complementary strengths, but it is far from the only area for potential cooperation. The ecosystem that has made Ukraine’s drone program so formidable is built on broad technical foundations including robust software engineering, AI-assisted target recognition, electronic warfare countermeasures, and sophisticated logistics platforms. Each of these capabilities has substantial civilian and commercial applications in areas that match the priorities of the Gulf states.

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Any deepening of Ukraine-Gulf technology ties must navigate a complex geopolitical landscape. The Gulf states have, with varying degrees of success, sought to maintain working relationships with both Russia and Ukraine throughout the current war.

This studied neutrality is a potentially valuable asset in fostering Ukraine-related technology cooperation. Some Ukrainian companies might prefer partners who can operate without the political complications of deeper NATO engagement, while Gulf-based joint ventures offer a flexibility that Western partners often cannot.

At the same time, the Gulf states maintain active ties with both Russia and China, creating potential risks for Ukraine’s battle-tested tech to travel further than intended. EU and US sanctions packages have repeatedly flagged UAE-based entities for supplying military and dual-use goods to Russia, including microelectronics and UAV components. The threat of Ukrainian defense IP migrating toward Beijing or Moscow through a Gulf intermediary is not theoretical. It is a structural problem that any co-production framework would need to resolve before NATO partners could endorse it.

Western governments are watching these dynamics carefully. There is a legitimate concern in Washington and Brussels about the dual-use nature of drone and AI technologies amid alarm that capabilities developed by Ukraine could, if commercialized through Gulf intermediaries, find their way into the hands of hostile actors.

These concerns will require careful management. But they should not obscure the more fundamental point that technology partnerships between Ukraine and the Gulf, conducted transparently and within a clear governance framework, could potentially serve the strategic interests of both parties and of the broader rules-based international order.

Ukraine’s drone program is the most dramatic expression of a broader technological transformation that the country has undergone since the Euromaidan Revolution of 2014 and, with accelerating urgency, since 2022. The war with Russia has in many ways turbo-charged Ukraine’s tech sector, driving engineers toward defense applications with the same creative energy previously directed at consumer software.

For the Gulf states, engaging with this ecosystem means potentially accessing not just drone know-how but a broader pipeline of technology talent and startup energy. A deliberate focus on Ukrainian technology companies, whether through direct investment, co-investment structures with Ukrainian state entities, or technology accelerator partnerships, would represent a logical extension of existing Gulf region investment strategies.

Transforming this potential into reality requires deliberate institutional architecture. At the governmental level, the frameworks for technology and investment cooperation between Ukraine and the Gulf states remain underdeveloped compared to those with EU member states or the United States. Bilateral investment treaties, technology transfer agreements, and joint venture frameworks need to be negotiated, or existing agreements updated, to reflect the current reality of Ukraine’s technological capabilities and the investment priorities of individual Gulf states.

At the industry level, dedicated platforms for technology matchmaking are needed. Existing tech sector events are useful, but a more targeted mechanism such as an annual Ukraine-Gulf technology forum could provide the sustained attention that one-off exhibitions cannot. Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation and the country’s tech industry associations have the institutional capacity to anchor such an initiative from the Ukrainian side.

At the financial level, the structure of Gulf investment in Ukrainian technology will need to be carefully designed to account for the realities of war, reconstruction, and regulatory complexity. Special purpose vehicles, escrow arrangements, and the use of third-country holding structures may be necessary to provide Gulf investors with the governance certainty they require.

The interest that Gulf region governments and investors are showing in Ukraine’s drone capabilities is, at one level, simply pragmatic. But this interest, if properly cultivated, could serve as the entry point for a much broader and more consequential relationship.

Ukraine needs to rebuild its economy, attract sustainable foreign investment, and establish itself as a technology hub that can thrive in the postwar era. The Gulf states need to accelerate their technology transitions, diversify their strategic partnerships, and develop genuine domestic innovation capacity rather than simply buying capabilities off the shelf from Western defense contractors. These are not competing objectives. They are, in important respects, the same objective approached from different directions.

The drones are the headline. But behind the headline lies the possibility of a durable, mutually beneficial technology partnership between two of the world’s most dynamic and consequential technology stories of the current decade. Whether that possibility is realized will depend on the vision and initiative of policymakers, investors, and entrepreneurs on both sides. The ingredients for something significant are present. The question is whether those involved will have the strategic clarity to combine them.

Anatoly Motkin is president of the StrategEast Center for a New Economy, a non-profit organisation with offices in the United States, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan, developing the knowledge driven economy in the Eurasian region.

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Many Ukrainians saw Tuesday’s attention-grabbing airstrike on a non-military target in central Lviv as part of Kremlin efforts to terrorize the civilian population and break Ukrainian society’s will to resist the ongoing Russian invasion. “This is how Russia tries to make normal life impossible,” commented Ukrainian member of parliament Inna Sovsun.

Over the past year, Russian attacks of civilian targets have risen sharply. According to United Nations data, 2025 was the deadliest period for Ukrainian civilians since the initial months of the full-scale invasion, with the number of deaths rising by 31 percent compared to the previous year.

Many of these civilian deaths came as a result of an escalating bombing campaign made possible by the dramatic expansion of Russia’s domestic drone production capacity. Whereas aerial attacks in 2023 and 2024 typically involved dozens of drones, it is now common for Russia to launch hundreds of unmanned bomber drones at targets across Ukraine in a single day. For example, Tuesday’s strike in central Lviv was part of a nationwide attack involving almost one thousand drones over a 24-hour period. The sheer scale of these bombing raids means that Ukrainian air defenses are often overwhelmed.

The recent winter season saw Russia’s most extensive bombing campaign against the Ukrainian civilian population of the entire war, with a coordinated air offensive targeting critical heating and power infrastructure amid Arctic temperatures. This apparent attempt to freeze millions of Ukrainians into submission in their own homes ultimately failed, but it did serve to underline Kremlin dictator Vladimir Putin’s readiness to employ terror tactics as he seeks to increase the pressure on the Ukrainian authorities and push Kyiv toward capitulation.

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Moscow’s mounting attacks on Ukrainian civilians have come against a backdrop of growing battlefield frustration for the Kremlin. Despite enjoying the military initiative throughout 2025, Russia managed to seize less than one percent of additional Ukrainian territory while suffering catastrophic losses.

This underwhelming military performance has continued in recent months. For the first time in more than two years, Ukraine actually liberated more land during February 2026 than Russia was able to occupy. The Russian army’s inability to achieve a decisive breakthrough is now causing rumblings of discontent on the home front, including among Russia’s vocal pro-war blogger community.

Despite his army’s lack of progress on the battlefield, Putin shows no signs of a willingness to compromise on the maximalist goals of his invasion. Instead, he continues to insist on peace terms that would leave postwar Ukraine isolated, defenseless, and completely at his mercy.

The Russian ruler knows he cannot afford to settle for anything less. After all the sacrifices of the past four years, a negotiated peace that left 80 percent of Ukraine beyond Kremlin control and firmly anchored in the Western world would be viewed in Moscow as a defeat of historic proportions.

With no obvious route to military victory in Ukraine, Putin finds himself trapped in a war he cannot win but dare not end for fear of weakening his grip on power and tarnishing his place in Russian history. So far, he has responded to this dilemma by increasing attacks on Ukraine’s civilian population.

There is very little evidence to suggest this approach is working. On the contrary, recent polls indicate that the bombardment of civilians has hardened Ukraine’s resolve to fight on rather than accept peace terms dictated by the Kremlin. Nevertheless, Russian attacks on civilians are likely to expand further in the coming months as Putin lacks credible alternatives to revive his faltering invasion.

Russia’s decision to bomb a heritage site in the middle of a major Ukrainian city in broad daylight was a signal of intent that points unmistakably toward a coming escalation. Putin is clearly struggling to defeat Ukraine on the battlefield, but he remains committed to extinguishing Ukrainian statehood and is prepared to ruthlessly target the civilian population in order to break the current deadlock and force the country’s surrender. Tuesday’s attack on a UNESCO site in the heart of Lviv sent a chilling message that nobody and nowhere in Ukraine is safe.

Peter Dickinson is editor of the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert service.

Lukashenka’s decision to release 250 detainees was widely welcomed. Many of those freed had been in prison since the crackdown that gripped Belarus following the country’s 2020 presidential election, which sparked unprecedented nationwide protests amid allegations of massive voter fraud. The released prisoners included Valiantsin Stefanovich and Marfa Rabkova of Belarusian human rights group Viasna, along with journalist Katsyaryna Andreyeva.

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Under President Trump, the United States has sought a thaw with Minsk. These efforts have so far led to the release of hundreds of political prisoners and an easing of US sanctions against Belarus.

Increased engagement between the US and Belarus represents a significant change in strategy following years of growing tensions between Minsk and Western capitals. Western governments have expressed alarm over Lukashenka’s repressive domestic policies, along with his involvement in Putin’s hybrid war against Europe and his complicity in the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The Trump administration initiative to reengage with Lukashenka has brought clear humanitarian benefits and has had a life-changing impact on released prisoners along with their families. Nevertheless, concerns remain that the current US approach risks creating incentives for the Belarusian authorities to imprison more domestic opponents.

Despite a number of large-scale releases over the past year, human rights groups claim there are still almost one thousand political prisoners in Belarus, with new names regularly being added to the list as arrests continue. Activists have likened this process to a “revolving door” of repression, with new political prisoners regularly detained as others are pardoned and released.

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Beyond the humanitarian dimension, the US diplomatic outreach to Minsk is seen as an attempt to counter Lukashenka’s near complete dependence on Moscow. Since the 2020 protest movement that almost ousted the Belarus dictator, he has been heavily reliant on Russia for his political survival. In exchange for its support, the Kremlin has sought to expand its grip on neighboring Belarus. This has led to what some have labeled as a “creeping annexation.”

Trump has sought to restart dialogue with Minsk against a backdrop of faltering US-led peace efforts to end the Russia-Ukraine War. So far, however, there is little indication that Lukashenka may be prepared to downgrade his backing for Putin’s invasion or offer any assistance to advance negotiations.

The Belarusian ruler has been a key Russian ally throughout the invasion. This support has included allowing Putin to use Belarus as a gateway for Russia’s initial attempt to seize Kyiv in 2022. More recently, Lukashenka has agreed to host Russian nuclear weapons. He is also accused of aiding Moscow’s drone attacks on Ukraine and partnering with China to produce ammunition for the Russian army.

Lukashenka may now be on track to join Putin among the criminal suspects wanted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague. On March 12, the ICC officially opened an investigation into alleged crimes against humanity committed by Lukashenka and his security apparatus against political opponents. In March 2023, the ICC issued a warrant for Putin’s arrest in connection with his alleged involvement in the large-scale deportation of Ukrainian children.

The latest Belarusian prisoner releases are an indication of improving relations between Washington and Minsk. However, it remains to be seen whether the benefits of this diplomatic outreach will extend beyond humanitarian goals and lead to broader gains in the security sphere. Lukshenka is no doubt ready to offer more pardons in exchange for economic incentives, but he has yet to demonstrate a willingness to decrease domestic repression or distance himself from the Kremlin.

Mercedes Sapuppo is a fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center.

Could Russia use fake separatists to destabilize Estonia and discredit NATO?

James Rice — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 20:31:17 +0000

In recent weeks, references to a pro-Russian separatist movement in neighboring Estonia have begun appearing with increasing frequency on social media. The so-called “Narva People’s Republic” clearly echoes the “People’s Republics” established by the Kremlin in eastern Ukraine during the early stages of Russia’s invasion in spring 2014. However, not everyone is convinced that this virtual movement is worthy of serious attention.

Estonia’s Internal Security Service, which has earned considerable respect in recent years for a string of high-profile counterintelligence successes, has dismissed the “Narva People’s Republic” initiative as an information operation. Meanwhile, the Estonian Foreign Intelligence Service doubts any direct Russian government involvement.

A journalist from the Estonian newspaper Postimees recently managed to infiltrate a Telegram chat group and expose the “Narva People’s Republic” as a tiny operation being run by someone likely outside Estonia with apparent ties to St. Petersburg. Given the small scale of the campaign, there is a lively debate in Estonia and across social media over whether highlighting it is a sensible precautionary measure or counterproductive.

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Many have inevitably drawn comparisons with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the role played by fake separatist movements created by the Kremlin to justify Moscow’s expansionist agenda in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region. When separatist propaganda about “People’s Republics” first began appearing in Ukraine in the years prior to the onset of Russian aggression in 2014, it was not initially taken seriously.

Recent references to a “Narva People’s Republic” appear to refer to the entire Ida-Viru County in northeastern Estonia rather than the city of Narva alone. Like Ukraine’s Donbas, Ida-Viru County was subject to an extended period of russification. During the Soviet occupation following World War II, large numbers of Russian-speakers from various parts of the Soviet Union were settled in Narva and in newly built Soviet industrial cities in the region.

With a current population that remains dominated by Russian-speakers and ethnic Russians, this would seem to make Ida-Viru County ripe for the Kremlin’s influence operations and grievance politics. However, the Estonian government has invested significantly in the region’s economic development and cultural integration.

Also, the fact that many residents of Estonia’s northeast have family links to Russia means they are well aware that they currently enjoy a far better standard of living than most people across the Narva River in the Russian Federation. With Estonia, like Ukraine, one must avoid the fallacy of conflating language with loyalty.

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The fact that a grassroots separatist movement is unlikely to develop in Ida-Viru County will not necessarily prevent Russia from using the separatist narrative to advance its agenda. When efforts to cultivate a local separatist movement in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine proved insufficient in 2014, the Kremlin sent in Russian citizens and military personnel without insignia. Soon after, they were followed by an undeclared invasion force.

Russia’s goal in Estonia might not be military conquest. It is often suggested that Moscow could aim to test NATO’s collective security commitments and discredit the alliance by launching a relatively minor incursion and claiming a small chunk of Estonian territory on the pretext of protecting compatriots. This would be much easier said than done, however, given Estonia’s heavily monitored border, where even the smallest infraction is noticed quickly. In such a case, Estonia would not wait for NATO to respond.

Estonian officials can be prickly about any portrayal of their country as particularly vulnerable or overly reliant on others for security. Since Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine, there have been endless articles asking “is Narva next?” This framing has been met with strong push back from Estonian security experts.

Similarly, war games exercises resulting in a quick Russian takeover of the Baltic region have been criticized by Estonian officials as lacking understanding of the Baltic states’ own security posture to the point of being insulting. In common with nearby Finland, Latvia, and Lithuania, Estonia employs a whole of society “total defense” concept that should not be underestimated.

Due to the enormous losses it is sustaining in Ukraine, Russia’s military is currently thought to be in no position to launch an invasion of Estonia. In its annual report for 2026, Estonia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, while clear-eyed about the Kremlin’s expansionist ambitions, assessed that Russia has no intention of militarily attacking Estonia or any other NATO member state in the present year, or likely the next.

It is no wonder that Estonia’s foreign and defense policy has been focused on marshaling support for Ukraine as it confronts Russian aggression. It is also easy to understand why elements in Russia would like to create the impression of a looming threat to Estonia. So far, Estonia’s reaction to social media chatter about a supposed separatist movement has been typically phlegmatic. As this narrative has drawn media attention, we can expect to see it pushed further and recycled. Estonia’s NATO allies should follow Tallinn’s lead and react by remaining alert but calm.

James Rice is a doctoral student at the Institute of World Politics and former legislative director for US Senator Chuck Grassley.

This uncompromising stance makes perfect sense when viewed from Putin’s perspective. After all, the invasion he unleashed in 2022 has cost countless Russian lives and plunged the country into a new Cold War. Putin knows that only total victory can justify these sacrifices.

If Putin accepted the peace terms currently on offer, this would leave around 80 percent of Ukraine free and beyond Kremlin control. Most Russians would regard that as a disastrous defeat. Putin’s dreams of entering Russian history alongside Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, and Stalin would be shattered. Instead, he would be condemned as the man who lost Ukraine.

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In a very real sense, Putin is caught in a trap of his own making and has no real choice but to fight on. At the same time, however, it would be wrong to suggest that the Kremlin dictator is merely seeking to postpone the inevitable. On the contrary, he remains convinced that the goals of the invasion are still achievable and is now counting on Western disunity to hand him victory in Ukraine.

Putin’s low opinion of the democratic world is based on personal experience. Time and again throughout his reign, Russia’s aggressive actions have sparked vocal condemnation from Western capitals followed with indecent haste by calls for a return to dialogue and “business as usual.”

Western leaders loudly condemned Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia, but were soon queuing up to reset relations with the Kremlin. The same lack of resolve was on display following Russia’s 2014 seizure of Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region, with minimal costs imposed on Moscow and multiple European countries actually increasing their dependence on Russian energy exports.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Putin treats the proclamations of his Western counterparts with thinly veiled contempt. While he has been unpleasantly surprised since 2022 by the scale of support for Ukraine, the Russian leader’s own dealings with his Western counterparts have encouraged him to conclude that this unity will prove temporary. As the war grinds into a fifth year with no end in sight, Putin believes he can ultimately outlast the West.

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Shifts within the Western alliance over the past year are fueling confidence in Moscow that current levels of support for Ukraine will not last forever. Since returning to the White House in January 2025, US President Donald Trump has cut military aid to Ukraine and sought to reposition the United States as an intermediary in peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine.

This has placed the burden of supporting the Ukrainian war effort firmly on Europe. According to recent Kiel Institute data, Ukraine’s European partners have done a good job of filling this gap. However, the majority of aid is now coming from a relatively small group of nations including Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, and Britain. This places Ukraine’s war effort on fragile foundations.

Meanwhile, a ninety billion euro financing package agreed by EU leaders remains blocked by Hungary. This is part of long-term pattern that has seen Hungary’s pro-Kremlin Prime Minister Viktor Orban repeatedly obstruct or delay efforts by the European Union to strengthen Ukraine or increase pressure on Putin.

With far-right populist parties currently riding high in the polls throughout Europe, Putin also has good cause for optimism over the possible imminent appearance of more Orban-style allies. This could help the Kremlin in its efforts to divide and weaken Europe from within.

Broader geopolitical developments are also placing new strains on Western unity and threatening to undermine backing for Ukraine. The US-Israeli joint operation against Iran is currently causing unprecedented tension among NATO allies, with European countries reluctant to participate in efforts to safeguard the Strait of Hormuz. This has highlighted a growing transatlantic divide that could seriously weaken Ukraine’s position.

Putin cannot risk a compromise peace in Ukraine, but he remains confident that time is on his side. While the Russian army has been unable to defeat Ukraine on the battlefield, Putin is prepared to wait until Western disunity leaves the Ukrainians stripped of support and at his mercy. While this would not mean an immediate end to the carnage, Putin believes a dramatic decline in Western support would finally allow Russia to pummel an exposed and abandoned Ukraine into submission.

Mykola Bielieskov is a research fellow at the National Institute for Strategic Studies and a senior analyst at Ukrainian NGO “Come Back Alive.” The views expressed in this article are the author’s personal position and do not reflect the opinions or views of NISS or Come Back Alive.

Wartime Ukraine offers global lessons on the future of cyber resilience

Oleksandr Bakalynskyi, Maggie McDonough — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 17:58:46 +0000

The twelve years of cyber warfare that have accompanied Russia’s escalating invasion of Ukraine have transformed the country’s digital environment into a proving ground for modern conflict. Persistent cyber attacks against government systems, critical infrastructure, energy networks, media outlets, and the financial sector have become a defining feature of Ukraine’s wartime reality. Amid this sustained pressure, Ukraine has demonstrated an ability to defend itself and has developed a degree of cyber resilience that is now embedded in the digital state.

Russian aggression in the cyber sphere has forced Ukraine into rapid and often improvised defense. Coordination mechanisms have emerged across government agencies, volunteer networks, and private sector IT firms, with operational responses conducted under constant pressure. Permanent mobilization, however, is not sustainable. Instead, the goal is to codify the next phase of reform in Ukraine’s evolving cyber security strategy.

For Ukraine, the strategic objective is no longer limited to repelling cyber attacks. It is to ensure continuity of state functions even when attacks succeed. This requires a national cyber resilience framework that encompasses government, business, and civil society. It demands continuous professional training along with strengthened legislative and risk management frameworks. It also implies a culture of cyber hygiene at the citizen level. Together, these measures represent a shift from episodic defense to durable digital statehood.

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Ukraine’s experience over the past twelve years underscores a central truth of cyber defense: People play a decisive role in cyber security. Since 2014, thousands of professionals from the private sector, volunteer networks, and academia have mobilized to defend Ukraine’s digital front. Sustaining this momentum requires institutional support and a long-term talent strategy.

Priority areas include integrating cyber education across schools, universities, and military institutions. Partnerships between industry and academia should undergo expansion through education and internships. Workforce development is not merely a labor market issue; it is a pillar of cyber sovereignty and continuity of government. It is also crucial to establish a national cyber reserve supported by access to cyber ranges and allied training platforms.

Wartime conditions have already accelerated innovation in Ukraine. Cloud-based backups, relocation of critical data to secure environments abroad, and decentralized platforms for citizen services are now routine. These practices must be institutionalized to endure beyond the war. Priorities include embedding innovations into permanent government processes and establishing applied cyber research centers at universities.

The convergence of academia, defense institutions, and the technology sector in wartime Ukraine is enabling a distinct national cyber security model to emerge rooted in operational experience and continuous adaptation. It is a model that complements existing frameworks while reflecting Ukraine’s realities. As a result, Ukraine has become an integral actor within the Euro-Atlantic cyber ecosystem.

At the international level, cooperation with the EU, NATO, United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Japan has evolved from ad hoc assistance to structured partnerships. Core focuses include joint threat intelligence-sharing mechanisms; harmonization with EU and NATO standards; participation in multinational exercises; and the development of a shared resilience space in which national resilience contributes to collective defense. Ukraine’s expertise positions it not only as a recipient of assistance, but increasingly as an exporter of operational resilience models to partners confronting hybrid threats.

Ukraine’s progress demonstrates the importance of embedding cyber resilience in institutional architecture rather than treating it as a reactive function. A resilience-by-design model entails distributed system architecture to reduce single points of failure. It requires adoption of open standards and transparent protocols, along with continuous training and simulations embedded in institutional life cycles.

Psychological resilience training for cyber professionals operating under sustained pressure and information warfare conditions is also crucial. This should position cyber security as a governance principle, framing Ukraine not only as a state under attack but as a testing ground for next generation digital resilience.

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Since the onset of Russia’s invasion in 2014, Ukraine has become the world’s most consequential real-time laboratory for cyber resilience. The country’s experience demonstrates that effective cyber security is an integrated system encompassing governance, education, law, diplomacy, and economic resilience. Institutionalizing these lessons into a durable national cyber resilience ecosystem will underpin postwar recovery and long-term digital sovereignty.

For partners, Ukraine’s experience offers much more than a narrative of resistance. It represents a practical plan for collective security for the coming decades of international military conflicts, each of which will have a mandatory digital component.

As Ukraine develops its forthcoming National Cybersecurity Strategy 2.0, several priorities should guide the next phase of institutional reform. First, Ukraine should expand the doctrine of active cyber protection, enabling defensive operations that proactively detect, disrupt, and neutralize threats before they impact critical systems.

Second, the continued Euro-integration of Ukraine’s cyber regulatory framework will be essential. This should include alignment with EU directives such as NIS2, the Critical Infrastructure Resilience framework, and the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), ensuring interoperability with European cyber governance standards.

Third, Ukraine should actively participate in the development of a European cyber shield. The goal should be a collective resilience architecture built on shared threat intelligence, joint incident response mechanisms, and coordinated defensive capabilities across the continent.

Fourth, long-term resilience requires sustained investment in cyber workforce development aligned with the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0. This should include standardized training pathways, public-private talent pipelines, and the expansion of national cyber reserve capacities.

Fifth, strengthening cyber security capacity at the regional administration level across Ukraine will be vital. This can help ensure that local governments and regional critical infrastructure operators possess the operational capabilities and resources necessary to implement national cyber resilience policies effectively.

Finally, Ukraine’s next cyber strategy should also define a clear wartime framework that establishes legal authorities, operational coordination mechanisms, and public–private responsibilities for defending national digital and operational infrastructure during periods of armed conflict or hybrid attack.

With each subsequent international conflict, the digital component will grow in importance and become an increasingly critical part of the battlefield. This is already becoming clear in the current context of revolutionary progress in robotics, the development of AI, big data, parallel computing, and ever-accelerating data transmission technologies.

In this evolving environment, success will no longer depend on greater human or conventional military resources, but on an innovative, flexible, and progressive approach toward the development and use of the latest technologies. In these conditions, cyber resilience is not only a security strategy but also the foundation of freedom.

Dr. Oleksandr Bakalinskyi is a Senior Researcher at the G. E. Pukhov Institute for Modeling in Energy Engineering at the National Academy of Sciences in Ukraine. Maggie McDonough is the Senior Vice President and Chief Innovation Officer at the Baltimore Development Corporation. She was previously affiliated with the Purdue Applied Research Institute (PARI) and Purdue’s Center for Education & Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS), where she served as a technical advisor on global cyber security resilience programming.

The Iran war is good for the Russian economy but bad for Putin’s prestige

Maksym Beznosiuk, Will Dixon — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 15:50:23 +0000

Two weeks since the outbreak of the Iran war, commentators around the world are already declaring Vladimir Putin the winner. It is easy to see why so many seem to believe that the Russian President will emerge as the main beneficiary of escalating hostilities in the Middle East. After all, from energy exports to the invasion of Ukraine, Putin clearly has much to gain.

The Russian economy has been showing signs of severe strain in recent months as the combined toll of international sanctions, Ukrainian airstrikes, and ballooning defense spending negatively impact the Kremlin coffers. The Iran war now threatens to transform this picture in Moscow’s favor.

With energy prices already spiking and the Strait of Hormuz blocked, the world is entering a fuel crisis that could reinvigorate Putin’s war economy. The United States has already relaxed sanctions on the Kremlin in a bid to ease energy pressures elsewhere. If the current conflict becomes a prolonged campaign, Moscow may be able to repair much of the economic damage done over the past four years.

The Iran war could also provide a more direct boost for Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. With the Trump administration now firmly focused on the Middle East, the Kremlin will face significantly less diplomatic pressure to engage in US-led peace talks with Ukraine, while Kyiv will struggle to keep Russia’s invasion high on the international agenda.

Crucially, the US is expected to prioritize the supply of air defense interceptor missiles to the Middle East over Ukraine. With limited numbers of missiles produced annually, this means Ukrainian air defense crews might soon find themselves short of the ammunition required to defend their cities and infrastructure against Russian ballistic missiles. The consequences for the civilian population could be disastrous.

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Despite these potential advantages, there is little sign of celebration in the Kremlin. While Russia appears well-positioned to benefit economically and militarily, the US-led war with Iran has also served to highlight Russia’s declining international influence and has underlined Moscow’s limitations as an ally.

Since the onset of hostilities at the end of February, the Kremlin has restricted itself to a limited number of statements and has largely refrained from any strong condemnation of the United States. While reports indicate that Moscow is providing Iran with military assistance including targeting data and drone warfare expertise, the Russian response has been strikingly muted and has fallen far short of America’s very public support for Ukraine following Putin’s 2022 invasion.

Putin’s cautious reaction is particularly noteworthy in light of the support Iran has provided to Russia over the past four years. Since 2022, Tehran has supplied Moscow with large quantities of drones, missiles, and ammunition. This backing proved especially important during the early stages of the war, before Russia was able to expand domestic production and diversify its lines of supply.

Despite much speculation over an emerging “Axis of Autocrats” including both Russia and Iran, Putin has so far proved unwilling or unable to repay Tehran for its earlier backing. While Russian and Iranian officials hailed the signing of a “comprehensive strategic partnership agreement” in January 2025, this has not translated into significant Russian aid since the current conflict erupted.

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Russia’s failure to robustly support its Iranian allies is the latest in a series of similar geopolitical setbacks since the beginning of the full-scale Ukraine invasion more than four years ago. In late 2022, Kremlin credibility was dented by Moscow’s inability to prevent a renewal of hostilities between Azerbaijan and Armenia, leading to the collapse of Russia’s traditional security role in the South Caucasus. US President Donald Trump has since stepped into the void to lead peace efforts in the region.

The fall of Kremlin-backed Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad was to prove an even more humiliating blow for Putin. For almost a decade, Moscow had invested significant military and diplomatic resources to keep Assad in power. This engagement was touted by Moscow as proof of Russia’s return to great power status. However, when the Assad regime began to rapidly unravel in late 2024, Russia was unable to intervene. Instead, the Kremlin limited itself to offering the ousted Syrian leader asylum.

Likewise, Russia proved powerless to assist Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro when he was captured by the United States in early 2026. Moscow was seen as a key strategic partner of Maduro and had provided Caracas with a wide range of financial and security backing. Days before the American operation, Russia was still voicing its “full support” for Venezuela. However, the Kremlin ultimately took no action when US forces swooped.

From Armenia and Syria to Venezuela and Iran, Moscow’s obvious inability to aid its allies in times of crisis has seriously damaged Russia’s reputation as a global power. While the Kremlin is still capable of supplying weapons and spreading propaganda, these limited tools are no substitute for the kind of substantial security support that potential partners seek.

For Putin, this matters. Throughout his reign, he has carefully cultivated a strongman image and sought to reassert Russia’s claims to superpower status. However, the world’s leading powers do not maintain their influence through rhetoric alone.

Following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s repeated failure to defend its international allies has revealed the underwhelming reality behind Putin’s posturing. This loss of prestige has very practical implications for Moscow’s ability to attract partners and project strength on the world stage. Putin hoped that by conquering Ukraine, he could return Russia to the dominant role it occupied during the Cold War. Instead, he has become bogged down in an invasion that has ruthlessly exposed modern Russia’s geopolitical limitations.

William Dixon is a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Service Institute specializing in cyber and international security issues. Maksym Beznosiuk is a strategy and security analyst whose work focuses on Russia, Ukraine, and international security.

The new UN report noted that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s direct involvement in the mass deportations has been “visible from the outset.” This tallies with existing criminal charges against Putin brought by the International Criminal Court in The Hague. In spring 2023, ICC officials issued an arrest warrant for Putin for his personal role in Russia’s child abduction program. This warrant has since prevented the Kremlin dictator from attending a number of international summits due to fears that he may face arrest for war crimes.

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This is not the first time United Nations investigators have accused Russia of committing crimes against humanity during the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. A spring 2025 UN probe concluded that the large-scale detention of Ukrainians in occupied regions of the country represented a “systematic attack against the civilian population” that qualified as a crime against humanity. In areas of Ukraine currently under Kremlin control, Moscow is accused of conducting a Stalin-style terror campaign of mass arrests targeting thousands of civilians including elected officials, journalists, civil society activists, religious leaders, cultural figures, and military veterans.

Similarly, a more recent UN investigation into targeted Russian drone strikes against the civilian population in three front line regions of southern Ukraine determined that these aerial attacks amount to a crime against humanity. The killings are clearly intentional, United Nations investigators concluded, with Russian troops reportedly using video-guided drones to hunt down individual victims. Terrified locals refer to Russia’s drone strikes on civilians as a “human safari.”

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The Kremlin’s ongoing program of child deportations and accompanying anti-Ukrainian indoctrination are viewed in Kyiv as elements of a broader Russian plan to erase Ukrainian national identity entirely. Throughout occupied regions of Ukraine, the Russian authorities are ruthlessly eradicating all traces of Ukrainian statehood, history, language, and cultural heritage. Meanwhile, local residents are being forced to accept Russian citizenship. Anyone who refuses to cooperate risks being denied access to basic public services or deported.

Moscow’s efforts to forcibly Russify thousands of abducted Ukrainian children have been widely cited as evidence of the genocidal intent underpinning Russia’s invasion. This is hardly surprising. The 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention specifically identifies “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group” as one of five internationally recognized acts of genocide.

Russia rejects United Nations claims that it is committing crimes against humanity in Ukraine and has consistently denied allegations of mass child abductions. Instead, Kremlin officials maintain that the large-scale transfer of Ukrainian children from occupied Ukraine to Russia is a routine wartime safety measure. However, nobody in Moscow has been able to explain why it is necessary to indoctrinate children against their native Ukraine and force them to adopt a Russian national identity in order ensure their safety.

Peter Dickinson is editor of the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert service.

Nobody is better equipped to address this challenge than Ukraine. Since 2022, the Ukrainians have gained unrivaled experience defending their country against massive Russian drone attacks on an almost daily basis. They have learned to do so in a cost-effective and sustainable manner by employing a wide range of tools including cheap interceptor drones, sophisticated monitoring systems, electronic warfare equipment, and helicopter gunships.

Since the outbreak of hostilities in the Middle East, Ukraine has signaled a readiness to share its drone warfare experience with the United States and its Gulf region allies. Kyiv’s offer has been readily accepted. As a result, the Ukrainian drone defense crews currently deploying to the Middle East are likely to be the first of many. Others are also taking note. Berlin confirmed plans this week to have Ukrainian experts train German troops, while Romania unveiled a major joint venture to co-produce drones together with Ukraine.

This is having a profound impact on Ukraine’s international image. Until recently, Ukraine was widely regarded as a country with little leverage that was heavily dependent on the West for survival. In light of recent developments, a radically different picture is now emerging of Ukraine as a valuable security partner and a major military power in its own right.

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Ukraine’s rise to drone superpower status has been remarkably rapid. The country first began experimenting with the use of drones on the battlefield in the wake of Russia’s initial invasion in 2014. However, major breakthroughs would not take place until the full-scale invasion of 2022.

In the space of just four years, Ukraine has gone from defense tech startup to global leader in the art of drone warfare. This remarkable progress owes much to Ukraine’s vibrant prewar tech sector and the country’s strong entrepreneurial spirit, which have combined to turbo-charge the wartime development of a domestic drone manufacturing sector. The existential nature of the Russian threat has also played a key role, providing local producers and government officials with all the motivation they need to remove potential roadblocks and maximize domestic output.

Ukrainian officials recognized early in the war that they could not rely on Western partners to supply the necessary weapons and ammunition on time and in sufficient quantities. Prioritizing the mass production of comparatively cheap drones was identified as Ukraine’s most realistic strategy as the country sought to counter Russia’s often overwhelming advantages in terms of manpower and conventional firepower. The results speak for themselves. When the full-scale invasion began, Ukraine only had a handful of drone producers. In 2026, domestic output is expected to reach seven million drones.

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Ukraine’s strategic emphasis on drones has transformed the war on land, in the air, and at sea. Around three-quarters of all Russian battlefield casualties are now inflicted by Ukrainian drones. Meanwhile, a drone-dominated kill zone stretching for over ten kilometers either side of the front lines makes any major offensive operations fraught with danger for the attackers. As the Russian invasion enters a fifth year, Ukraine’s “drone wall” is now the key to the country’s defensive strategy.

At sea, Kyiv has used domestically developed naval drones to break the Russian blockade of Ukraine’s Black Sea ports and neutralize around one-third of Russia’s entire Black Sea Fleet. Following a string of naval humiliations, Putin was forced to withdraw the remainder of his warships from Crimea to the relative safety of Russia itself.

Ukraine’s naval drones are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Some recent models have been armed with anti-aircraft missile capabilities, while others have served as mini aircraft carriers for smaller drones. This creative use of maritime drone technologies has made it possible for Ukraine to gain the upper hand in the Battle of the Black Sea, despite not having a conventional navy to speak of.

Ukraine’s growing drone arsenal also includes long-range drones that have made it possible to strike targets deep inside Russia. In recent years, Kyiv has escalated attacks on military and industrial sites located over one thousand kilometers from the Ukrainian border. This has expanded the geographical scope of the war and brought Putin’s invasion home to Russia in ways that the Kremlin propaganda machine is unable to censor.

Ukraine’s new friends in the Gulf region are primarily interested in Kyiv’s interceptor drone technologies. These weapons have been developed in response to Russia’s own innovative use of attack drones. Since acquiring the blueprints from Iran during the early stages of the war, Russia has significantly upgraded its fleet of Shahed drones to make them bigger, faster, and more maneuverable. Moscow has also dramatically increased production, enabling far larger nightly attacks on targets throughout Ukraine.

The Ukrainian authorities have responded to this escalating Russian bombardment by developing a series of interceptor drones that can be mass produced for a fraction of the cost of traditional air defense missiles. Customers including oil giant Saudi Aramco are reportedly now queuing up to acquire these Ukrainian interceptors.

When Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he expected an easy victory and vowed to “demilitarize” the country. With Ukrainian drone specialists now training NATO forces while guarding Gulf petrostates and US military bases, it is safe to say that this attempted demilitarization has backfired in spectacular fashion.

Rather than leaving Kyiv disarmed and defenseless, the war unleashed by Putin four years ago has transformed Ukraine into a drone superpower. This newfound status is already changing outside perceptions of the country and looks set to further strengthen Ukraine’s geopolitical standing as more countries seek to benefit from Kyiv’s drone warfare expertise. Zelenskyy clearly holds plenty of cards and is prepared to play them.

David Kirichenko is an associate research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society.

Putin signals his lack of interest in peace by making absurd demands that no Ukrainian government could possibly accept. He calls for Ukraine to surrender the country’s most heavily fortified region without a fight, despite the fact that the Russian army has been unable to capture this territory for more than a decade. He demands a Russian veto over security guarantees for postwar Ukraine, while insisting on the right to interfere in Ukrainian domestic affairs. He questions the legitimacy of the Ukrainian government and calls for wartime elections, despite having systematically dismantled Russia’s own fledgling democracy during his twenty-six year reign.

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Putin’s uncompromising position makes perfect sense when viewed through the prism of Russian imperialism. The peace terms being offered by Trump, which would allow Moscow to retain the approximately 20 percent of Ukraine currently under Russian occupation, may seem generous, but the Kremlin dictator knows he cannot accept anything less than Kyiv’s complete capitulation. For Putin, the survival of a sovereign, democratic Ukraine would be a political death sentence. Russian audiences would view such a deal as a defeat of historic proportions. Rather than securing his legacy as one of Russia’s greatest rulers, Putin would be condemned as the man who lost Ukraine.

In practical terms, Putin has also come to depend on the war. Over the past four years, it has become the main source of his legitimacy and power. The Russian economy now relies heavily on war-related spending. Russian society as a whole has undergone a radicalization, making it possible to impose new levels of censorship, repression, and propaganda. Without the war, this entire edifice could collapse.

Then there is the issue of Russia’s military veterans. Almost a million men are currently serving in Ukraine. Most have been brutalized by a daily ration of war crimes amid staggering casualties. The vast majority are also now accustomed to receiving salaries far in excess of anything they could hope to earn in Russia. Putin is no doubt painfully aware that if he demobilizes these damaged and dangerous men, he would be unleashing a destabilizing force that could cause chaos across Russia. The only way to prevent this is by extending the invasion indefinitely.

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None of this means that peace is impossible. In order to secure a sustainable settlement, however, current efforts to appease Putin must end. It is a grave mistake to treat the aggressor and the victim as equals, and an even bigger blunder to pressure the victim into further concessions. Bringing Putin out of international isolation only emboldens him. In Putin’s zero-sum world, goodwill gestures are signs of weakness. It is no coincidence that as calls for a compromise deal have grown louder over the past year, Russia’s bombardment of Ukraine’s civilian population has intensified.

Western leaders must instead send an unambiguous message to Moscow that they are not prepared to reward Russian aggression. The objective should be to raise the costs of the invasion for the Kremlin until continuing the war poses risks to Putin’s grip on power inside Russia. This goal is realistic. With Putin’s army struggling to achieve any major breakthroughs in Ukraine despite suffering catastrophic casualties, rumblings of discontent are growing. Meanwhile, on the domestic front, the Russian economy is beginning to show signs of serious strain. Now is the time to increase the pressure on Putin.

Tightening economic sanctions is critical. This means tougher measures against Russia’s energy exports along with Putin’s shadow fleet of tankers. It also means implementing secondary sanctions against those who fund the war by purchasing Russian oil and gas. Recent decisions to relax sanctions temporarily in response to the US war in Iran and spiraling global energy prices are a step in the wrong direction that threatens to rescue the Russian economy and fuel international instability. Putin will not stop the invasion until he runs out of money.

Kyiv’s partners must also provide Ukraine with the military backing to defeat and deter Russia. This should include credible long-term commitments that dash any Russian hopes of outlasting the West in Ukraine. Western countries must overcome their crippling fear of escalation and provide Ukraine with the long-range weapons that will make it possible to strike deep inside Russia. This will allow Ukraine to target Putin’s war machine and create the kind of deterrence that could prevent future repeats of the current invasion.

If Putin is unable to advance in Ukraine while facing mounting economic costs and escalating destruction on the home front, he may finally have to accept that continuing the war poses very real dangers for the stability of his regime. At that point, genuine peace talks could prove possible.

Subsequent negotiations must focus on protecting Ukraine against further Russian aggression. It is vital that any security guarantees transcend political cycles in Western capitals and leave Putin in no doubt that a renewed attack on Ukraine could spark the collapse of the Russian Federation.

The best security guarantees of all remain NATO membership or nuclear status. If these options are currently not feasible, Ukraine needs to receive clear commitments from its major partners that spell out the responses Russia can expect.

Above all, Ukraine’s own armed forces must receive the necessary support to serve as the country’s ultimate security guarantee. European countries have an obvious self-interest in maintaining Ukraine’s military strength. After all, a strong Ukraine is now indispensable for Europe’s broader defense strategy as the continent confronts resurgent Russian imperialism.

Current Western efforts to broker a compromise peace with Putin are based on false assumptions and wishful thinking. This misguided approach only encourages Russia and other authoritarian regimes including Iran, China, and North Korea to pursue aggressive foreign policies. If the West wants a sustainable peace in Europe, it must work to ensure Putin’s defeat in Ukraine.

Oleksandr Merezhko is a member of the Ukrainian Parliament for the Servant of the People Party and Chair of the Ukrainian Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee.

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When Russia occupied Crimea in 2014 and shortly afterward invaded east Ukraine’s Donbas region, many observers in Washington and European capitals saw it as a shocking but limited land grab. Many accepted the narrative that Crimea and eastern Ukraine were “Russian lands,” populated by Russian speakers who supposedly wanted to be part of Russia. Some even argued that Moscow was merely responding to local preferences, albeit illegally. Even then, it was clear that this reading was dangerously wrong. In reality, Moscow was asserting a unilateral right to intervene wherever it claimed the population as compatriots, regardless of what those communities actually wanted.

The idea of protecting Russian compatriots has long served as the backbone of a broader Kremlin project aimed at redrawing borders and reasserting Russian dominance across the post‑Soviet space. Similar tactics including cultural outreach, imperialistic propaganda, the distribution of Russian passports, and military intervention, have been evident in Moldova’s Transnistria region, Georgia’s South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and Ukraine. This approach also poses an obvious threat to a range of other countries.

Russia’s full‑scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 confirmed that Crimea was not an exception but a pilot project. Putin’s justification for war leaned heavily on the idea of restoring Russia’s so-called historical unity and protecting Russian speakers in the Donbas region from alleged discrimination.

Alarmingly, even as Russia bombed Ukrainian cities and attempted to seize Kyiv, many Western discussions continued to treat parts of Ukraine as spaces where Russia’s claims might be partially legitimate or at least negotiable. This conceptual carve‑out has endured over the past four years, subtly shaping proposals to freeze the conflict along the current lines of control.

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The idea of a single, unified Russian people stretching across borders is less a sociological reality than a political ambition. The Kremlin has long blurred the lines between ethnic Russians, Russian speakers, non‑Russian ethnic minorities such as Abkhazians and Ossetians, and political “compatriots.” This allows Moscow to manufacture a constituency that justifies military intervention, even where Russian speakers are a minority or have no desire for Moscow’s protection.

This dynamic is visible in Ukraine today. Moscow claims to be acting on behalf of Ukraine’s Russian‑speaking communities, but in practice it has bombed, tortured, deported, and repressed these communities throughout the occupied territories. Meanwhile, millions of Ukrainians who speak Russian at home, including many in cities like Kharkiv and Odesa, have chosen to resist Russian forces, volunteer for the Ukrainian army, or flee westward, contradicting the notion that language determines loyalty.

Putin’s talk of defending compatriots is a not a minority rights policy; it is a carefully crafted propaganda script to justify military aggression. First, Moscow defines a broad, elastic category of compatriots. Then it alleges discrimination against them. The target group next receives Russian passports. Finally, the Kremlin claims a duty to intervene militarily. When international policymakers and commentators accept the vocabulary of “protection” on Moscow’s terms, they are accepting the logic of empire. After all, modern borders depend on international law not historical grievance or dubious ethnic claims.

As the largest European invasion since World War II enters a fifth year, Western policy is still constrained by the remnants of these myths. When officials suggest that a peace settlement might involve Ukraine “recognizing realities on the ground” in Crimea or the occupied east of the country, they echo the idea that these territories are somehow less Ukrainian because of their demographic and linguistic profile.

In practice, this means legitimizing and rewarding the Kremlin’s compatriot policy. Accepting this logic in Ukraine would signal that using Russian speakers and the protection of ethnic Russians as a pretext for occupation and annexation is an acceptable tool of statecraft. That message would not only entrench Russia’s gains in Ukraine; it would also open the door to similar tactics in other states from Kazakhstan to the Baltics, where Moscow could once again weaponise bogus historical narratives to justify future aggression.

To move toward real peace, Western governments need to update not only their military and economic policies, but also their mental maps. That means rejecting Russia’s imperial expansion strategy built on historical myths that foster the quiet assumption that Crimea and eastern Ukraine are “different” in ways that justify special rights for Moscow. Instead, any settlement must reflect international law and the internationally recognized borders of Ukraine, rather than Putin’s imperial ambitions.

As long as the West grants tacit legitimacy to Russia’s compatriot doctrine and Putin’s claims to “historically Russian lands” in Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, and beyond, it will be extremely difficult to end the current war in a manner that will safeguard European security.

Dr. Agnia Grigas is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and author of Beyond Crimea: The New Russian Empire.

Iran war could save Vladimir Putin’s failing Ukraine invasion

Peter Dickinson — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 22:34:17 +0000

The mood in Moscow was strikingly subdued in late February as the country marked four years since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Kremlin officials made little mention of the anniversary, while the heavily censored Russian media offered only minimal coverage. With no end in sight to the increasingly costly war, this lack of fanfare is easy to understand. However, events currently unfolding in the Middle East may yet rescue Vladimir Putin’s faltering invasion.

When Putin first announced the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, he vowed to “demilitarize” and “denazify” Ukraine. He has also sought to justify the war as a campaign against NATO expansion and crusade to revive Russia’s great power status. By almost any measure, Putin has failed to achieve these goals.

The Russian leader’s inability to demilitarize Ukraine has been perhaps his most glaring failure. Indeed, few countries have ever looked less demilitarized than today’s Ukraine. As the war with Russia enters a fifth year, Ukraine possesses Europe’s largest army and is a world leader in drone warfare. From NATO members to Gulf petrostates, countries are now queuing up to access Ukraine’s unrivalled expertise. Meanwhile, a consensus is emerging in European capitals that Ukraine has an indispensable role to play in the future security of the continent.

Likewise, Putin’s bid to “denazify” Ukraine has proved spectacularly counterproductive. The entire concept of “denazification” is Kremlin code for the eradication of Ukrainian national identity, but Putin’s invasion has sparked an unprecedented surge in patriotism among the Ukrainian population along with a deep distrust of all things Russian. As a result, it is now virtually impossible to imagine the emergence of a pro-Russian government in Kyiv, unless permanently propped up by Kremlin bayonets.

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Putin has gone to great lengths to blame the war on NATO’s post-1991 eastward expansion beyond the old Iron Curtain. Far from arresting or reversing this process, Russia’s actions have sparked a new and highly significant wave of enlargement. In response to the invasion of Ukraine, both Finland and Sweden opted to abandon decades of neutrality and join NATO. This has more than doubled Russia’s shared border with the alliance, while also transforming the Baltic Sea into a NATO lake.

On the global stage, the invasion of Ukraine has left Russia unable to project strength or justify its claims to great power status. With the vast majority of his military forces deployed in Ukraine, Putin has proved unable to aid a series of international allies during moments of crisis. Syria, Venezuela, and Iran have all learned the hard way that Putin’s promises of partnership are empty.

Russian prestige has taken a further pounding on the battlefields of Ukraine. Like many others in Moscow and elsewhere, Putin fully expected to secure a quick and complete victory in Ukraine. Instead, his armies have been unable to achieve any decisive breakthroughs despite suffering catastrophic losses. More than four years on, they remain bogged down in brutal attritional warfare.

Putin has tried to distract from this underwhelming military performance by projecting confidence in eventual success, but his boasts of relentless Russian advances now ring increasingly hollow. In February 2026, Ukraine actually liberated more territory than the Russian army was able to seize, making a mockery of Kremlin efforts to portray Russian victory as inevitable.

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With Russia’s prospects in Ukraine looking increasingly grim, the joint US-Israeli operation against Iran could hardly have come at a better time for Putin. While Russia’s inability to assist a key ally is undoubtedly embarrassing, the Kremlin could potentially emerge as a major beneficiary of the escalating conflict in the Middle East.

The scope for economic gains is obvious. With the Strait of Hormuz under threat and key energy export routes out of the Middle East facing major disruption, Russia stands to benefit more than most from rising oil and gas prices. This could reinvigorate Putin’s war economy at a time when it was beginning to show signs of serious strain.

The US focus on Iran may also distract the Trump administration from diplomatic efforts to broker a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine. While these US-led peace talks had not resulted in any tangible progress toward a sustainable settlement, they represent a diplomatic challenge to the Kremlin. Putin will now likely be able to breathe a little easier, at least while the United States remains preoccupied with Iran.

Crucially, escalating hostilities in the Middle East may force Washington to limit the supply of weapons to Ukraine. The US, Israel, and the Gulf states are all reportedly struggling to cope with Iranian drones and are already in danger of running low on air defense ammunition.

In particular, the first days of the conflict have reportedly seen unprecedented use of Patriot air defense missiles, which are in limited supply and desperately needed by the Ukrainians to intercept Russian ballistic missiles. If Kyiv finds itself without these missiles in the coming months, Russia will be able to strike critical infrastructure targets across Ukraine with impunity. This could leave large parts of Ukraine unlivable and have a major impact on the country’s ability to maintain the war effort.

None of this is inevitable. If US-Israeli forces succeed in curtailing Iran’s ability to strike back and can conclude their campaign within a matter of weeks, Putin will have little to cheer. However, if the current air offensive escalates into a protracted military conflict, this will likely strengthen Russia economically while weakening Ukraine’s ability to defend itself and prolonging Europe’s largest invasion since World War II.

Peter Dickinson is editor of the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert service.

Russian army faces comms crisis amid Starlink cut and Kremlin crackdown

Katherine Spencer, Marc Goedemans — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 14:05:45 +0000

The Russian army in Ukraine is facing a growing communications crisis amid recent disruptions to Telegram and Starlink, leaving troops increasingly in the dark and exposing mounting strains inside Russia.

The problems began in early February when Elon Musk imposed restrictions on unauthorized Russian access to Starlink satellites operated by Musk’s SpaceX company that provide high-speed internet. The move came following talks between Musk and recently appointed Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov.

Starlink made headlines in 2022 as a crucial tool for the Ukrainian military during the initial phase of the Russian invasion. More recently, Russia has acquired thousands of Starlink internet terminals and incorporated them as an important element of the invading army’s communications infrastructure.

Efforts to disable unauthorized Russian terminals operating in Ukraine had an immediate impact, with Ukrainian officials reporting a sharp drop in Russian bombardments and drone attacks on front line positions. In one incident on the Zaporizhzhia front, twelve Russian soldiers were reportedly killed by friendly fire after a Starlink terminal failure.

Ukraine appears to have benefited from Russia’s sudden loss of connectivity. In the first five days following the Starlink cutoff, Ukrainian forces reportedly liberated more than two hundred square kilometers of territory, representing an area roughly equivalent to the Russian army’s gains throughout the whole month of December. This trend has continued into early March.

While there is still some debate over the extent to which the areas reclaimed by Ukraine had previously been under Russian control, the advances provided a boost to Ukrainian morale while strengthening the country’s front line position. According to the Institute for the Study of War, this battlefield success owed much to the disruption caused by Russia’s loss of Starlink services.

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With no domestically produced alternative to Starlink technology, Russian units are now scrambling to find alternative ways to communicate. Some have sought to revive access to the Starlink system, with the Ukrainian authorities warning that Russians are now attempting to pressure the families of Ukrainian prisoners to register terminals.

Russia’s own satellite communications system, which is run by Gazprom Space Systems, has been used in a limited capacity during the war. However, it is regarded as far less reliable than Starlink and is not seen as a viable alternative.

The fallout over the loss of Starlink has sparked a scandal in Russia, with many questioning why the army allowed itself to become so dependent on a communications system owned and controlled by an American company. Critics have attacked this development as both a national humiliation and a strategic blunder which left the Russian military dangerously vulnerable.

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Russia’s recent communication woes are not only due to external restrictions. Days after Musk agreed to cut Starlink access, the Kremlin moved to slow down the hugely popular messenger app Telegram, citing the application’s failure to comply with Russian data laws.

This was widely seen as a significant step toward closing one of the few remaining uncensored communications channels in Putin’s Russia. Telegram serves as a leading news platform among Russian audiences with over 93 million users in the country.

The Kremlin decision to restrict Telegram sparked a rare backlash within Russia’s own ranks, with pro-war bloggers particularly vocal in their criticism. The limitations further undermined connectivity between Russian forces fighting in Ukraine, with many soldiers complaining that the loss of Telegram would hamper their ability to share battlefield information and conduct fundraising activities.

Recent measures against Telegram are part of a much larger effort by Putin to exert greater control over all digital communications. The end goal appears to be the establishment of a “sovereign internet” inside Russia sealed off from foreign influence.

Since the start of the full-scale invasion, Russia has banned Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, and X. Meanwhile, the Kremlin is now actively pushing Russians to use the new state-controlled MAX app, which contains extensive tracking capabilities for surveillance and is now pre-installed on all phones in Russia.

As the war in Ukraine has progressed, Russia has also restricted internet usage through the widespread implementation of mobile internet blackouts. Putin recently signed a law expanding the ability of state bodies to restrict connectivity, essentially handing the security services a kill switch to the internet inside Russia.

Putin’s readiness to target Telegram despite the challenges this creates for the Russian army in Ukraine has led to speculation that he may be prioritizing domestic regime stability over military success. Some have suggested that he could be preparing for a new and politically risky mobilization; others believe the Kremlin fears unrest as the economic situation in Russia worsens.

Whatever the true motives behind recent efforts to throttle Telegram in Russia, the Kremlin’s actions do not project confidence. On the contrary, they hint at a regime seeking to silence critics and prevent any potential grassroots discontent from gaining traction.

Katherine Spencer is a program assistant at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. Marc Goedemans is a Young Global Professional at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center.

A series of ambitious reforms followed, but it was not until the full-scale invasion of February 2022 that the Ukrainian army truly came of age. Faced with the existential threat of Russia’s invasion, the Ukrainian nation rose up to resist. The ranks of the army swelled to include around one million troops, while the country’s stagnant defense industry was soon taking the first steps toward an unprecedented resurgence that continues to this day.

Over the past four years, much of Ukraine’s defense sector growth has focused on new technologies as Ukrainians have sought ways to counter Russia’s often overwhelming advantages in terms of funding, manpower, and conventional weapons. A thriving domestic ecosystem of defense tech startups has emerged, with a particular emphasis on drone production. Ukrainian developers are able to test new ideas almost immediately in combat conditions, leading to a culture of relentless innovation that has turbo-charged the evolution of drone warfare and reshaped the battlefield.

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Ukraine’s prowess has not gone unnoticed, with numerous European partners seeking to benefit from Ukrainian military know-how. In recent weeks, Germany became the latest NATO country to unveil plans for Ukrainian military instructors to train their troops. Ukrainian trainers are also reportedly sharing their drone warfare insights with multiple other European countries including Poland and Britain.

This represents a striking shift in the relationship between Ukraine and the country’s allies. Throughout the period from 2014 until 2022, Western military trainers routinely traveled to Ukraine to provide instruction, while the defense sector discourse in Kyiv revolved around Ukrainian efforts to adopt and incorporate NATO standards. After four years of defending themselves against the biggest European invasion since World War II, it is now Ukraine that is setting the standards, while NATO commanders try to catch up.

Ukraine’s NATO partners have much to learn, it would seem. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that during a spring 2025 exercise in Estonia involving NATO forces and Ukrainian drone crews, the Ukrainians easily overcame a far larger NATO contingent, sparking considerable alarm and much debate. Meanwhile, many Ukrainian soldiers have noted that the military equipment provided by the country’s Western partners is often now redundant due to the lightning pace of the technological advances taking place on the Ukrainian battlefield.

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Ukraine’s emergence as a major military power is a nightmare scenario for Russia. When Vladimir Putin launched the full-scale invasion four years ago, he identified the “demilitarization” of Ukraine as one of his two key war aims. If demilitarization was the goal, the invasion has failed in spectacular fashion. Far from being demilitarized, today’s Ukraine now boasts the largest and most technologically advanced army in Europe.

Across the continent, there is growing awareness that with the United States seeking to reduce its transatlantic security commitments, Ukraine is destined to play a central role in the future defense of Europe. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine any European security strategy that doesn’t include Ukraine as a core contributor. A country that spent years fruitlessly seeking an invitation to join NATO is now acknowledged as a guarantor of Europe’s security at a time when faith in the effectiveness of the alliance has fallen to record lows.

Zelenskyy’s proposal to send specialists to the Middle East in exchange for a Kremlin ceasefire should probably not be taken literally, but it does reflect the confidence of a man who knows his country is more prepared than most for the realities of twenty-first century warfare. Zelenskyy clearly recognizes that Ukraine’s unrivaled experience is a valuable commodity. This is particularly true in the current context, with Iranian drones saturating existing air defenses and demanding the kind of cost-effective solutions that Ukraine has spent the past four years perfecting.

The Ukrainian leader also well aware that his country’s military strength represents a major trump card as he seeks to negotiate a settlement that will safeguard Ukrainian statehood and secure the country’s European future. The war unleashed by Putin in 2022 was meant to strip Ukraine of its army, its identity, and its sovereignty. Instead, it has transformed Ukraine into one of Europe’s leading military powers and positioned the country at the cutting edge of global defense sector innovation. This new reality will help define Ukraine’s place in the wider world for decades to come, while serving as a formidable obstacle to Russia’s imperial ambitions.

Peter Dickinson is editor of the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert service.

Missiles made in Ukraine are bringing Putin’s invasion home to Russia

David Kirichenko — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 23:47:55 +0000

Ukraine conducted a landmark airstrike in late February, using domestically produced FP-5 Flamingo cruise missiles to hit a military production facility deep inside Russia. The strike on the Votkinsk complex, which produces a range of ballistic and cruise missiles for the Russian military, marked the first time Kyiv had successfully targeted a strategically significant Russian defense industry site with long-range missiles manufactured in Ukraine.

Surveillance camera footage and satellite images released following the attack appeared to show evidence of a precision hit that caused extensive damage. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy welcomed news of the strike as an indication of Ukraine’s growing capabilities. “We carried out precise strikes with Flamingo missiles at a range of 1,400 kilometers. I believe this is truly a success for our industry,” he commented.

The attack has helped restore the credibility of Ukraine’s Flamingo missile program, which has been subject to much speculation and significant skepticism since first making headlines last summer. The missiles, developed by Ukrainian defense sector startup Fire Point, generated a considerable amount of initial buzz but failed to make any major impact on the battlefield during the second half of 2025. Zelenskyy recently acknowledged that development was delayed by a Russian attack on a production site.

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The emergence of the Flamingo as a credible threat marks a major upgrade in Ukraine’s long-range strike capabilities. With a reported maximum range of around three thousand kilometers and a payload of over one thousand kilograms, the Flamingo is far more powerful than the drones typically used by Ukraine for strikes inside Russia. While long-range drones have been instrumental in puncturing the myth of Russian invulnerability, their relatively small payloads have meant that damage caused in attacks is often easy to repair. As the recent strike in Votkinsk demonstrated, the Flamingo has the potential to be far more destructive.

Much will now depend on Ukraine’s ability to scale up output and produce enough Flamingos to make a difference. While the February attack on the Votkinsk facility was a success, Ukrainian officials have since confirmed that multiple missiles were required in order for one to hit home. It will therefore be crucial to manufacture entire flocks of Flamingos if the Ukrainians wish to make the most of this new weapon.

The Flamingo initiative is one of a number of Ukrainian missile projects currently under development. Ukraine is pouring millions of dollars into a new domestic “missile market” that aims to replicate the success of its rapidly expanding drone industry. Recently appointed Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov has noted that the government is acting like a venture investor by giving large grants to multiple different local companies active in missile production.

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Ukraine’s emphasis on the development domestic missile capabilities makes strategic sense. The front lines of the war have remained largely static for over three years, with Russia unable to secure any decisive breakthroughs despite holding the battlefield initiative throughout this period. Kyiv’s current plan is to reduce any further Russian advances to a bare minimum while inflicting crippling losses. In parallel, Ukraine aims to bring Putin’s invasion home to Russia with an escalating campaign of airstrikes using missiles in combination with drones.

Ukrainian commanders are playing a long game by targeting the Russian oil refineries, energy infrastructure, and military production facilities that support the war effort. This approach is designed to gradually erode Moscow’s ability to generate revenues and fund the invasion. Adding missiles to the mix dramatically increases the challenges facing the Kremlin. As Ukraine’s long-range arsenal expands, Russia’s limited air defenses will be stretched thinner and thinner. The end goal is to transform Russia’s vastness from an asset into a liability.

No single weapon can serve as a silver bullet to stop Russia’s invasion. However, the true significance of Ukraine’s domestic missile program lies in its trajectory. If Kyiv can maintain the current pace of innovation while simultaneously reducing costs and scaling production, this will greatly strengthen the country’s position at the negotiating table.

Putin seems to be well aware of the dangers posed by long-range missiles and has worked hard to prevent Kyiv’s partners from supplying Ukraine with these weapons. When Western leaders mulled lifting restrictions on the use of Western missiles against targets inside Russia in late 2024, Putin warned that this would place NATO “at war” and Russia. More recently, he intervened directly when US President Donald Trump appeared to be on the verge of providing Ukraine with Tomahawk missiles.

There is no denying that Putin has been successful in his efforts to deter Kyiv’s allies, but he cannot stop the Ukrainians from producing their own long-range missiles. If this trend continues, it can help establish a framework for a pragmatic settlement. Many in Ukraine believe a strong arsenal of domestically produced long-range missiles can serve as a meaningful deterrent against future Russian aggression. While Ukrainians have little faith in written security guarantees, they see long-range missile capabilities as something Putin simply cannot ignore.

David Kirichenko is an associate research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society.

Europe must not seek Putin’s approval before sending troops to Ukraine

Stephen Blank — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 22:49:46 +0000

European leaders will not send troops to monitor a ceasefire in Ukraine without first securing permission from Russian leader Vladimir Putin, Britain’s Telegraph reports. The news represents a significant political victory for Russia and comes following a coordinated Kremlin campaign of intimidation designed to deter any European military deployment to Ukraine.

This informal Russian veto over European troops in Ukraine places a key element of the current peace process in jeopardy. Ever since the so-called Coalition of the Willing began to take shape in early 2025, participating countries led by Britain and France have been developing plans to send a significant number of troops to Ukraine following a ceasefire in order to monitor adherence and serve as a reassurance force. However, Putin has consistently signaled that he will not agree to a European military presence, with Kremlin officials stating that any European soldiers sent to Ukraine would be “legitimate targets.”

These threats appear to have worked. With the Coalition of the Willing reportedly unwilling to act unless Putin gives them the green light, the entire concept of a reassurance force is now in doubt. This means that a viable and independently monitored ceasefire in Ukraine looks to be unattainable. All Putin need do to block the process is withhold his approval indefinitely.

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Europe’s reluctance to sanction a military mission to Ukraine without Russia’s prior agreement is the latest setback to a faltering peace process. After more than a year of false starts and fruitless talks, many now believe that Russia has no intention of agreeing to a ceasefire and does not genuinely seek peace.

Critics argue that Putin is using the current US-led negotiations to buy time and as an opportunity win over the Trump administration. The Kremlin dictator remains adamant that despite the slow progress of his invasion, Russia will still ultimately achieve its goals in Ukraine. It came as no surprise when reports emerged recently claiming that Russian officials are privately mocking Trump for his naivety about Putin’s true intentions.

With little prospect of progress toward a negotiated peace settlement, Western leaders should be focusing their energies on steps to secure Russia’s defeat in Ukraine. Unfortunately, however, there currently appears to be little chance of this happening. Since 2022, the West has largely wasted Ukraine’s sacrifices while failing to arm Kyiv for victory or impose sufficiently stiff sanctions on Moscow. As the invasion enters a fifth year, there are now some signs of growing European resolve, but much more needs to be done in order to stop Russia.

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Putin’s ability to intimidate European leaders on the issue of troop deployments to Ukraine underlines Europe’s continued lack of credibility in the international security arena. While there has been plenty of talk in European capitals over the past year about the need for greater strategic autonomy, this has yet to translate into concrete action. European governments are still not ready to provide credible deterrence against Russia and suffer from an absence of overall leadership that makes decisive action in the security sphere particularly challenging.

The Trump administration’s efforts to step back from transatlantic security commitments have highlighted the need for increased European defense spending, but Europe remains reliant on the US and has no practical alternative to NATO. It is therefore important to reinvigorate rather than undermine the alliance. Instead, the opposite is happening, with faith in NATO’s collective security commitment presently at all-time lows. This only emboldens Putin. Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump is actually validating European fears by demanding that Ukraine and not Russia make concessions to end the war.

Intelligence agencies and Western government officials increasingly acknowledge that Russia is preparing for a wider European war. This makes it all the more vital to increase backing for Ukraine and integrate the country deeper into Europe’s defense architecture. There are signs this is well understood, with encouraging recent developments including the co-production of weapons in a number of European countries for use in Ukraine.

Putin has long since made clear that he will only negotiate under duress. The Kremlin dictator remains committed to erasing Ukrainian statehood and will not enter into serious talks to end the war until the alternative is defeat. In order to reach that point, Europe must continue to rearm while incorporating the lessons learned on the battlefields of Ukraine and developing the drone capabilities that will define the wars of the future.

Crucially, European leaders must also recover their political nerve and demonstrate to Putin that he cannot hope to intimidate them indefinitely. They can begin by declaring that Russia does not get to decide whether European troops are deployed to a sovereign and independent Ukraine.

Stephen Blank is a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

Even in an optimistic scenario, any agreement between Kyiv and Moscow will demand long-term readiness and self-reliance. Ceasefires can be violated. Commitments can erode. What endures is force posture: Trained units, predictable rotation, and the resilience to absorb pressure.

Deterrence is not a document. It is a condition and it rests on how effectively a state mobilizes and prepares its population. Yet Ukraine’s mobilization still reflects post-Soviet assumptions. Men between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-nine are treated as the default defenders of the state, while women are viewed as supplementary. That division no longer matches battlefield realities or Ukraine’s strategic needs.

Since 2024, Kyiv has tightened mobilization rules, expanded enforcement, and narrowed exemptions. These measures have stabilized force levels, but they have not solved the underlying problem: Ukraine is fighting a prolonged war of attrition against a far larger adversary. Pulling more men into the system without changing how the system functions will not produce sustainable results.

One weakness is preparation and allocation. Many men still only receive limited training before mobilization. At the same time, tens of thousands of women with in-demand support skills in fields such as logistics, communications, medicine, intelligence, engineering, IT, and drones, remain outside the recruitment and training pipelines.

The result is inefficiency on two fronts. Front line units are overstretched and denied predictable rotation, while rear area roles are often filled by personnel whose skills are misaligned with their assignments.

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Ukraine does not need to mirror Russia’s mass mobilization model. It needs smarter force management. Women can be systematically integrated into roles currently performed by men far away from the front, including checkpoints, border duties, logistics hubs, training commands, communications and intelligence units, and other rear-area security functions.

In a war of attrition, regular rotation is essential to combat effectiveness. Reallocating personnel this way would relieve pressure on front line units. Over time, it would create a broader preparedness posture in which more Ukrainians have the skills to resist renewed aggression. It would also broaden the pool of people with military experience, which strengthens deterrence long after any ceasefire.

The case for integration is not hypothetical. Ukrainian women have volunteered in large numbers since 2014. Legislation adopted in 2018 granted women equal rights and responsibilities in the Ukrainian armed forces. By 2025, more than 70,000 women were serving in the Ukrainian military, including in drone units, medical evacuation teams, intelligence cells, and logistics chains. Recruiting data from the past year indicates that roughly one in five new candidates entering the pipeline was female.

Despite the growing prominence of women, the Ukrainian military has not yet fully adapted. Legal equality has not translated into institutional integration. Access to training and promotion is inconsistent. Women are still too often treated as volunteers rather than a core element of force planning. Discrimination and sexual harassment persist, while accountability is uneven.

Many barriers are practical. Units often lack properly fitted equipment and uniforms. Separate barracks, showers, and toilets are not universal. Access to gynecological care is inconsistent. Mechanisms to prevent and address harassment and misconduct are sometimes poorly enforced. These are not symbolic deficiencies; they directly affect retention, readiness, and morale.

A modern defense strategy is not built on weapons alone. It is built on resilience. Russia’s theory of victory assumes Ukrainian society will fracture under prolonged pressure. Zelenskyy’s diplomacy aims to deny Moscow that outcome by securing international backing and buying time. But society must disprove Russia’s assumptions in practice.

A whole-of-society defense that mobilizes women across military and security roles sends a strong signal of endurance. It demonstrates that Ukraine is prepared for years of deterrence and reinforces the message that Ukraine is building a modern European state.

This signal will also matter to allies. Western support is increasingly constrained by domestic politics. Ukraine’s strongest argument is not moral clarity alone, but strategic credibility. A country that can sustain defense over time is easier to support than one perpetually dependent on emergency assistance.

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Other states facing serious long-term threats have updated their security cultures. Israel mandated conscription for both genders in 1949. Norway introduced gender-neutral conscription in 2015; Sweden followed in 2018.

Ukraine has taken steps toward modernization. In 2024, it updated defense education curricula in secondary schools. By 2025, pilot programs expanded civilian preparedness. But beyond high school, structured pathways for women to acquire military training remain limited. Lyceums and military academies are still underused as talent pipelines.

The costs of delay compound. Exhaustion erodes combat effectiveness. Poor rotation accelerates burnout, desertion, and casualties. No peace plan, however carefully negotiated, can compensate for a force structure that excludes half the population from systematic preparation.

Whether Zelenskyy’s peace initiative succeeds or stalls, Ukraine will require endurance. The policy agenda should be clear. First, Kyiv should extend mandatory service to women aged twenty-five to sixty for designated non-front line support roles currently filled by men such as logistics, medical support, communications, and administration.

It will be crucial to clearly codify exemptions based on factors including parental and family commitments, along with professional status and medical limitations. This will make it possible to free more male personnel for front line duty while sustaining continuity of operations.

Second, the Ukrainian authorities need to fix the basics that determine retention and readiness. This includes properly fitted uniforms and equipment, adequate facilities, reliable medical and gynecological care, and strict enforcement against harassment and misconduct.

Third, Ukraine should expand training and education pipelines that actively target women, including military higher education. Recruiting data already shows demand; the state should convert that demand into readiness, while civil society tracks progress.

Fourth, Ukraine’s allies should support women’s integration through training exchanges. Western military commanders have decades of lessons to share on integrating women into units and training pipelines.

Finally, Kyiv will need to invest in long-term societal preparation. Ukraine cannot rely on emergency mobilization alone; youth must be educated early for the responsibility of defense. When service is framed as an expected civic duty rather than an abrupt wartime shock, conscription becomes a sustainable pillar of national security.

Security guarantees will shape Ukraine’s future, but guarantees are not substitutes for national capacity. Zelenskyy is right to pursue diplomacy that does not mortgage sovereignty; he is also correct to insist peace must be durable. Durability, however, will be measured in battalions, rotations, and readiness, not in signatures.

Ukraine’s most reliable long-term defense asset is its people: Men and women alike. Mobilizing and integrating women is not about ideology. It is a strategy for victory and long-term security.

Calin Trenkov-Wermuth is the former principal security governance advisor at the US Institute of Peace and co-author of The Future of the Security Sector in Ukraine, published by USIP. Sofia Kryshtal is the former executive coordinator of the USIP Task Force on the Future of the Security Sector in Ukraine.

This is forcing Putin and his generals to rethink. The Kremlin dictator remains determined to extinguish Ukrainian independence and force Ukraine permanently back into the Russian orbit. However, he knows that there is little prospect of achieving his ambitious objectives via the bloody battles currently taking place over the rust belt towns and villages of eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region.

In order to break this strategic deadlock, Russia aims to systematically dismantle the conditions that allow Ukraine to function as a state. This means the continued bombardment of energy infrastructure throughout the country; it is also likely to involve expanded attacks on other crucial public utilities, such as municipal water services and sewage treatment. In parallel, Russia will increase strikes on civilian transport with an emphasis on Ukraine’s logistically vital rail network.

The end goal is to deprive Ukraine of the industrial capacity to defend itself and destroy the basic amenities to sustain even a minimum standard of living. Kremlin officials hope this will break Ukrainian morale and enable Putin to dictate the terms of peace.

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Russia has made no formal declarations regarding its intentions, but the strategic shift toward the bombardment of infrastructure over the past year has been unmistakable. In 2025, Russia launched around 55,000 kamikaze drones at targets in Ukraine, representing a fivefold increase from the total one year earlier. Attacks have sought to deprive individual cities of power while severing Ukraine’s national energy network along the Dnipro River.

The impact of this bombing campaign extends far beyond civilian suffering. By cutting off major power generation assets and disrupting connectivity, Russia is pushing the entire grid into a near-permanent state of emergency. This is placing heavy strain on Ukraine’s defense industry, which is often deprived of the electricity it needs to function. With Kyiv now relying on domestic defense sector output to cover around 50 percent of the country’s military needs, this disruption to production poses a grave threat to national security.

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The coming spring season will be crucial. The next few months of warmer weather should be Ukraine’s window to rebuild and recover lost industrial capacity. However, Moscow will be working hard to slam that window shut with waves of attacks made possible by Russia’s surging domestic drone production.

The continued bombardment of infrastructure targets across Ukraine will also help exhaust the country’s limited air defense ammunition supplies. Every interceptor missile used to defend a Ukrainian city or a power substation is one less available to cover front line positions. This will force Kyiv to prioritize between protecting the civilian population or shielding soldiers in the combat zone.

Another key feature of the war during the first half of 2026 will be escalating Russian attacks on Ukraine’s railways. Recent strikes on key routes linking Ukraine to Poland indicate that this campaign is already well underway. Any major disruption to rail services could cause significant economic damage and prevent millions of Ukrainians from traveling. More importantly, it would leave the army under-supplied and logistically isolated during the height of the summer campaigning season when Russia’s offensive capacity is expected to peak.

It is still not too late to counter the Kremlin’s plans, but the clock is ticking. Kyiv’s partners must urgently enhance Ukraine’s air defense capabilities and provide the country with more systems to protect the expanding list of potential infrastructure targets. Efforts should also be made to fortify strategic sites and anticipate future repair requirements by providing likely replacement components in advance.

Russia’s current strategy should come as no surprise. At the very start of his reign, Putin learned in Chechnya that pulverizing infrastructure was a reliable path to victory in a conflict that conventional military force could not resolve. In 2003, the United Nations reportedly called Chechen capital Grozny “the most destroyed city on earth.”

The Kremlin dictator now plans to secure victory in Ukraine by employing similar tactics. If Ukraine’s electricity grid and critical infrastructure are allowed to fragment further, the authorities in Kyiv may find themselves literally powerless to defend their country.

In Kursk, this advantage proved consequential. Over seven months of fighting, Russian fiber-optic drones helped render Ukraine’s presence in the Kursk region increasingly unsustainable. Ukrainian forces ultimately withdrew back across the border in March 2025.

Open source strike videos published by Russian war bloggers indicate that a disproportionate share of Russian fiber-optic drone attacks from August 2024 to September 2025 took place in the Kursk sector, even though the area represented only a small fraction of the overall front lines of the war during that period.

Strikingly, Russian fiber-optic drone attacks contributed to an unprecedented vehicle loss ratio that saw Ukraine lose 25 percent more vehicles than Russia in Kursk. Many of the vehicles damaged or destroyed were supply trucks and personnel carriers, but targets also included high-value equipment such as Abrams tanks and Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, systems that Ukraine did not have in abundant supply. In the words of a Ukrainian medic who fought during the Kursk campaign: “Our logistics just collapsed; fiber-optic drones were monitoring all routes, leaving no way to deliver ammunition or provisions.”

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After Kursk, the trend soon spread. Fiber-optic drones began proliferating across other areas of the front, graduating from a niche capability to a staple weapon. Their use has since expanded to such an extent that vast swaths of Ukrainian farmland and forest are now littered with fiber-optic cables shed by drones. Fiber-optic drones have also featured prominently in a series of major battles, including the most consequential fighting of the past year in the Pokrovsk region of eastern Ukraine.

By mid-2025, the fiber-optic drone story was no longer so one-sided as Ukraine moved to replicate and adapt the capability. Domestic production surged thanks to Ukraine’s agile ecosystem of innovative defense tech startups. Within months, more than 80 Ukrainian-designed fiber-optic systems had been approved for use, while the number of Ukrainian companies involved in producing or integrating this category of drones has rapidly expanded.

Ukrainian developers are now pushing the boundaries of range, with the country’s famous Birds of Magyar drone unit fielding a fiber-optic drone model capable of reaching approximately forty kilometers. What began as a Russian experiment has evolved into a mutual innovation cycle in which Ukraine is now leading in certain aspects.

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The rapid emergence of fiber-optic drones has caught the attention of NATO officers. In 2025, countering fiber-optic drones became the central theme of NATO’s Innovation Challenge, with participants from Ukraine and the United States taking the podium.

There is no silver bullet to neutralize the threat posed by these unjammable drones. Countermeasures range from last-resort shotgun blasts and physical barriers to radar tripwires, acoustic sensors, and experimental AI-assisted detection systems. Some are improvisations; others are technologically sophisticated solutions with longer development timelines. As with much of the war in Ukraine, adaptation is continuous and ephemeral; what works today may fail tomorrow.

The rise of fiber-optic drones has implications that extend far beyond the battlefields of Ukraine. Sudanese militias, Mexican cartels, and even the Chinese People’s Liberation Army are already reportedly incorporating fiber-optic drones into their growing arsenals. As drone warfare proliferates globally, the ability to avoid jamming will continue to attract attention wherever electronic interference is common or expected.

Ukraine’s experience suggests that militaries relying exclusively on radio-controlled drones and electronic warfare risk catastrophic disruption at critical moments. Fiber-optic drones may not replace conventional systems, but they have established themselves as a durable component of the modern battlefield toolkit. What began in Kursk as an experiment with a seemingly retrograde technology has now reshaped drone warfare.

Vlad Sutea is head of intelligence at Pravo Ventures and an open source intelligence expert focused on defense issues.

Ukrainians don’t want to be resilient. Putin has given them no other choice.

Peter Dickinson — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 20:57:23 +0000

As the world marks the fourth anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s full-scale Ukraine invasion this week, we can expect to see plenty of praise in the international media for the remarkable resilience of the Ukrainian people. This is thoroughly deserved. After all, whether we’re talking about holding back one of the world’s most powerful armies or maintaining a semblance of normality amid the largest European invasion since World War II, Ukraine has undoubtedly surpassed all expectations.

Nevertheless, there are many in Ukraine who no longer welcome the whole resilience narrative that has taken shape over the past four years. Critics argue that it creates unrealistic expectations while crediting the Ukrainian population with superpowers they do not possess. At a time when Ukraine desperately needs more international support, they warn that endless upbeat talk of Ukrainian resilience risks distracting from the urgency of the situation. At worst, it can serve as a substitute for action or an excuse to do nothing.

Rather than mythologizing Ukrainian resilience, international audiences should be asking themselves what drives this incredible durability and determination. Where do millions of Ukrainians find the strength to carry on amid barely imaginable hardships and trauma? The short answer is that Putin has given them no other choice.

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Even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine began with the 2014 seizure of Crimea, Putin was well known for questioning Ukraine’s right to exist as an independent state. Recently declassified transcripts show that in 2008, the Russian leader told US President George W. Bush that Ukraine was an “artificial country.” He was also notorious for promoting an unashamedly imperialistic version of Ukrainian history and insisting that Ukrainians were actually Russians (“one people”).

These trends intensified following the start of Russia’s armed intervention, with Putin becoming openly dismissive of Ukraine’s legitimacy and laying claim to Ukrainian territory. In summer 2021, he took the highly unusual step of publishing a 5000-word history essay that read like a declaration of war against Ukrainian statehood. At around the same time, the Kremlin dictator began referring ominously to independent Ukraine as an “anti-Russia.”

Meanwhile, Putin’s formidable propaganda machine was busy demonizing and dehumanizing Ukrainians. Anyone who rejected the official Kremlin vision of Ukraine as an “inalienable” part of Russia’s own history, culture, and spiritual space was depicted as a Nazi and a traitor. This extreme anti-Ukrainian rhetoric set the stage for the crimes committed following the onset of the full-scale invasion in February 2022.

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The horrors of the past four years have gone far beyond the death and destruction associated with conventional armed conflicts. In areas of Ukraine currently under Kremlin control, the Russian occupation authorities have launched a campaign of national destruction and set out to completely erase all traces of Ukrainian culture, history, language, and identity. Untold thousands have been detained in waves of arrests that United Nations investigators have branded as a crime against humanity.

Those who remain are being subjected to ruthless russification encompassing virtually every aspect of daily life. Anyone who refuses to accept Russian citizenship faces the prospect of deportation from their own homes. Military age men are liable to be conscripted into the Russian army and obliged to fight against their fellow Ukrainians.

Perhaps the single most shocking Russian war crime committed in occupied Ukraine has been the mass abduction of children, who are sent to Russia for indoctrination in order to rob them of their Ukrainian heritage and impose an imperial Russian identity. In 2023, the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued an arrest warrant for Putin in connection with Russia’s large-scale child kidnapping campaign.

These crimes have taken place against a backdrop of genocidal language that is now a routine feature of Russia’s political and media discourse. Kremlin officials and propagandists frequently call for the liquidation of Ukraine and indicate that they intend to extinguish Ukrainian national identity completely. Based on the crimes taking place in Ukraine and the intent on display in Moscow, numerous international experts have concluded that the Russian invasion qualifies as an act of genocide.

Ukrainians are acutely aware of Russia’s genocidal objectives. They know what is happening in the occupied regions of their own country, and are all too familiar with the sickening propaganda emanating from the Kremlin. This awareness is a crucial factor fueling the phenomenon of Ukrainian resilience. Far from being comic book heroes, most Ukrainians are ordinary folk who recognize that if they stop resisting, their country will not survive.

Since 2022, Ukraine’s bravery has captured the imagination of the watching world. But as we marvel at the courage of a nation defying seemingly impossible odds, it is crucial to also act accordingly by increasing international support for the Ukrainian war effort. Too often, vocal cheerleading in Western capitals has not translated into robust backing. This only emboldens Russia and prolongs the war.

As Putin’s invasion enters a fifth year, it is now abundantly clear that Russia aims to destroy Ukraine as a state and as a nation. Ukrainian resilience alone will not be enough to prevent this catastrophe. If Kyiv’s partners fall short, the applause of the past four years will ring very hollow indeed.

Peter Dickinson is editor of the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert service.

Russia’s blitzkrieg attack failed because it was based on a series of false political and military assumptions. In the political realm, Russia’s leaders had long dismissed Ukraine as an artificial state with no unifying national identity. As a result, they seem to have been genuinely shocked by the scale of popular resistance in spring 2022 as millions of Ukrainians rose up to defend their nation.

On the battlefield, the initial stage of the invasion exposed the underwhelming reality behind Russia’s military superpower pretensions. The Russian army may look impressive when marching unopposed across Red Square, but Putin’s commanders struggled to conduct combined arms operations in Ukraine and demonstrated a distinct lack of imagination. Likewise, the Russian air force was unable to establish control of the skies over Ukraine.

Putin’s plans unraveled because he underestimated Ukraine. After years of dismissing Ukrainian statehood as an accident of history and insisting Ukrainians were really Russians (“one people“), he seems to have convinced himself that Ukraine could not possibly demonstrate the national cohesion necessary for a sustained defense. His commanders appear to have been similarly dismissive, and clearly did not think the Ukrainian military was capable of waging a modern war.

These assumptions were largely the product of wishful thinking. They conveniently ignored Ukraine’s significant nation-building progress during the post-Soviet era, and failed to anticipate the impact of the comprehensive military reforms undertaken in the country following the onset of Russian aggression in 2014.

Putin and his Kremlin colleagues were not the only ones to fall into the trap of underestimating Ukraine. On the eve of the full-scale invasion, military and political leaders throughout the West were also queuing up to write off the country.

While individual forecasts differed, there was a broad consensus that Ukraine had no real chance of resisting the might of the Russian military and would be completely overrun by the Kremlin war machine in a matter of days. Instead, Ukraine won the Battle of Kyiv and stunned the watching world.

This remarkable success set the tone for all that has followed. By the end of 2022, Ukraine had liberated around half of the land seized by Russia during the initial stage of the invasion. Since then, Kyiv has managed to decimate the Russian Black Sea Fleet and has forced Putin to withdraw the bulk of his remaining warships from occupied Crimea. Ukraine is also now increasingly bringing Putin’s invasion home to Russia with long-range drone and missile strikes deep inside the Russian Federation.

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Over the past four years, Russia’s invasion has become the biggest European war since World War II, with a series of game-changing technological advances transforming military doctrine. In 2022, the battlefield was dominated by tanks, armor, and artillery, much as it had been since the early twentieth century. Today, the war is being shaped primarily by drones and small groups of infantry.

The proliferation of these technologies has turned what began as a war of movement into a war of attrition, with a kill zone stretching at least ten kilometers from ground zero on both sides of the front line. Robotic systems can now strike enemy targets on land, in the air, and at sea, and are also being deployed to evacuate the wounded, perform logistics roles, and serve as front line sentries.

Ukraine has proved highly adept at this innovative form of warfare. In many cases, Ukrainian military commanders have sought high tech solutions in order to counter Russia’s overwhelming advantages in manpower and conventional firepower.

Kyiv has also viewed defense tech innovations as an economically viable way to compensate for often unpredictable flows of military supplies from the country’s Western partners. This approach has helped to minimize any negative consequences following the reduction in direct US aid to Ukraine since the return of Donald Trump to the White House last year.

As a result, Ukraine now boasts a large and sophisticated domestic drone industry, with developers constantly upgrading existing models based of real-time combat feedback. Ukraine’s remarkable defense tech progress since 2022 has positioned the country at the cutting edge of drone technologies. Partner countries increasingly acknowledge this status and are seeking to benefit from Ukraine’s expertise, with Ukrainian soldiers training their NATO counterparts in drone warfare.

As the Trump presidency leads to dramatic shifts in the international security landscape, Kyiv is more generally in the geopolitical ascendancy. With America looking to downgrade its transatlantic commitments, the Ukrainian army is recognized as a key contributor to Europe’s future security. A country once seen as militarily insignificant is now regarded as indispensable for the defense of the continent.

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Ukraine’s emergence as the largest and most innovative military in Europe has enabled the country to stem the tide of Russia’s invasion and prevent any major breakthroughs. While Moscow has consistently held the battlefield initiative since late 2023, the Russian army has only managed to seize around one percent of additional Ukrainian territory while suffering hundreds of thousands of casualties.

Faced with a bloody quagmire on the front lines, Putin has resorted to exaggerating his army’s advances as he seeks to maintain the myth of inevitable Russian victory and discourage further support for Ukraine. This tactic was brutally exposed in late 2025 when Putin repeatedly claimed to have captured Kupyansk in northeastern Ukraine, only for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to visit the city personally and record a selfie video revealing the Kremlin dictator’s lies.

Despite Ukraine’s strong record of military innovation and battlefield success since 2022, there are indications that both Russia and some of Kyiv’s Western partners continue to underestimate the country. Putin’s recent public statements reaffirming his determination to fight on, together with Russia’s increasingly open rejection of a compromise peace, suggest that Moscow still expects the Ukrainian army to collapse.

Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump has repeatedly stated that Ukraine has “no cards” and should therefore agree to a Kremlin-friendly peace deal. Others in Europe continue to argue that unfavorable military realities make painful Ukrainian concessions unavoidable in order to end the war.

These pessimistic perspectives ignore the lessons of the past four years. The Russian army is clearly not the irresistible force of Kremlin propaganda, while Ukraine is no longer a military minnow and has multiple trump cards in its possession. The most important conclusion of all is that the human dimension still ultimately determines outcomes on the battlefield. It is here that Ukraine truly excels, with an army of skilled, inventive, and highly motivated personnel defending their homes and families.

The grassroots ingenuity of Ukraine’s military and the country’s readiness to embrace defense sector innovation have undoubtedly been instrumental in sustaining the Ukrainian war effort. But while impressive new weapons systems have often grabbed the headlines, it would be shortsighted to attribute Ukraine’s military strength to technological advances alone.

As the war enters a fifth year, the Ukrainian nation as a whole deserves the respect of the world for defying Russia so emphatically and transforming their country into a formidable military power. Nobody knows this better than Putin, who is paying a very high price for making the mistake of underestimating Ukraine.

The battlefield itself has also changed, with the clearly defined front lines of the early years giving way to a shifting grey zone dominated by ubiquitous drone coverage. As a result, major offensives featuring armored units and massed infantry are now extremely difficult to conduct. Russia has refined its tactics in response to these changes, shifting away from a reliance on human wave assaults toward the use of small infiltration groups that probe Ukrainian defenses while seeking to establish footholds.

With Putin’s commanders under intense political pressure to capture more ground, the impetus is on Russia to continue offensive operations. As the defending force, this places Ukraine in a strong position. According to Ukrainian officials, Russian casualties have recently reached record highs of more than 30,000 per month. For the first time in the war, this means Russia’s losses are now higher than monthly recruitment levels.

The Russian army in Ukraine has recently experienced disruptions to Starlink connectivity, creating further challenges for the coordination of offensive operations. Without stable links between front line units and commanders, Russian forces are likely to become even more vulnerable and easier to eliminate. This has already led to a number of successful Ukrainian counteroffensives and could create the conditions for additional increases in Russian casualty rates.

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Since the onset of the invasion, the Kremlin has been careful to reduce the risk of any backlash over heavy losses in Ukraine. Recruitment has concentrated on Russia’s ethnic minorities and the country’s poorest communities, with prisoners offered amnesties in exchange for military service. For the past few years, the emphasis has increasingly turned to attracting volunteers via large enlistment bonuses and generous salaries. Nevertheless, Russia’s ability to absorb casualties is not limitless. The longer the war drags on, the harder it will be for Moscow to maintain the current tempo, especially if Russian casualties continue to climb.

As part of efforts to maximize Russian losses, Ukraine has established a digital infrastructure to turn drone warfare into a systematic campaign of attrition. Through mechanisms such as the ePoints system, all Russian personnel and equipment losses are logged, verified, and analyzed. Ukrainian commanders can identify which units are most effective and adjust tactics as needed.

Ukraine’s strategy is producing striking results. In December 2025 alone, Ukrainian drone units claim to have hit over one hundred thousand Russian targets, a 31 percent increase compared to the previous month. Russian war blogger Dmitry Rogozin is one of many on the opposing side to acknowledge the effectiveness of this approach, noting that Ukraine is “building a model for the conflict as a long-term project designed to exhaust and exert systematic pressure.”

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The Russian army in Ukraine is already beginning to show signs of strain. According to UK Defense Secretary John Healey, Moscow is becoming increasingly dependent on foreign recruits as Russian commanders lose men faster than they can replace them. “Putin likes to give the impression that they’re making relentless and inevitable progress,” Healey noted recently. “But he’s weaker than he’s been and more reliant than he’s been on foreign fighters.”

Russia’s efforts to attract foreign mercenaries are a clear indication of the country’s mounting manpower challenges. Putin remains deeply reluctant to order a new mobilization due to concerns that this could destabilize the home front and spark a repeat of the exodus of fighting age Russian men that took place in 2022. However, with the Russian economy struggling, paying for new volunteers may become more challenging and lead to budget cuts elsewhere that could also fuel discontent.

If Russian losses continue to outpace recruitment, Putin may find himself with no good options. He could be forced to choose between mobilization, diverting state funds to sustain recruitment incentives, or scaling back offensive operations. All of these choices have the potential to fuel domestic instability. In recent days, there has been widespread speculation that Russian efforts to block the Telegram app may reflect growing Kremlin concerns over the possibility of unrest.

For much of the war, the Russian public has experienced the invasion of Ukraine as a distant conflict. Mounting casualties, particularly if paired with growing economic hardship, may gradually erode this sense of detachment and increase the pressure on the Kremlin. As the war enters a fifth year, Ukraine is hoping escalating Russian losses can finally force Putin to rethink his invasion and seek a meaningful settlement.

David Kirichenko is an associate research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society.

As Russian battlefield losses mount, Putin is turning to Africa for soldiers

Katherine Spencer — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 19:38:58 +0000

At the end of January, CSIS estimated that Russia has suffered approximately 1.2 million casualties during the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. If accurate, this figure would represent the greatest loss incurred by a major power in any war since World War II. The exact number of Russian soldiers killed and wounded in Ukraine remains hotly debated, but nobody would seriously question the fact that the invasion has led to catastrophic losses.

As casualties continue to mount, Russia is seeking to recruit men from abroad to replenish the ranks of its depleted army. The BBC Russian service recently estimated that around 20,000 men from foreign countries have signed up to join Russia’s invasion, with many recruited from former Soviet republics as well as low-income nations in the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa.

Foreign recruitment is increasingly popular with the Putin regime as it allows Moscow to avoid another round of politically risky mobilization, which could easily destabilize Russian society. By paying foreigners to fight in Ukraine, the Kremlin is able to shift the war’s bloodiest burden away from Russian households and minimize any potential backlash on the home front.

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Russia’s military recruitment efforts are global in scope and span many countries. The issue of African recruitment has made headlines in recent weeks following the publication of footage showing the apparent mistreatment of African men in the Russian army. A number of videos surfaced on social media in January that appeared to depict the verbal and physical abuse of Africans by their Russian colleagues, who referred to them as “disposables” and mocked one recruit who was seen with an anti-tank mine strapped to his chest.

Russian military recruiters have targeted Africa with particular intensity. More than 1,400 African nationals have been identified as serving in the Russian army, with one in five reported dead. These confirmed figures may only represent a small portion of the overall total. The Kremlin is accused of sending African men to fight in Ukraine after first attracting them to Russia with false promises of ordinary jobs or non-combat military roles. Many survivors have complained of finding themselves on the front lines of the invasion with little to no military training.

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The growing number of African men serving in the Russian military is sparking international alarm, with a number of African nations voicing their concerns. A Kenyan intelligence report released on February 19 claimed that at least 1,000 Kenyans have been recruited to fight for Russia through clandestine recruitment networks. Officials in Nairobi are now moving to shut down an estimated 600 recruiting agencies, and are pushing Moscow to ban the recruitment of Kenyan soldiers.

South African government officials have entered into talks with their Russian counterparts on the issue and are hoping to repatriate 17 of their nationals. These men were reportedly recruited for combat roles in Russia via a scheme involving the daughter of former South African president Jacob Zuma. Nigeria’s foreign ministry has also warned citizens about a rise in illegal recruitment schemes sending fighters to Russia, following reports that two Nigerians were killed in Ukraine.

Meanwhile, women from South Africa and other parts of the continent are reportedly being targeted and tricked into working in Russian drone factories. Most are recruited via social media adverts for jobs in the catering and hospitality industries. The South African authorities have warned citizens about online campaigns promising jobs and study in Russia. As awareness increases across Africa, media coverage is highlighting the dangers facing Africans who seek lucrative employment in Russia.

The Kremlin will likely attempt to enlist more Africans in 2026 as Russia struggles to find sufficient numbers of domestic recruits amid mounting battlefield losses. Around 422,000 Russian nationals signed contracts with the military last year, a 6 percent drop from 2024, according to recent reports. In addition to availability, foreign troops are also cheaper to recruit than Russian citizens, who in many cases now expect unprecedented enlistment bonuses as well as other benefits including salaries far in excess of national averages.

Russia’s growing reliance on African soldiers is a powerful symbol of an invasion that has gone horribly wrong for Vladimir Putin. The Kremlin dictator expected to decapitate and subjugate Ukraine in a matter of days. Instead, as the invasion enters a fifth year, Putin finds himself forced to recruit troops from around the world in order to avoid destabilizing Russia and threatening the survival of his own regime.

Katherine Spencer is a program assistant at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center.

Ukrainian defense tech companies must prepare for export opportunities

Michael Druckman — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 22:18:27 +0000

Ukrainian defense tech companies received the country’s first export permits in early February as Ukraine looks to capitalize on the dramatic recent expansion of the defense sector and boost the wartime economy. The news came days after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed the decision to allow international weapons sales and unveiled plans to establish ten export centers across Europe in 2026.

The move to permit Ukrainian arms exports has been a long time coming, with defense tech companies arguing that they have spare production capacity due to the Ukrainian state’s limited purchasing power. With foreign sales now on the agenda, potential participating companies must make sure they are in a position to make the most of the emerging opportunities.

Since the onset of the full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022, Ukraine’s defense tech sector has proved itself in the most demanding conditions imaginable. Ukrainian companies, many of them young, resource-constrained, and operating under constant attack, have designed, adapted, and deployed weapons systems at a pace rarely seen in peacetime industries.

Crucially, these firms have been able to produce and refine innovative products in combat conditions based on real-time battlefield feedback. In practice, this has meant development cycles that can often be measured in days or weeks, rather than the multi-year acquisition cycles typical of traditional defense procurement.

The performance of Ukraine’s defense tech industry has generated significant international interest and a spate of early seed investments. As the war continues and the Ukrainian government moves to open up foreign markets, ambitious defense sector companies will need to focus on maximizing their export readiness.

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In the context of the Ukrainian defense tech industry, export readiness refers to a company’s ability to navigate the complex legal, regulatory, and compliance frameworks governing the international sale of defense and dual-use technologies. This includes securing the necessary export licenses from the Ukrainian authorities, understanding and complying with destination country import controls, adhering to multilateral export control regimes, implementing robust end-use monitoring and supply chain security, and demonstrating transparency in ownership and governance to satisfy due diligence requirements of foreign buyers and investors.

For Ukrainian companies, export readiness also means turning battlefield innovation into compliant, scalable products for global markets and converting their tactical advantage into strategic economic growth. The Ukrainian businesses building these weapons systems and the investors backing them must begin this work now, not after the first export opportunity appears. Waiting until a deal is on the table could result in losing momentum, credibility, and valuation.

International defense markets operate under strict and unforgiving rules. Compliance with frameworks such as the US International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), Export Administration Regulations (EAR), the EU’s Dual-Use Regulation, and related NATO-aligned regimes is not optional.

These rules apply not only to finished products, but also to components, software, technical data, and even the nationality of personnel involved in development. Under the incorporation principle, foreign-origin controlled parts integrated into Ukrainian products can subject the final system to external jurisdiction and re-export restrictions.

Some US export rules allow limited flexibility when controlled components are only a small part of a system. ITAR does not. Even minor integration of ITAR-controlled items can trigger full US export licensing obligations. Companies that treat export controls as an afterthought often discover too late that they have painted themselves into a regulatory corner.

A critical but often underestimated component of export readiness is supply chain integrity. Many modern defense and dual-use systems rely on electronics, sensors, chips, and subcomponents sourced through global markets.

Supply chains with hidden or poorly documented tails that run back to China or other high-risk jurisdictions can quietly disqualify an otherwise competitive product from Western export markets. In some cases, these dependencies can trigger outright prohibitions; in others, they impose licensing requirements so onerous that customers walk away.

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Export readiness also requires institutional maturity inside companies. This includes appointing dedicated export control and compliance officers; implementing comprehensive trade compliance policies and procedures that govern every stage of the product lifecycle from design and procurement to production, marketing, and after-sales support; and building internal capability to identify, classify, and manage controlled items and technologies.

Ukrainian companies need to understand which products fall under which regulatory regimes, which export markets are realistically accessible, and what licensing pathways exist. Filing for licenses proactively, engaging early with national authorities, conducting internal compliance audits, and mapping obligations in advance can prevent costly delays, enforcement actions, and reputational damage that investors, partners, and customers alike are increasingly unwilling to tolerate.

Mistakes can be costly, with the compliance failures or unauthorized exports of a single private company capable of triggering diplomatic incidents, sanctions, or restrictions that jeopardize market access and credibility for Ukraine’s entire defense industrial base. This makes institutional discipline a matter of national security, not merely corporate risk management.

The implications are equally clear for international investors. As capital becomes more selective and diligence more rigorous, shareholder value will increasingly favor Ukrainian defense companies that are compliant, transparent, and forward-looking. Funds that encourage early investment in governance, compliance infrastructure, and supply chain resilience are not being overly cautious; they are protecting downside risk and enhancing upside potential. In future funding rounds and exit scenarios, export readiness will be a differentiator that directly affects valuation.

There is also a broader strategic dimension. Ukraine’s integration into Western defense and industrial ecosystems will depend not only on political alignment, but also on regulatory compatibility. Companies that are export-ready today will be in a position to participate in joint development programs and contribute to trusted supply chains tomorrow.

Ukraine’s defense sector has already demonstrated enormous battlefield credibility. The next phase is commercial and institutional credibility. Companies and investors who act now by auditing supply chains, implementing compliance frameworks, and preparing for regulated exports will be the ones best placed to lead the global defense market.

Michael Druckman is the founder and managing director of Trident Forward.

A bad Ukraine peace could ignite new wars in Russia’s former empire

Joseph Epstein — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 21:38:40 +0000

A fresh round of US-brokered peace talks between Russia and Ukraine is taking place this week as the Trump administration seeks to reach a deal by early summer. While pro-Ukrainian voices warn that any agreement lacking ironclad security guarantees for Kyiv could embolden Moscow to go further into Moldova or test NATO in the Baltics, the biggest threat may be to countries elsewhere in the former Soviet space.

There are already signs that Russia is turning its imperial appetite toward the South Caucasus and Central Asia, where the groundwork for destabilization appears to be well underway. Any negotiated settlement in Ukraine that ignores these regions will not end the current war; it will merely relocate it.

Russian nationalist ideologue Alexander Dugin, who is often called “Putin’s brain,” declared last month that no post-Soviet state should possess sovereignty. Instead, he argued, Moscow “has no choice but to restore the Russian Empire.” Days earlier, leading Kremlin propagandist Vladimir Solovyov called for Russia to conduct “special military operations” similar to the invasion of Ukraine in Central Asia and the Caucasus.

The Russian Foreign Ministry sought to distance itself from these comments by dismissing Solovyov as a “private journalist,” but few were convinced. In a country where the Kremlin controls news coverage and individuals can face prison for holding up blank signs, any talk of private journalism lacks credibility. Instead, this rhetoric is a further indication that even while bogged down in Ukraine, Russia is already waging shadow wars against other neighbors.

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Evidence of Russia’s intentions goes beyond mere revisionist rhetoric. In early February, Azerbaijani security services released recordings of Ramiz Mehdiyev, the former head of the country’s presidential administration, allegedly coordinating coup plans with Russian FSB agents. This echoed events in Armenia last summer, when the authorities arrested Samuel Karapetyan, a Russian-Armenian oligarch on the US Treasury Department’s Kremlin List, for allegedly plotting to overthrow Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s government in cooperation with Gazprom and Russian Railways.

Two alleged Russian-backed coup attempts in the South Caucasus in a single year should be enough to alarm every policymaker in Washington and across Europe. Meanwhile, in Central Asia, leaked Russian military intelligence documents claim to reveal plans for active operations to destabilize Kazakhstan. The initial focus was set to be the country’s northern regions, where Kazakhstan’s ethnic Russian population is concentrated. The plans included bribing elites, weaponizing accusations of “Russophobia,” and funneling propaganda through front organizations; tactics that echo earlier destabilization efforts in Ukraine.

The Kremlin has particular cause for concern due to the growing American presence in regions that Moscow regards as its own backyard. Over the past year, the United States has displaced Russia as the principal mediator between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and has brokered a peace deal including US oversight of a corridor that could become a key trade route connecting Europe to Asia while bypassing Russia entirely.

US Vice President JD Vance’s recent visit to Yerevan and Baku underlined the changing geopolitical balance in the South Caucasus. This was the highest level American engagement in the region for nearly two decades. It represented a statement of strategic intent that the Kremlin cannot ignore.

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US President Donald Trump has made ending wars a signature promise, but his team must know that some peace deals could end up accelerating hostilities elsewhere. If a settlement in Ukraine frees up Russian military resources without establishing credible deterrents against further Kremlin aggression, Moscow will have the means and the motive to reassert dominance elsewhere in its former empire.

History warns us to take this seriously. The tragedy of the war in Ukraine is not only the scale of the killing but its repetition. In his book “War and Punishment,” Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar chronicles how Russia systematically repressed Ukrainians for centuries to extinguish statehood aspirations. Zygar traced this process from the abolition of Cossack autonomy in the eighteenth century to the prohibition of Ukrainian language and literature in the nineteenth century, and on to the artificially engineered 1930s famine, known as the Holodomor, that killed around four million Ukrainians.

Strikingly similar templates exist throughout the former Soviet domains. “Perished Civilization,” a volume published under the nom de guerre “Kuzari” and drawing on leaked Russian archival files, has gained attention in the Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Tajik, and Ukrainian media since Dugin and Solovyov’s provocations. The book documents how Moscow justified its conquest of Muslim Central Asia as a sacred duty to defend Orthodoxy, a civilizational framing that lent permanence to what began as territorial opportunism. Following the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks retained every inch of this conquered land, swapping religious justification for ideological mandate.

The human cost was staggering. Kazakhstan experienced its own artificially engineered famine during the Soviet era, known in the country as the Asharshylyk. This mirrored Ukraine’s Holodomor and annihilated around 38 percent of the Kazakh population. Today’s concerns are not ancient grievances; they are unhealed wounds in societies that understand what Russian imperial restoration could mean.

With painful memories of Russian rule still widespread in Central Asia and the South Caucasus, few residents will accept the argument that Russia’s poor military performance in Ukraine makes further aggression unlikely. Instead, they will point to Moscow’s record of learning from its failures.

Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia was tactically successful but operationally embarrassing. The invasion was mired by aircraft losses, poor coordination, and drunk soldiers wandering through villages and reportedly wobbling at roll calls. Six years later, Russia seized Crimea with “little green men” in an operation that was both remarkably swift and highly professional. A hasty Ukraine peace could once again enable Russia to learn from its mistakes and implement key lessons against new targets.

A number of steps are required to prevent a settlement in Ukraine from serving as the spark for further Russian aggression in Central Asia or the South Caucasus. First, any security guarantees for Ukraine should also cover other at-risk post-Soviet states through bilateral defense pacts or a multilateral framework.

Second, the United States should seek to amplify its economic footprint throughout the region by committing to infrastructure and resource development projects. This will help counter Russian influence while creating incentives for stability. Third, sanctions relief should be dependent on concrete criteria such as halting Kremlin destabilization efforts in Azerbaijan, Armenia, Kazakhstan, and beyond.

By embedding regional safeguards into a Ukraine peace deal, President Trump can deliver on his promise to end wars without igniting new conflicts. The Kremlin’s propagandists are telling us exactly where they plan to go next. This time, we should listen.

Joseph Epstein is director of the Turan Research Center.

Vladimir Putin is trapped in a war he cannot win but dare not end

Peter Dickinson — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 22:50:16 +0000

More than a year since he returned to the White House vowing to end the Russia-Ukraine War within 24 hours, US President Donald Trump remains upbeat about the prospects for peace. “Very, very good talks today,” Trump stated on February 6 following the latest round of negotiations in Abu Dhabi. “Something could be happening.”

Few in Kyiv share this optimism. While Ukrainian officials are loathe to dismiss Trump’s peace efforts for fear incurring his displeasure, a majority of Ukrainians remain utterly unconvinced that Russian President Vladimir Putin has any interest whatsoever in ending hostilities. A poll conducted by Kyiv’s International Institute of Sociology in late January found that only 20 percent of Ukrainians think the war will end by July, while 43 percent expect fighting to continue into 2027 or beyond.

Such skepticism is easy to understand. Ukraine agreed to an unconditional ceasefire way back in March 2025, but Putin has so far refused to follow suit. Instead, he has spent much of the past year engaging in blatant stalling tactics while constantly moving the diplomatic goalposts in a transparent bid to prevent any progress toward a lasting settlement. This has resulted in what most Ukrainians and many others regard as a phony peace process.

As fruitless US-led negotiations rumble on, Putin has underlined his true intentions by dramatically increasing Russian attacks on the Ukrainian population, leading to a 31 percent surge in civilian casualties during 2025. The most recent escalation saw Russia attempt to freeze millions of Ukrainians in their own homes by systematically bombing critical heating and power infrastructure amid Arctic conditions. Some believe this ruthless winter bombing campaign qualifies as an act of genocide; it is most certainly not the act of a man seeking a compromise peace.

Trump has difficulty reading Putin’s true intentions because he fundamentally misunderstands the motivations behind the Russian invasion of Ukraine. To Trump, the current negotiations are a geopolitical real estate deal, with the Russians playing hardball to secure better terms. In reality, Putin is operating on a completely different wavelength altogether.

The Kremlin dictator is not looking to make deals, acquire additional land, or push the Russian border a few hundred kilometers to the west. Instead, he wants to secure his place in history. Putin genuinely believes he is on an historic mission to reverse the injustice of the Soviet collapse and revive the Russian Empire. In order to achieve this, he has convinced himself that he must erase Ukraine as a state and as a nation.

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For more than two decades, Putin’s Ukraine obsession has shaped his reign and defined Russian foreign policy. His relationship with the West first became openly hostile in the aftermath of Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution, which Putin bitterly denounced as a Western plot to destabilize Russia.

Since that watershed moment, Ukraine has been at the heart of virtually every single new crisis in relations between Moscow and the democratic world, from the 2014 seizure of Crimea to the full-scale invasion of 2022. Throughout this period, Putin has repeatedly demonstrated his readiness to sacrifice Russia’s other national interests in pursuit of his anti-Ukrainian crusade.

Meanwhile, he has used the full weight of the formidable Kremlin propaganda machine to poison Russian society against all things Ukrainian and prepare the ground for a war of national extermination. Putin has become notorious for insisting that Ukrainians are actually Russians (“one people”), and has repeatedly dismissed independent Ukraine as an illegitimate state and an artificial “anti-Russia.”

Anyone in Ukraine who dares to disagree with Putin’s claims has been dehumanized and branded a Nazi or a stooge of the West. This hate campaign has proved remarkably successful and has contributed to the almost complete absence of visible anti-war sentiment in today’s Russia, despite widespread public knowledge of the atrocities taking place in Ukraine.

Ukraine’s importance to Putin is twofold. As the largest non-Russian former Soviet republic by population and the closest to Russia in terms of shared heritage, Putin sees Ukraine as the key to undoing the verdict of 1991. If he can end what he regards as the aberration of Ukrainian statehood, this will redeem Russia and reestablish the country’s credentials as a great power.

Likewise, Ukraine’s perceived closeness means that the further consolidation of an independent and democratic Ukrainian state represents an existential threat to authoritarian Russia. As a KGB officer in East Germany during the late 1980s, Putin witnessed firsthand how grassroots movements can topple empires. If Ukraine’s transition from Kremlin vassal to European democracy continues, he fears this could serve as a catalyst for the next stage in a Russian imperial retreat that began in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

This helps to explain why Putin has shown so little interest in the seemingly generous peace terms proposed by Trump. The US leader has indicated that Russia would be allowed to keep the territories it has captured in Ukraine while facing no meaningful consequences for launching the largest European invasion since World War II. At first glance, these terms might appear to represent a major Russian victory, but Putin himself obviously does not think so.

Putin’s reluctance to accept Trump’s offer makes perfect sense when viewed from the perspective of the Russian ruler’s revisionist worldview and imperial ambitions. Crucially, Putin is well aware that any peace deal based on the current front lines of the war would leave 80 percent of Ukraine beyond Kremlin control and free to integrate into the democratic world. That is exactly what he is fighting to prevent.

In line with the present proposals, the Kremlin would retain control over the rust belt towns of the Donbas, but would cede iconic Odesa and sacred Kyiv, the mother city of all Russia, to a hostile neighbor. Most Russians would regard this as a defeat of historic proportions. Instead of being remembered as a new Peter the Great, Putin would be doomed to enter Russian history as the man who lost Ukraine.

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With a compromise peace out of the question, Putin has no real choice but to fight on. Doing so offers some obvious advantages. As long as the war continues, Putin can delay a reckoning over the huge Russian losses in Ukraine and the damage done to the country’s international standing. But as the fourth anniversary of the invasion draws near, it is becoming increasingly difficult to disguise the fact that the war is not going according to plan.

Putin’s problems are most immediately apparent on the battlefield. When he launched the full-scale invasion in February 2022, Putin vowed to “demilitarize” Ukraine. Four years on, Ukraine now boasts the largest army in Europe and has emerged as a world leader in drone warfare.

The radically upgraded Ukrainian military has already defeated Russia in multiple major engagements and is now seeking to gain the upper hand in a grueling high-tech war of attrition. Putin’s army suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties in 2025, while seizing less than one percent of Ukraine. At the current glacial pace, it would take the Russian military decades to conquer the country.

In public, at least, Putin continues to project confidence and insist that the goals of Russia’s invasion will be unconditionally met. However, his boasts of battlefield dominance are now starting to ring hollow. With so few actual victories to cheer, he has recently resorted to inventing imaginary advances.

Putin’s habit of exaggerating Russian gains came back to haunt him in late 2025 when he repeatedly claimed to have captured the Ukrainian city of Kupyansk, only for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to personally visit the city and record a selfie video exposing the Russian ruler’s lies. This embarrassing episode underlined the growing credibility gap between Putin’s bold talk of inevitable Russian victory and the far less impressive battlefield reality of his faltering invasion.

Putin’s other stated war aim was the “denazification” of Ukraine. This is Kremlin code for the erasure of a separate Ukrainian national identity and the imposition of Russian imperial doctrine in every sphere of public life, from education and culture to politics and religion. If this was the intention, it has backfired disastrously.

The war unleashed by Putin in 2022 has fueled an unprecedented consolidation of Ukrainian patriotism alongside a wholesale rejection of all things Russian throughout Ukrainian society. As a result, the entire notion of a pro-Kremlin government in Kyiv is now inconceivable unless propped up indefinitely by Russian bayonets, which would be ruinously expensive for the Kremlin.

This geopolitical divorce is also evident in the international arena. For centuries, Ukraine was widely seen by the outside world as indivisible from Russia itself. Putin still clings to this imperial mythology, but his propaganda slogans of “brotherly nations” now sound absurdly outdated. Instead, today’s Ukraine is widely recognized as an emerging democracy and a member of the wider European community of nations.

It would be extremely reckless to underestimate the Russian military, of course. Russia’s sheer size means that it remains a formidable threat and will likely continue to grind forward in Ukraine. However, after nearly four years of limited progress and staggering losses, it is now difficult to imagine how Putin could achieve the maximalist goals of his invasion on the battlefield.

Many Russians had pinned their hopes on a new Trump presidency, but even the dramatic reduction in US military aid to Ukraine over the past year has failed to produce any significant Russian breakthroughs. Furthermore, US weapons continue to flow to Ukraine via the PURL initiative, with indications that the White House has also relaxed earlier restrictions on strikes inside Russia.

America’s withdrawal from transatlantic commitments also means European leaders are more motivated than ever to maintain their support for Ukraine in the coming years. In a rapidly changing security environment, they are acutely aware that the Ukrainian army is now indispensable for the defense of Europe. With Ukraine’s own revitalized defense industry meeting around half of the country’s military needs domestically, Kyiv looks well positioned to continue defending itself despite the decline in support from the United States.

As the war enters a fifth year, Putin finds himself in an unenviable predicament. He has no obvious pathway to victory but cannot agree to a compromise peace without acknowledging what would amount to an historic defeat and placing his own political survival in question.

Faced with a bloody quagmire on the front lines, Putin will likely seek to break Ukrainian resistance in the coming months by expanding Russian attacks on the general population and making as much of the country as possible unlivable. In parallel, he will continue to play for time on the diplomatic stage, while attempting to bribe the United States with wild proposals and bully Europe into inaction with thinly-veiled threats of escalation.

If President Trump is serious about ending the war, he needs to recognize that his Russian counterpart currently dare not risk any peace that safeguards Ukrainian independence. Putin knows that if Ukraine survives, he loses. A sustainable settlement will therefore only be possible if he comes under significantly more pressure and is confronted with the prospect of a fate far worse than failure in Ukraine.

Putin will abandon his invasion when he begins to fear that continuing the war could threaten the future of his regime and the stability of Russia itself. The current occupant of the Kremlin still dreams of emulating Stalin and Katherine the Great, but he has no desire to become the next Tsar Nicholas II.

Peter Dickinson is editor of the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert service.

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The current ban on Russian football teams competing in international competitions was one of many similar measures imposed in response to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The International Olympic Committee and International Paralympic Committee placed restrictions on Russian athletes, as did the World Athletics Council. Other sports that imposed a full ban on Russian athletes included archery, badminton, baseball, basketball, biathlon, canoeing, ice hockey, rowing, sailing, softball, skating, skiing, taekwondo, and volleyball.

As the war has progressed, some international sports organizations and governing bodies have begun to soften their stance toward Russia. The country’s tennis stars have returned to the sport’s most prestigious tournaments, while Russian athletes in a range of disciplines have been permitted to participate in international events under a neutral flag.

Some sports have opted to lift restrictions entirely. In September 2025, the International Paralympic Committee announced that it would end its ban on Russian athletes, allowing them to participate fully in the 2026 Winter Paralympics. Similarly, in November 2025, the International Judo Federation, the International Sambo Federation, and the European Gymnastics General Assembly all removed bans on Russian athletes.

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Many of those advocating for or justifying the relaxation of restrictions on Russian athletes have done so by insisting on the separation of sport from politics. Others have noted that with the Russian invasion of Ukraine soon set to enter a fifth year, there is no indication that the bans have had any impact on Kremlin policymaking. Instead, they claim, these restrictions have merely imposed unjustified costs on individual Russian athletes and hindered their development.

These arguments conveniently overlook Russia’s long record of routinely exploiting sports for propaganda purposes. Throughout the Cold War, the Kremlin pioneered the practice of generating political capital from sporting success. While the USSR did not permit the development of professional sport, the Soviet authorities invested heavily in sophisticated training programs in a wide range of sports.

This trend has continued into the twenty-first century. Russian President Vladimir Putin spent tens of billions of dollars hosting the 2014 Winter Olympics and the 2018 FIFA World Cup. Both events provided the Kremlin with an opportunity to whitewash modern Russia’s image among international audiences.

Russian sporting successes abroad are also frequently celebrated in Moscow as victories for the country as a whole and brandished as proof of Russia’s standing on the world stage. When Russian hockey player Alex Ovechkin made history in spring 2025 by beating Wayne Gretzky’s record as the US National Hockey League’s all-time goal scorer, the Kremlin propaganda machine was quick to toast a national triumph.

On numerous occasions, Russian athletes have directly participated in Putin regime propaganda, including appearing alongside the Kremlin dictator at public events. The BBC reports that some prominent Russian athletes have direct ties to the Russian military, while others have shared pro-Putin and pro-war content on social media in support of the Russian military.

Efforts to ease restrictions on Russia’s participation in international sports are particularly painful for Ukraine. Russia has killed hundreds of Ukrainian athletes during the current invasion, while preventing countless thousands of young Ukrainian talents from continuing with their training and fulfilling their potential. To many Ukrainians, the entire notion of allowing Russians to return to the international sporting arena amid the ongoing war seems exceptionally unethical.

Any further moves to lift existing international bans on Russian athletes may have consequences far beyond the sporting arena. Welcoming Russia back would risk normalizing the invasion of Ukraine and sending a message that the international community ultimately lacks the resolve to hold major nations to account for acts of aggression. This would be potentially disastrous not only for Ukraine, but for countries across the globe.

Mark Temnycky is a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council and a freelance journalist covering Eurasian affairs.

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Most studies of autocracies have concluded that the biggest single threat to regime stability comes from existing elites. Putin is apparently well aware of this and has worked hard to minimize the danger of a potential palace coup. While dissent is still possible among Kremlin powerbrokers, Russia’s current ruling class is too closely tied to Putin to mount any serious challenge. One of the Russian ruler’s longstanding allies, Dmitry Kozak, reportedly opposed the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and advocated for de-escalation. But rather than triggering open resistance, this disagreement led to Kozak’s quiet removal from office.

There have also been reports of disagreements within the Kremlin over the handling of the war economy, with diverging opinions on key issues such as financial policy and attracting international investment. However, these differences of opinion have not translated into a serious public split.

The single biggest wartime test for the regime so far came in summer 2023 with the Wagner mutiny. This dramatic episode exposed a potential regime vulnerability, but the uprising ultimately proved short-lived due to a lack of defections from within the Russian military and political establishment.

Crucially, while there was little evidence of any rallying around the flag during the brief mutiny, no major security institutions or regional authorities sided with the Wagner rebels. Instead, most chose to wait rather than commit. Once the initial threat had been contained, Putin was able to reassert his authority. This was widely seen as vindication of the highly personalized style of government established during Putin’s reign, with no rival power bases capable of presenting a direct challenge.

Further opposition from disgruntled military personnel cannot be ruled out, but there appears to be virtually no prospect of a broader anti-regime protest movement emerging within Russia. A number of protests took place during the first weeks of the full-scale invasion but failed to gain momentum. Draconian new legislation is now in place, increasing the penalties for any public opposition to the war. An unprecedented round of mobilization in September 2022 proved deeply unpopular among the Russian public, but most opponents chose to flee the country rather than protest.

The degree of Russian public support for the invasion remains disputed. While polling data consistently demonstrates strong pro-war sentiment, skeptics point to obvious issues regarding the credibility of opinion surveys conducted in military dictatorships. Nevertheless, it seems clear that the organizational capacity for any meaningful opposition in today’s Russia is weak, while the information environment is tightly controlled.

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The Putin regime has been careful to minimize the risk of any backlash over heavy Russian losses in Ukraine. During the last decade of the Soviet era, public anger over the deaths of conscript soldiers in Afghanistan helped destabilize the USSR. Similar processes were also evident during the Chechen wars of the early post-Soviet period.

Putin has tailored his military recruitment policies with this threat very much in mind. Rather than relying on conscripts, he has focused on enlisting men predominantly drawn from ethnic minorities and the prison population. The Russian army also depends heavily on volunteers enticed by the promise of large initial bounties and generous salaries.

Despite the Kremlin’s best efforts, risks remain. Russia’s disproportionate use of ethnic minority troops could lead to a surge in anti-regime moods and separatist sentiment in places like Ingushetia and Dagestan. If current downward economic trends continue, Moscow may also find it increasingly challenging to fund the big payouts necessary to secure a steady flow of new volunteers. The war will inevitably remain Putin’s top priority, but money diverted to the army from other sectors will create the potential for discontent elsewhere.

The same logic could also apply to Russian losses in Ukraine. So far, the huge human cost of the invasion has not sparked a major domestic backlash, but with monthly casualty figures now reportedly reaching record highs, public dismay may yet become a destabilizing factor.

Western policymakers need to be aware that while there is no reason to expect an imminent collapse of the Putin regime, the end could come suddenly. Few were predicting the demise of the Tsarist Empire in 1916, or the fall of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. Putin has constructed formidable defenses during his twenty-six years in power and has done much to anticipate any possible sources of internal opposition. Nevertheless, the costs of maintaining this system could spiral out of control amid a fifth year of war, leading to dangerous consequences that he may be unable to contain.

An awareness of the Putin regime’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities should inform the Western approach to the war and help shape the faltering peace process. Western leaders will also likely be guided by concerns that if Putin does fall, this could lead to a future Russia that may be far darker and even less predictable than the current regime.

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Russia’s current attacks on Ukraine’s critical civilian infrastructure are neither accidental nor isolated. Power plants, transmission lines, substations, and heating systems have been repeatedly targeted throughout the entire country in a methodical manner to inflict maximum damage. These strikes have intensified in recent weeks as temperatures plunged, underlining the Kremlin’s deadly intent. During the coldest months of the Ukrainian winter, heating and power are not mere conveniences; they are essential for survival.

The present talk of a “kholodomor” in Ukraine not only captures the essence of Russia’s winter bombing campaign. This language also consciously echoes the term “Holodomor” (“death by hunger”), which is used to describe the artificially induced famine of the early 1930s that killed at least four million Ukrainians. Then as now, the Kremlin objective was the destruction of the conditions necessary for life in Ukraine.

Since the onset of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, Ukrainian analysts and other experts have been warning that history is in danger of repeating itself. By December 2022, humanitarian agencies assessed that 17.7 million Ukrainians would need emergency aid simply to survive the first winter of the war amid the large-scale bombardment of the country’s power grid, a campaign that later resulted in International Criminal Court arrest warrants for the Russian military commanders who orchestrated it.

Putin’s escalating weaponization of winter mirrors Stalin’s use of famine against Ukrainians almost one century earlier. Both atrocities are rooted in genocidal logic that treats the existence of a separate Ukrainian nation as an existential threat to Kremlin imperialism. However, unlike the Soviet authorities during the Holodomor, Putin has made no real effort to disguise or conceal the current targeting of Ukraine’s civilian population. On the contrary, Russian officials and media personalities have praised the destruction of civilian infrastructure and the suffering this inflicts.

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Russia’s winter bombing campaign is not only about depriving Ukrainians of the conditions to sustain life. It is also part of a broader strategy to reshape Ukrainian society and force the country to accept an artificially imposed Russian identity. This goal is most immediately apparent in occupied regions of Ukraine, where schools and social services have been repurposed to indoctrinate the population and erase all traces of Ukrainian identity. Rendering large parts of Ukraine unlivable is the first step; remaking the country on Moscow’s terms is the second.

Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure cannot be dismissed as an example of ordinary wartime brutality. Instead, the current bombing campaign must be viewed as part of a deliberate plot to destroy the conditions necessary for Ukrainian society to endure. Genocide is not defined only by mass killing; it is also defined by the deliberate destruction of the conditions of life required for a group’s survival.

As US-led peace talks continue, it is vital that the international community now avoid repeating the mistake of ignoring Ukraine’s warnings about Russia’s true intentions. In 2014 and 2022, Ukrainians were not taken seriously when they tried to alert the outside world to the danger. They are now once again raising the alarm over calls for Kyiv to cede heavily fortified areas of the Donbas to Russia in exchange for ambiguous promises of peace. Ukrainians warn that this would only encourage Moscow and create the ideal conditions for the next stage of Putin’s invasion.

When Ukrainians speak of facing death by cold, they are not attempting to shock or provoke. On the contrary, they are describing the latest stage in a Russian strategy that is historically all too familiar, and one that has become increasingly apparent since 2022.

The sheer scale of Russia’s current winter bombing campaign makes a mockery of attempts to broker a compromise peace and underlines the Kremlin’s determination to destroy Ukraine as a state and as a nation. While international audiences rightly acknowledge the remarkable resilience of the Ukrainian population, they must also recognize the need to address the sense of impunity driving Russia’s invasion. This impunity has convinced Putin that he can now freeze millions of Ukrainians in front of the watching world. Failure to hold him accountable for this crime will condemn other European countries to face a similar fate.

Kristina Hook is assistant professor of conflict management at Kennesaw State University and a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center.

Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 led to the emergence of a new social contract between Ukrainians and the state that saw party politics placed on pause. With the survival of the country in question, the Ukrainian public entrusted the government with extraordinary authority, while attention turned to urgent issues of national defense.

In practice, wartime realities meant an unprecedented concentration of power in the office of the president. As a result, the influence of the Ukrainian parliament on policy-making declined markedly. The dangers of this shift did not go unnoticed by politicians and activists alike, but there was a general consensus that such temporary political measures were justified by the existential nature of the fight against Russia’s invasion.

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The unspoken social contract of 2022 finally began to unravel in summer 2025, when the government passed controversial legislation undermining the independence of Ukraine’s anti-corruption architecture. This was widely perceived as a direct threat to the institutional progress achieved following the country’s 2014 Revolution of Dignity.

The Ukrainian public response was emphatic. Almost immediately, crowds gathered in central Kyiv and in a number of other Ukrainian cities to voice their opposition to the bill. This rapidly escalated into the country’s largest wartime protests. Faced with public outrage and widespread expressions of concern from Ukraine’s international partners, the authorities backed down and introduced fresh legislation protecting the independence of the country’s anti-corruption agencies.

This episode confirmed the underlying strength of Ukraine’s democratic instincts. Even in extreme wartime conditions, Ukrainians were ready to stand up in defense of their democracy. The summer 2025 protests established a clear red line between the temporary delegation of power and the permanent erosion of institutional safeguards.

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A further test of the wartime political status quo came in November 2025, when Ukraine’s anti-corruption institutions went public with allegations of systemic corruption within the country’s energy sector and accused numerous senior figures of involvement. The ensuing scandal led to a string of high profile resignations, including multiple ministers and the president’s chief of staff.

This political firestorm has raised fundamental questions about the monopoly of power in wartime Ukraine. While most Ukrainians continue to oppose the idea of holding national elections until a peace deal is in place, the energy sector corruption scandal in late 2025 has led to widespread calls for greater accountability, and has sparked heated debate over the need for changes in the country’s political leadership.

In this dynamic political climate, Ukraine’s parliament has begun to play a more prominent role. In December 2025, parliament voted to establish a temporary investigative commission to examine alleged violations related to corruption, human rights, and the defense sector. Crucially, this move received cross-party support.

An overall picture is emerging of a political system adapting to wartime realities but still very much atuned to core democratic values. Parliament is once again exercising oversight and influencing key political decisions, while anti-corruption institutions, civil society, and the country’s independent media act to expose violations. Meanwhile, Ukrainian society remains ready to defend the country’s hard-won democratic gains.

Most Ukrainians still recognize the need for wartime measures that would be seen as problematic in peacetime. However, the Ukrainian public has also established a number of firm red lines during the past four years of full-scale war. These are boundaries that no Ukrainian politician can afford to ignore, especially as negotiations to end the war progress. In fiercely democratic Ukraine, any potential peace deal must win public approval before it can be successfully implemented.

Oleksiy Goncharenko is a member of the Ukrainian Parliament with the European Solidarity party.

Vladimir Putin must not have a veto over security guarantees for Ukraine

Iulian Romanyshyn — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 21:14:18 +0000

The ongoing US-led peace process to end the Russian invasion of Ukraine continues to lack credibility. Skeptics question whether Russian President Vladimir Putin has any interest whatsoever in a durable settlement. Others doubt the underlying logic of existing peace talks and note that by granting Russia a veto over security guarantees for Ukraine, Kyiv’s Western partners risk prolonging the war indefinitely.

One of the most contentious proposals currently under discussion is the idea of delaying the introduction of European troops to Ukraine until after a ceasefire has been implemented. This approach seems to have been specifically designed to fail. After all, nothing is more likely to deter the Kremlin than the suggestion that a ceasefire will create the conditions to prevent any future advances and end the era of Russian expansionism in Ukraine.

More than a year since US President Donald Trump returned to the White House, it should be abundantly clear to European leaders that the United States no longer sees any vital national interest in guaranteeing Europe’s security. This fundamental shift requires a clear-eyed response. Instead of constantly responding to a geopolitical agenda defined in Washington and Moscow, Europe must seek to reassert its own agency and secure a stake in the negotiations to end the current war.

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If European leaders wish to participate as equal partners in discussions to determine the future security of their own continent, they cannot afford to rule out the deployment of troops to Ukraine. The Coalition of the Willing initiative, which is being led by the UK and France, was conceived in early 2025 as a way of keeping Trump engaged in European security; it is now the most realistic route to securing a European role in the peace process.

European troops could have a meaningful impact in Ukraine without engaging in combat operations. They could perform a range of support and training roles far from the front lines. For example, European contingents could take on much of the burden for monitoring the Ukrainian border with Belarus and the unrecognized Transnistrian Republic in Moldova, thereby allowing Ukrainian units to be used elsewhere. The deployment of European soldiers could also free up Ukrainian forces currently involved in the protection of critical infrastructure such as power plants and logistics hubs.

Boots on the ground in Ukraine could enhance existing training programs undertaken by Kyiv’s NATO partners. From a practical standpoint, it would certainly make military and economic sense to conduct training inside Ukraine rather than requiring large numbers of Ukrainian troops to travel internationally. The presence of European colleagues would boost morale within the Ukrainian army and demonstrate solidarity.

Crucially, a European military presence in Ukraine would undermine Russian efforts to prevent progress toward the implementation of credible security guarantees. While US officials have endorsed the concept of an assurance force to safeguard any peace deal, this is currently recognized as being conditional on Russian permission. However, Putin will not agree to any measures that rule out the possibility of further Russian gains. Deploying troops would send a signal that Moscow cannot define the debate over security guarantees.

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Critics will argue that any decision to deploy European troops to Ukraine would provoke Russia and lead to escalation. Kremlin officials are well aware of these concerns and have frequently warned that any Western military contingent in Ukraine would be legitimate targets. At the same time, the price of continued inaction may be Russian victory in Ukraine or a Kremlin-friendly peace that would leave European security in jeopardy for years to come.

Past experience strongly suggests that calling Putin’s bluff is the right strategy to adopt. Since launching the full-scale invasion of Ukraine almost four years ago, the Kremlin dictator has repeatedly announced red lines and warned of serious consequences, only to subsequently back down when confronted with a resolute response. Previous Russian red lines have included the supply of various categories of military aid to Ukraine, along with the use of long-range Western weapons inside Russia. On each occasion, Putin’s threats have proved to be empty.

Any move to place European forces in Ukraine would involve significant risks, but failure to act would risk leaving Europe sidelined and irrelevant. If European leaders want to secure a place at the negotiating table and avoid finding themselves on the menu, they must assert their agency. This can be achieved by demonstrating to the Kremlin that Russia does not have a veto over security guarantees for Ukraine.

Dr. Iulian Romanyshyn is a senior fellow and lecturer at the Center for Advanced Security, Strategic and Integration Studies (CASSIS) at the University of Bonn.

After almost four years of full-scale war, Ukraine now leads in the development of inexpensive and highly accurate drones and cruise missiles. By fully embracing this revolution, Ukraine and its allies stand a good chance of regaining the battlefield initiative and obliging Russia to compromise on its objectives.

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Historians have long known that the development of warfare is not linear. For long periods of time, weaponry and tactics tend to develop only incrementally. European armies in 1780, for example, looked almost identical to those of 1680. Likewise, little distinguished the medieval forces of 1300 from the armies that fought two centuries earlier.

At specific junctures, however, a confluence of new weapons, tactics, and forms of organization can fundamentally transform how wars are waged. In the late medieval period, a military revolution saw disciplined, salaried infantry displace mounted knights. Then came the early modern military revolution characterized by cannons, star-shaped forts, and oceanic warships. Centuries later, the industrial revolution empowered those states able to master the new technologies of railways, steel artillery, and mass conscription.

Not all military revolutions are the same. Some have led to the introduction of new technologies that only the wealthiest states can afford, while others have seen new military capabilities become more readily available to a wider range of states.

These two trends can clearly be seen in the military history of early modern Europe. In the late fifteenth century, the emergence of bronze artillery and star-shaped fortresses fundamentally changed the nature of war. Bronze cannon meant that armies could demolish castles and city walls in a matter of days rather than mounting lengthy sieges. To counter these new cannons, defenders developed star-shaped fortresses. Both technologies were exceedingly costly and were initially only accessible to a handful of leading powers such as France, Spain, and the Ottoman Empire.

It was a small state that kicked off the next wave of military revolution. This began in 1568 when the Dutch revolted against Imperial Spain. By almost any measure, the rebellious Dutch provinces should have lost. Spain was flush with silver from the Americas and had a far larger population base. Spain was also the indisputable military superpower of the period, having humbled France in the 1551-59 Italian War and crushed the Ottoman navy in 1571.

Initially, the war went as expected, with the Spanish conquering key cities such as Antwerp. However, the Dutch then began innovating. They discovered that the expensive and complex masonry employed in the construction of star-shaped fortresses was superfluous in wartime. Once they realized this, they started mass producing star-shaped fortifications out of earth and timber. Paid laborers or conscripted peasants could now build fortresses, so long as a trained engineer was present to supervise.

Likewise, the Dutch also pioneered casting cannon from iron. In many respects, these iron cannon were inferior to bronze; they weighed more and were prone to bursting. Iron guns, however, cost only one-tenth as much to manufacture. The Dutch used these cheaper cannons to equip larger fleets than the Spanish and to supply their many earthen fortifications with plentiful guns.

Dutch innovation in the late sixteenth century enabled the Netherlands to record one of the greatest military upsets in history. By 1609, they had obliged Spain to sign a truce. In 1648, The Spanish granted the Netherlands full independence. This military revolution did not introduce intrinsically different technologies. Instead, the Dutch developed ways of accessing capabilities that had hitherto only be available to great powers. What we are seeing in Ukraine today is a modern iteration of this dynamic.

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In the modern era, the United States has led the way in another military revolution by pioneering the development and deployment of precision-guided long-range strike weapons. Once again, the cost and complexity of these new weapons meant that only the world’s wealthiest and most technologically capable states could initially embrace this revolution.

Ukraine now stands on the brink of replicating the success of the Dutch more than four centuries ago. As the fourth anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion approaches, Ukraine is manufacturing large quantities of attack drones and developing its own cruise missiles, with plans to expand domestic production further. This ambitious objective is realistic, particularly if Ukraine’s allies provide sufficient support.

The conditions that have enabled Ukraine to achieve such innovations are unique in modern history. The existential nature of the war for Ukraine has meant that a vast talent pool of individuals hitherto uninvolved in the arms industry such as software engineers, tech entrepreneurs, and physicists have all embraced the task of developing novel solutions for Ukraine’s defense.

The funding of Ukraine’s war effort, with multiple Ukrainian ministries and foreign partners all financing projects, has created a remarkably pluralistic environment. In other words, entrepreneurs with promising products and potential backers are perpetually in search of one another. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s wartime circumstances have swept away many of the bureaucratic barriers and regulations that typically impede the testing and evaluation of weapons. The upshot is an innovation ecosystem more akin to Silicon Valley that typical military-industrial complexes.

Ukraine’s unique defense sector ecosystem has made it possible to produce an extraordinary number of long-range strike systems with unprecedented cost effectiveness. This is democratizing the long-range weapons technologies first pioneered by the United States in the final decades of the twentieth century. Ukraine’s progress is reminiscent of Dutch achievements in the sixteenth century, when they developed cheaper versions of existing technologies that had shaped Renaissance Europe’s earlier military revolution.

By leaning into this progress, Ukraine’s allies can help the country regain the initiative in the war against Russia. Ukraine currently lacks the resources to fund the production of cruise missiles and drones at the necessary scale, but Ukrainian defense sector companies do have spare capacity to produce more. By financing additional output of drones and missiles in Ukraine, partner countries can help transform the military situation.

Increased volumes of long-range strike weapons can enable a strategically successful campaign with an operational depth stretching hundreds of kilometers behind the front lines. In conditions of modern warfare, infantry and armored units are comparatively brittle and ineffective if they are denied supplies and long-range fire support. Ukraine’s expanding arsenal of deep strike assets provides a plausible means of achieving this, especially if supported with real-time intelligence from the country’s partners.

Ukraine’s long-range strike systems can also be used effectively in tandem with Western sanctions measures to increase the pressure on Russia’s overstretched wartime economy. A combined policy of tightening sanctions on Russian energy exports and escalating Ukrainian strikes on refineries and pipelines can seriously damage the strategically crucial Russian oil and gas industry.

The military revolution that Ukraine is currently leading has already succeeded in democratizing the production of long-range strike systems. With sufficient support from Kyiv’s partners, this revolution offers a viable pathway to Russia’s battlefield defeat and can set the stage for an acceptable peace agreement.

Dr Marc De Vore is a senior lecturer at the School of International Relations at the University of St. Andrews.

Drone superpower Ukraine can teach Europe how to defend itself

Lesia Orobets — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 22:54:12 +0000

Ever since US President Donald Trump returned to the White House just over a year ago, it has become increasingly apparent that the world is now entering a new and unpredictable era of international relations. For Europe, this has meant coming to terms with the idea that continued US military support can no longer be taken for granted. After decades of outsourcing their security to the Americans, Europeans must once again learn to defend themselves.

Throughout the past twelve months, there has been much talk in European capitals of wake-up calls but relatively little actual action. While many European countries have vowed to dramatically increase defense spending, the debate over a new European security architecture still lacks a sense of urgency and remains hampered by competing national interests.

One of the few things that a majority of European policymakers appear to agree on is the importance of Ukraine in the continent’s emerging security strategy. This recognition of Ukraine’s role underlines the scale of the changes that have taken place over the past four years.

When Russia’s full-scale invasion first began in February 2022, Ukraine was heavily reliant on Western military aid as the country fought for survival. Since those early days, the Ukrainian army has expanded dramatically and evolved into the largest and most experienced fighting force in Europe. As a result of this transformation, a country that many had previously dismissed as a minor military player is now widely regarded as indispensable for the future defense of Europe.

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Ukraine’s potential to shape Europe’s new security architecture is most immediately obvious in the field of drone warfare. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is widely acknowledged as the world’s first full-scale drone war, with huge quantities of drones dominating the battlefield and operating deep inside enemy territory. Over the past four years, Ukraine has established itself as a “drone superpower” with an annual output of around four million drones, Bloomberg reported in November 2025.

Western security experts are no doubt acutely aware that alongside Ukraine, the two other nations currently driving the international development of drone warfare are Russia and China. This underlines Kyiv’s strategic importance as the democratic world adjusts to the challenges posed by an emerging alliance of authoritarian powers centered on Moscow and Beijing.

A growing number of US and EU defense companies have already sought to establish a presence in Ukraine in order to capitalize on the country’s technological expertize. This approach is understandable but may be shortsighted. In reality, Ukraine’s value extends far beyond access to existing military drone technologies.

Since 2022, Ukrainian drone developers and military units specializing in unmanned operations have learned to solve problems and adapt to new battlefield realities at lightning speed. Out of necessity, they have become accustomed to upgrading individual drone models and counter-drone systems within ever-decreasing innovation cycles that can now be measured in weeks.

Ukrainian forces have pioneered the use of combat drones on the front lines of the war. The country has also led the way at sea, with Ukrainian naval drones sinking multiple Russian warships and forcing Putin to withdraw the bulk of his remaining fleet from occupied Crimea to the relative safety of Russia itself. Meanwhile, long-range Ukrainian drones now routinely strike targets deep inside Russia. This Ukrainian success can serve as the foundation for a wider European security strategy as the world moves into a new era of drone-based warfare.

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Ukraine’s most immediate contribution to European security is likely to be in terms of helping countries defend against the mounting threat posed by Russian drones. The Kremlin’s current harassing activities around airports and other strategic sites across Europe are essentially an annoyance, but even such small-scale drone operations have exposed an alarming lack of readiness. At present, it seems safe to say that the continent as a whole is utterly unprepared for the kind of large-scale Russian drone attacks that have become a routine feature of the war in Ukraine.

Europe has responded to escalating Russian drone activity by developing plans to establish a “drone wall” along the continent’s exposed eastern flank. So far, however, this initiative remains somewhat fragmented with no unified concept or central coordination. While a collective response could eventually prove effective, pursuing this goal without learning from Ukraine’s unique experience makes little sense. Only Kyiv has the data and insights necessary to build layered defensive networks capable of combating waves of Russian drones.

In recent months, a growing number of European countries have taken the practical step of seeking to tap into Ukraine’s drone warfare prowess by working with Ukrainian trainers or establishing joint production initiatives. “Ukraine’s experience is the most relevant in Europe right now. Our specialists and technologies can become a key element of the future European drone wall, a large-scale project that will ensure safety in the skies,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy commented in September 2025.

In addition to drone tactics and technologies, Ukraine can also offer its European partners an unrivaled environment for drone operator training and weapons development. The whole of Ukraine is now a vast drone warfare laboratory where novel threats are identified and addressed on a daily basis. As a result, new drone models and upgraded designs can move from the drawing board to the battlefield at a pace that is unheard of in peacetime Europe.

Drone warfare is just one of the many areas where Europe can learn from Ukraine. As European leaders explore new security strategies in a rapidly shifting geopolitical environment, it should be abundantly clear that Kyiv has a crucial role to play. No other European country has such a battle-hardened army or intimate knowledge of modern warfare. In an increasingly unpredictable world, that makes Ukraine a vital partner.

Lesia Orobets is the founder of the Price of Freedom air defense initiative and a former member of the Ukrainian parliament.

During his recent visit to Lithuania, Zelenskyy addressed the Belarusian population directly and expressed his support for their European future. He also met with recently released Belarusian political prisoners and paid tribute to Belarusian volunteers serving alongside Ukrainian forces in the fight against Russia’s invasion.

Ukrainian officials have recently made clear that Lukashenka and his regime must be held accountable for complicity in Russia’s aggression. Meanwhile, in a further indication that Ukraine is moving toward more systemic engagement with the Belarusian democratic opposition, plans have emerged to potentially appoint a special envoy and host Tsikhanouskaya in Kyiv.

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Some analysts believe this recent change in tone toward Belarus may reflect the growing influence of former Ukrainian spymaster Kyrylo Budanov, who was recently appointed as President Zelenskyy’s new chief of staff. Budanov has long been involved in contacts with the Belarusian side and helped facilitate the transfer of released political prisoners to Ukraine in December 2025.

Kyiv’s apparent pivot may also reflect the fact that Russia’s military footprint in Belarus continues to grow. Ukrainian officials claim Russia uses Belarus to conduct drone attacks on Ukraine and evade air defenses. Lukashenka recently announced the deployment of nuclear-capable Russian Oreshnik missiles to Belarus, which Zelenskyy described as a threat to both Ukraine and the European Union.

Meanwhile, Russia’s integration of the Belarusian military industrial complex continues, with up to 80 percent of Belarusian enterprises reportedly now engaged in production for Russia’s military needs. Belarus is accused of supplying ammunition, providing repair services for Russian equipment, and channeling sanctioned technology to Russian defense companies.

Lukashenka is understandably eager to distance himself from any direct ties to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. However, the available evidence indicates that his regime is becoming more deeply embedded in the Kremlin war effort. This is the reality confronting the Ukrainian authorities. As long as Belarus remains firmly under Kremlin control, it will continue to pose a serious security threat along Ukraine’s northern border.

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Europe should be paying particular attention to indications of a new Ukrainian approach to Belarus. As US foreign policy priorities shift, responsibility for managing relations between Belarus and the West will increasingly fall on the European Union. EU officials must decide between freezing the Belarus issue or recognizing the country as a strategic challenge that requires European leadership.

Belarus has most recently made headlines due to a series of prisoner releases tied to partial US sanctions relief. The humanitarian impact of these deals should not be underestimated, but it is also important to underline that more than one thousand Belarusian political prisoners remain incarcerated. Some skeptics have argued that without a broader strategy, reducing sanctions pressure on Minsk in exchange for prisoner releases risks strengthening the current regime and reinforcing an oppressive system that imprisons political opponents.

This presents opportunities for Europe to demonstrate its ability to take the lead on the international stage. While the US seeks practical short-term results such as the release of political prisoners, Europe can push for more systemic change and democratic transition in Belarus. In this context, sanctions should be seen as a tool to undermine authoritarian rule rather than locking in the current status quo. This can be achieved by closing existing loopholes while targeting the revenue streams and logistical networks that sustain the Lukashenka regime and support the Russian war machine.

In the current geopolitical climate, any talk of a neutral Belarus is delusional. Lukashenka will not turn away from his patrons in the Kremlin voluntarily. If European policymakers wish to see genuine change in Belarus, they will need to demonstrate a readiness to increase the pressure on Minsk. The enticing prospect of future European integration can play a crucial role in these efforts.

Belarus now occupies a strategic position in Europe’s rapidly shifting security landscape. The country remains deeply involved in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and also represents a key challenge for European leaders as they seek to prove that the continent is capable of defending itself in an era when US support can no longer be taken for granted. The Ukrainian authorities clearly feel the time is right for a more proactive approach to Belarus. The question now is whether Europe will follow suit.

Hanna Liubakova is a journalist from Belarus and nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.

The core question now is not whether the state should intervene, but how to design intervention that protects national interests without suffocating private initiative or driving away international investors. This means finding the middle ground between security and economic freedom. Democratic Ukraine must seek to strike a better balance than its authoritarian adversary in order to enable the kind of continued defense tech innovation necessary to prevail on the battlefield and increase deterrence.

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There are currently concerns that Ukraine’s fast‑growing defense tech sector risks inheriting longstanding governance problems including opaque procedures, slow decision‑making, and uneven enforcement. Recent corruption scandals in Kyiv have already damaged trust, creating what some businesses have described as “negative expectations.”

From the Ukrainian government’s side, there is recognition that institutions are still adapting, with many of the available economic security tools still fragmented or not yet fully operational. This represents an opportunity for Ukraine if the country is able to build governance structures tailored to strategic sectors rather than retrofitting existing and outdated bureaucratic models. Creating a new generation of transparent institutions to address defense sector exports, investment screening, and procurement could become a competitive advantage for Ukraine if designed with private sector input from the outset.

Export licensing is one of the most acute potential bottlenecks. Ukraine’s defense tech businesses currently face a process requiring excessive approvals from multiple institutions, with little accountability or predictability. There is also a perception of unequal treatment, undermining confidence in the system. Ukrainian officials, meanwhile, tend to stress the necessity of strict controls to prevent leakage of sensitive technologies.

A risk‑based and tiered export control regime could address these concerns. By clearly defining a narrow list of highly sensitive technologies requiring strict oversight, the Ukrainian authorities could create faster and more predictable export pathways for less sensitive defense and dual‑use products. This would support economic growth while preserving core security interests.

Wartime currency controls and capital movement restrictions severely limit the ability of Ukrainian defense sector companies to expand internationally. Multiple investors have noted the paradox of profitable Ukrainian firms being unable to deploy their own capital abroad, forcing them to raise funds outside the country simply to operate globally.

From the perspective of Ukrainian policymakers, currency restrictions are viewed as necessary to preserve macro‑financial stability and to prevent capital flight. Targeted exemptions for vetted defense and dual‑use companies, particularly those pursuing foreign acquisitions or joint ventures aligned with national priorities, could unlock growth without undermining financial stability. Such a mechanism would signal trust in compliant firms and reward transparency.

Another key issue is intellectual property (IP). Standard IP processes are too slow for wartime innovation cycles. In the dynamic current environment, Ukrainian companies rely on trade secrets and know‑how rather than formal patents, but this increases risks when partnering internationally.

Ukrainian officials acknowledge the importance of innovation but have so far only been able to offer limited concrete solutions. Accelerated IP pathways for defense and dual‑use technologies, combined with support for joint research and development frameworks with trusted foreign partners, could help Ukrainian firms secure protection in allied jurisdictions while strengthening international integration.

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There is a degree of uncertainty in Ukraine’s expanding defense tech sector that can be seen in inconsistent terminology, unclear boundaries, and undefined red lines. A shared vocabulary and published strategic framework, co‑developed by the public and private sectors, could help reduce this uncertainty.

Different priorities lead to diverging visions. Defense tech industry executives and investors tend to view the issue of economic security primarily through the lens of scalability, competitiveness, and speed. Their key assumptions include the notion that innovation thrives in predictable, transparent environments.

Many also argue that Ukraine’s combat‑tested technologies represent a unique global opportunity, while cautioning that excessive controls risk pushing talent, capital, and IP abroad. With this in mind, industry representatives and investors generally support targeted security measures but fear blanket restrictions that treat all technologies and companies as equally sensitive.

Ukrainian officials tend to frame economic security primarily as a defensive necessity. They warn that adversaries actively use markets, investment, and technology transfer as weapons. Many are also concerned that under‑regulation could result in irreversible strategic losses. Naturally, their perspective prioritizes caution, monitoring, and alignment with allied security frameworks, even at the cost of slower growth.

The central tension here is time-based and risk‑based. Businesses operate on market timelines and accept calculated risk, while governments operate on security timelines and seek to minimize worst‑case scenarios. Without structured dialogue, these differences manifest as mistrust rather than complementary roles.

If managed effectively, wartime Ukraine’s approach to economic security in the defense tech and dual-use sectors could become a model for the country’s broader postwar reconstruction. Ukraine has the opportunity to redesign institutions in a strategic sector that already commands global attention. Success may depend on whether government policy is seen by businesses as a partnership or as an obstacle.

Constructive cooperation grounded in transparency, risk‑based policy, and continuous dialogue can transform economic security from a constraint into a catalyst for Ukraine’s long‑term strength and sovereignty, providing significant security benefits for allies and partners along the way. This is a realistic objective. After all, industry, investors, and government all ultimately seek the common goal of a resilient, innovative Ukrainian economy integrated with democratic allies and protected from adversarial exploitation.

Bridging the gap between perspectives is less a matter of ideology than of process, trust, and execution. Ukraine is currently in a period of transition that is marked by many significant challenges but no irreconcilable obstacles. Industry and investors are ready to scale globally while the government is racing to build safeguards against unprecedented threats. The task now is to synchronize these efforts.

Eric K. Hontz is director of the Accountable Investment Practice Area at the Center for International Private Enterprise.

At the same time, many have expressed frustration over the continued media emphasis on Ukrainian resilience amid a mounting humanitarian crisis that has left much of the country in desperate need of help. “Resilience doesn’t mean immunity. Ukraine cannot withstand everything indefinitely,” wrote Ukrainian commentator Iryna Voichuk on January 16. “Framing this as only a story of strength risks dulling the urgency of what’s happening.”

Others have echoed this sentiment, including some of Ukraine’s most prominent international supporters. “Mythologizing endurance is a quiet form of abandonment. Resilience does not mean invulnerability,” cautioned R.T. Weatherman Foundation president Meaghan Mobbs in a recent post. “When we speak as if Ukrainians can simply ‘take it,’ we absolve ourselves of responsibility.”

With the present arctic weather conditions expected to continue well into February, the situation in Ukraine is critical. In the high-rise apartment blocks that dominate Ukraine’s cities, many less mobile residents have already been housebound for weeks and will likely remain trapped in frigid darkness throughout the coming month. The outlook is particularly grave for the elderly, those with young families, and people in need of medical care. In other words, Russia’s present bombing strategy appears to have been specifically tailored to target the most vulnerable members of Ukrainian society.

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As the potential for large-scale loss of life becomes increasingly apparent, international audiences are waking up to the true extent of Russia’s criminal intentions. Wall Street Journal chief foreign affairs correspondent Yaroslav Trofimov recently referred to Russia’s winter bombing campaign as “Putin’s genocidal effort to make Kyiv unlivable.” It is easy to see why such terms are now being employed. The 1948 UN Genocide Convention identifies “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,” as one of five recognized acts of genocide. At the very least, Russia’s current actions closely resemble this definition.

The current winter bombing campaign reflects a broader trend of mounting Russian attacks against Ukraine’s civilian population. According to UN data, 2025 was the deadliest year of the war for Ukrainian civilians since 2022, with more than 2,500 people killed and over twelve thousand injured. This was 31 percent higher than the figure for the previous year and 70 percent more than in 2023. Many of these deaths were due to a spike in Russian missile and drone strikes on civilian targets including residential buildings, hospitals, and a children’s playground.

Russia also stands accused of conducting a systematic campaign of drone strikes targeting members of the public in the front line regions of southern Ukraine. These attacks have been dubbed a “human safari” by terrified locals. They involve the use of drones with video camera guidance systems to hunt individual victims, underlining the deliberate nature of the killings. An October 2025 United Nations investigation into this drone terror found that Russia was guilty of “systematically coordinated actions designed to drive Ukrainians out of their homes,” and concluded that the Kremlin’s actions in southern Ukraine qualified as the crimes against humanity of murder and of forcible transfer of civilians.

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Putin is dramatically escalating attacks on Ukraine’s civilian population because he cannot win the war on the battlefield. When he first launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Putin was expecting a quick and complete victory. Instead, his army has become bogged down in a brutal war of attrition that will soon enter a fifth year.

Despite pouring vast resources into the invasion and placing his entire country on a war footing, the Kremlin dictator has been unable to secure a decisive breakthrough. Many in Moscow had hoped the return of Donald Trump to the White House would transform the military situation, but even a dramatic decline in US aid for Ukraine over the past year has failed to turn the tide in Russia’s favor. Putin’s army captured less than one percent of Ukrainian territory during 2025, while suffering hundreds of thousands of casualties. At the present glacial pace, it would take Russia decades and millions of men to fully subjugate Ukraine.

In his official statements, Putin continues to project confidence and boast of his invading army’s success. However, with so few genuine victories to toast, this has often meant inventing imaginary advances. Putin’s habit of exaggerating Russian gains came back to haunt him in late 2025 when he repeatedly claimed to have captured the Ukrainian city of Kupyansk, only for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to personally visit the city and record a selfie video exposing the Russian ruler’s lies. This embarrassing episode underlined the growing credibility gap between Putin’s bold talk of inevitable Russian victory and the far more sobering battlefield reality of minimal Russian gains and disastrous losses.

With no obvious route to military victory, Putin is now openly embracing a strategy of terror tactics against Ukraine’s civilian population. He hopes that by weaponizing winter and putting millions of lives at risk, he can finally break Ukrainian resistance and force Kyiv to capitulate. Europe has not witnessed criminality on such a grand and terrible scale since the days of Hitler and Stalin.

So far, the international response to Russia’s winter bombing campaign has been utterly inadequate. While many of Kyiv’s partners have rushed to provide humanitarian aid, no additional costs whatsoever have been imposed on the Kremlin. Instead, it is Ukraine and not Russia that is reportedly being asked to make concessions. Unless this changes, the normalization of Russian war crimes will continue and Putin’s sense of impunity will become even more deeply entrenched. It will then only be a matter of time before other civilian populations experience the horrors currently taking place in Ukraine.

Peter Dickinson is editor of the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert service.

Surrender or freeze: Putin’s winter blitz targets Ukrainian civilians

Yuliya Kazdobina — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 21:16:26 +0000

Millions of Ukrainians have spent much of January without electricity and heating amid subzero winter temperatures, sparking fears that the country is on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe. This desperate situation has been deliberately provoked by a sustained Russian bombing campaign against Ukraine’s critical infrastructure, as Kremlin dictator Vladimir Putin targets the civilian population in order to pressure Kyiv into capitulation.

Russia’s attacks have led to dramatically deteriorating living conditions across Ukraine. Thousands of high-rise apartment buildings in large cities as well as smaller rural homes have been cut off from power, heating, and water for days at a time. As a result, indoor temperatures have dropped to dangerous levels. For the elderly, those with young children, and people suffering from health issues, the risks are particularly grave.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has declared a state of emergency in the country’s energy sector, while other Ukrainian officials have appealed to partners for urgent support. While international aid has begun arriving, the sheer scale of the crisis means that much may depend on weather conditions in the coming weeks.

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Attacks on Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure have been a routine feature of the war ever since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. According to Ukrainian Energy Minister Denys Shmyhal, every single energy-generating facility in the country has been bombed. “There is not a single power plant in Ukraine that has not been hit by the enemy since the beginning of the war,” he commented last week. “Thousands of megawatts of generation capacity have been knocked out. Nobody else in the world has ever faced a challenge like this.”

Russia’s current aerial offensive began to escalate noticeably during the final months of 2025 ahead of the cold season. As temperatures plummeted in early January, there was a further intensification of attacks on Ukraine’s power and heating infrastructure, with large numbers of drones and missiles concentrated on specific cities to overwhelm air defenses. The timing of Russia’s bombing campaign leaves no room for reasonable doubt; this was a premeditated attempt to target the Ukrainian population by weaponizing the winter weather.

The Kremlin’s goal is easy enough to decipher. By making Ukrainian cities unlivable and threatening to freeze millions of civilians, Moscow aims to break Ukraine’s resistance and force the Kyiv authorities to accept peace on Russian terms. In other words, the present bombing offensive is Putin’s response to US President Donald Trump’s peace efforts. Rather than agree to a ceasefire or offer concessions, Putin uses terror as a negotiating tool to secure Ukraine’s surrender.

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The targeting of Ukrainian civilians is not limited to attacks on critical infrastructure. According to the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, 2025 was the deadliest year of the invasion for Ukrainian civilians since 2022. In a report released in early January, United Nations officials confirmed that more than 2500 Ukrainian civilians were killed in 2025. This was 31 percent higher than the figure for the previous year and 70 percent more than in 2023. A separate assessment by European governments reached similar conclusions and found that the scale of Russian attacks on Ukrainian civilians increased whenever the Trump administration attempted to advance peace negotiations.

The rising civilian death toll in Ukraine is largely due to increased Russian bombing of Ukrainian cities. Moscow’s mounting air offensive owed much to a spike in domestic drone production, which has made it possible to launch hundreds of drones at Ukraine in a single night. Russia has also been accused of conducting a large-scale campaign of individual drone strikes against civilians in southern Ukraine that terrified locals have branded a “human safari.” UN investigators reported in October 2025 that Russia’s targeted drone strikes on civilians were a crime against humanity.

Russian attacks on Ukrainian civilians have increased amid mounting frustration in Moscow over the slow pace of the invasion. Despite holding the battlefield initiative throughout 2025, Putin’s army failed to achieve any significant breakthroughs and gained less than one percent of Ukrainian territory while suffering heavy losses. With little immediate prospect of military success, Putin seems to have decided that his best chance of victory lies in terrorizing the civilian population.

So far, Russia’s terror tactics do not appear to be working. A nationwide poll conducted in mid-January by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology found that a majority of Ukrainians continue to reject the Kremlin’s territorial demands in eastern Ukraine. Meanwhile, more than two-thirds of Ukrainians do not believe the present round of US-led negotiations will result in a lasting peace. Instead, most Ukrainians remain convinced that Russia aims to continue the war.

Today’s arctic conditions will eventually give way to milder weather, but the damage done to Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure in recent weeks will take months to repair. Nor is there any reason to believe that Russian attacks on Ukrainian civilians will abate. On the contrary, the Kremlin is likely to escalate further in a bid to demoralize, destabilize, and depopulate the country. By seeking to freeze millions of Ukrainians, Putin has underlined his readiness to target civilians as he seeks to impose an imperialistic vision of peace through submission.

Yuliya Kazdobina is a senior fellow at the “Ukrainian Prism” nongovernmental analytical center.

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Ukraine’s arsenal of long-range weapons has evolved significantly since 2022. Over the past four years, the country has managed to develop a variety of strike drones with the capacity to reach targets located well over a thousand kilometers from the Ukrainian border. Ukraine also now boasts an expanding selection of domestically produced cruise missiles. This enhanced long-range firepower has made it possible for Ukraine to conduct an escalating bombing campaign inside Russia that has already changed the geography of the war.

Since summer 2025, long-range Ukrainian attacks on Russian territory have reached record highs. Ukraine has struck dozens of military facilities and defense industry enterprises, while also paying special attention to the oil and gas infrastructure that fuels the Russian war economy. Ukraine has hit refineries, pipelines, oil rigs, ports, and a number of tankers belonging to the Kremlin’s so-called shadow fleet. These strikes have complicated the logistics of the invasion while contributing to a significant decline in Russia’s energy export revenues.

In addition to hampering the Kremlin war machine and causing economic damage, Ukraine’s mounting campaign of long-range strikes has also had a major psychological impact that is helping to bring home the reality of the war to the Russian public. Since the start of the full-scale invasion, the Kremlin has worked hard to shield ordinary Russians and contain the conflict within the borders of Ukraine. However, with air raid sirens becoming an increasingly routine feature of daily life in Russian towns and cities, the Putin regime is no longer able to control the narrative.

A recent survey conducted by Russia’s only remaining independent pollster, the Levada Center, has highlighted the impact Ukrainian strikes are having on Russian public sentiment. Asked to name the most notable event of the past year, 28 percent of respondents cited Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian cities and industrial facilities, making this the third most popular answer. Clearly, Ukraine’s long-range bombing campaign has succeeded in breaking through the Kremlin propaganda bubble and has made a strong impression on the Russian population.

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For Ukraine’s partners, the objective now should be to boost Ukraine’s long-range capabilities to the maximum in order to equip the country with the kind of strike power that can deter Russia. Numerous Western leaders have shied away from providing Kyiv with long-range missiles from their own arsenals due to escalation fears. The solution is simple: Western partners should focus their efforts on helping Ukraine produce sufficient quantities of drones and missiles domestically.

Ukrainian officials are well aware that the ability to hit targets across the Russian Federation may be their country’s most effective security guarantee against further Kremlin aggression. They are now appealing to Kyiv’s international partners for increased support as they seek to exploit the country’s considerable spare defense industry production capacity and crank up output.

“The modern arms race is not about nukes. It is about millions of cheap drones. Those who can scale up production quicker will secure peace,” commented Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha in late 2025. “This requires quick and sufficient funding for Ukraine’s defense industry, which is now the greatest source of defense innovation in the world. We can produce up to twenty million drones next year if we get sufficient funding.”

Throughout the past year of faltering US-led peace efforts, Vladimir Putin has repeatedly demonstrated that he has no intention of ending the invasion. As long as the war is being fought predominantly inside Ukraine, he is unlikely to change his position, regardless of Russian combat losses. However, if Ukrainian drone and missile strikes inside Russia continue to expand during 2026, the economic and social impact may become too serious to ignore. This could force Putin to abandon his stalling tactics and finally enter into genuine negotiations. It would also oblige him to think carefully before restarting his invasion in the years ahead.

Serhii Kuzan is chairman of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Center (USCC). He formerly served as an adviser to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense (2022-2023) and as an advisor to the Secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council (2014).

Ukraine’s enhanced fortifications are increasing the cost of Putin’s invasion

David Kirichenko — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 22:01:39 +0000

Russian forces continued to gradually advance in Ukraine during 2025, but suffered huge losses in exchange for minimal gains. This unfavorable ratio reflects the increasing effectiveness of Ukraine’s defensive lines, which now feature a combination of layered fortifications backed by deadly drone coverage. Together, these elements have turned much of the front line into a controlled kill zone that makes large-scale offensive operations extremely challenging while dramatically raising the cost of each new assault.

As Ukraine focuses on preventing further Russian advances and solidifying the front lines of the war, Kyiv has invested consideration resources in a major upgrade of the country’s defenses. This has resulted in what Britain’s The Economist recently described as a “massive fortification system” up to two hundred meters in depth covering much of the Ukrainian battlefield. “Ukraine now has the fortress belt it wishes it had in 2022,” the publication reported in early January.

Physical obstacles play an important role in this approach. Anti-tank ditches, razor wire, and concrete obstacles are layered to slow Russian advances. Defensive lines are often spaced within mortar range of one another, allowing Ukrainian units to trade space for time and counterattack against exposed enemy assault groups before they have had an opportunity to consolidate. The emphasis is on attrition and disruption rather than rigid territorial defense.

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Ukraine’s defensive strategy goes far beyond a reliance on traditional static barriers. Over the past year, there has also been a growing emphasis on dispersed, concealed, and flexible defensive networks. These small-scale fortified positions are often located underground or embedded in tree lines at strategic locations, and are supported by remote fires and decoys. Each individual node in these networks is designed to shape enemy movement rather than stop it outright, channeling attackers into deliberately prepared kill pockets without exposing defenders. By creating choke points for Russian troops, Ukraine aims to maximize Kremlin casualties and capitalize on its in-built advantages as the defending party in a war of attrition.

There are growing signs that this approach is working. Ukraine’s top military commander Oleksandr Syrskyi commented recently that the current strategy has proved particularly effective on the Pokrovsk front, which has witnessed some of the heaviest fighting of the entire war over the past year. According to Syrskyi, “timely and high-quality fortifications and engineering obstacles” enabled Ukrainian forces to inflict maximum losses on Russian units close to Pokrovsk and disrupt their plans, even when facing numerical superiority.

Where Ukrainian defenses have failed, the reasons are instructive. In areas such as Toretsk and parts of the Kharkiv front, troop rotations occurred without sufficient time or equipment to construct proper fortifications, leading to Russian gains. Constant Russian drone surveillance made the use of heavy engineering machinery dangerous, leaving units unprepared when assaults followed. These cases serve as confirmation that fortifications are not optional enhancements but foundational to battlefield survival under drone saturated conditions.

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Drones are at the heart of Ukraine’s defensive strategy, serving as a ubiquitous presence over kill zones and preventing localized Russian advances from consolidating into more substantial breakthroughs. Meanwhile, in some sectors of the front such as Pokrovsk, ground robotic systems are now being used to deliver the vast majority of supplies to troops. With this in mind, Ukrainian commanders argue that all future defensive lines should be optimized for both aerial and ground drones.

These technological advances do not eliminate the need for manpower. Even the most sophisticated fortifications require soldiers to react to emerging threats. When Russian units manage to infiltrate defensive lines or push into urban areas, infantry forces remain essential in order to clear and secure ground. While Ukraine’s improved fortifications are an encouraging development for the war-weary nation, no physical barrier can realistically stop Russia unless it is supported by sufficient quantities of well-trained troops.

Strengthening Ukraine’s fortifications and addressing manpower shortages will be among the top priorities for incoming Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, who took up his post this week. Fedorov made his name in government as Minister of Digital Transformation. Since 2022, he has been one of the driving forces behind Ukraine’s rapidly expanding drone warfare capabilities.

Fedorov’s extensive defense tech background, along with his reputation as a modernizer who has countered institutional corruption through the digitalization of state services, has led to considerable optimism over his appointment. He is now faced with the twin challenges of improving Ukraine’s front line defenses while addressing the mobilization and desertion problems hindering the Ukrainian war effort. If he is able to make progress on these two fronts, Ukraine’s prospects for 2026 and beyond will begin to look a lot better.

David Kirichenko is an associate research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society.

Veterans can shape the future of Ukrainian democracy

Vasyl Sehin — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 21:04:12 +0000

The participation of veterans in public and political life has the potential to transform Ukrainian democracy. If managed inclusively and responsibly, it can strengthen legitimacy and trust. However, this trend could also carry real risks if veterans are used by traditional political actors or inadequately prepared for their role in public life.

Ukrainian legislation does not allow for elections under the current martial law conditions. Beyond legal constraints, the practical obstacles to wartime elections are also overwhelming. Fair campaigning conditions and safety during voting cannot be guaranteed. Meanwhile, over ten million Ukrainians have been displaced by Russia’s invasion, with millions more currently serving in the military or trapped in Russian-occupied regions.

The impracticality of elections is broadly accepted by Ukrainian society and among the country’s European partners. They recognise that any premature vote would risk undermining the legitimacy of Ukraine’s institutions and eroding public trust at a moment when democratic resilience is essential. Tellingly, the idea of wartime elections is mainly promoted by Russia as part of Kremlin efforts to weaken Ukraine from within.

When conditions allow for free and fair Ukrainian elections to take place, a key issue will be the inclusion of those who are currently defending the country. According to a preliminary forecast by the Ministry of Veterans Affairs, after the war ends, the number of war veterans and their family members will reach five to six million people, or one in six Ukrainians.

Opinion polls indicate strong public trust in the Ukrainian military along with widespread support for the participation of veterans in Ukrainian politics. In contrast, Ukraine’s existing democratic and political institutions are among the least trusted entities in society. It therefore seems reasonable to assume that veteran involvement in politics could help counter this trust deficit and strengthen Ukrainian democracy.

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It is important to note that most Ukrainian veterans are not career military personnel. The vast majority of today’s Ukrainian soldiers joined the military voluntarily or were mobilized and expect to return to civilian life in peacetime. Veterans are also not a homogeneous group and do not represent a specific political agenda. They differ in views, values, and priorities, and should be understood as individuals seeking meaningful participation within legitimate democratic institutions.

Electing military personnel to public office is not without risk. Military experience does not automatically translate into political skill. Veterans transitioning from the battlefield to politics may face challenges in terms of essential political know-how such as policy coherence, negotiation tactics, coalition-building, and working within institutions. Without targeted support and a clear civilian framework, veterans risk being marginalized within political parties or exploited as symbolic figures without real influence.

Ukraine has previous practical experience of veterans entering politics, notably during the country’s 2014 parliamentary elections. One of the former military personnel elected on that occasion was Oksana Korchynska, who recalled at a recent Kyiv event how she “came from the front line, from Mariupol, two days before taking the oath of MP.”

Korchynska noted that in 2014, veterans were frequently included on electoral lists without being integrated into decision-making structures. While veterans enjoyed high public trust, their actual influence within parties and parliament has so far often been limited. This experience underscores a critical lesson: Political inclusion must be substantive, not symbolic. Veterans need pathways to real influence within parties and institutions, not mere visibility.

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Members of Ukraine’s veteran community do not need to wait for elections to take up a role in public life. Many are already serving in local government or building civic organizations and veteran associations. Kateryna Yamshchykova is a veteran who became acting mayor of Poltava in 2023. “Opportunities already exist for everyone,” she reflected. “Did I really want the position of acting mayor? It was the last thing I wanted in my life, but I understood that this responsibility had to be taken on in order to build the country we are fighting for.”

This kind of local engagement can help veterans develop the skills they need to run as candidates in national elections after the war ends. Democratic participation, civic habits, and political responsibility cannot be developed overnight. Instead, early engagement can help bring about a stable postwar transition.

For established Ukrainian political parties, engagement with the country’s veteran community is already becoming increasingly necessary to maintain public support. This will likely lead to intensified internal competition as veterans seek leadership roles alongside longstanding party members.

Valery Zaluzhny, Ukraine’s ambassador to the UK and former commander of the Ukrainian army, has warned that established political elites might see veterans as a threat to their position. If this happens, everyone in Ukraine stands to lose. Public trust in politicians would erode further, undermining the legitimacy of decisions that will be essential for European integration and postwar recovery.

A critical step toward the meaningful political participation of veterans is the development of a clear legal framework for Ukraine’s first postwar elections. This should ensure inclusive participation, clarify registration requirements for new political parties, and potentially impose stricter campaigning rules to protect electoral integrity.

Ukraine’s democracy is not on pause; it is being reshaped under fire. The emergence of veterans as political actors represents a profound structural change in Ukrainian society. In and of itself, this change is neither a threat to democracy nor a guarantee of positive change. Instead, it requires a deliberate and inclusive approach. If Ukraine succeeds in integrating veterans into civilian political life while preserving pluralism, accountability, and fair competition, it may emerge from the war with a more resilient democracy capable of sustaining inclusive recovery, reforms, and European integration.

Vasyl Sehin is the WFD Country Director in Ukraine.

Putin is weaponizing winter as Russia tries to freeze Ukraine into submission

Peter Dickinson — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 22:39:41 +0000

Russia is “going all in” to destroy Ukraine’s power system, Ukrainian Deputy Energy Minister Mykola Kolisnyk said on January 13 following the latest in a series of major bombardments targeting civilian energy infrastructure in cities across the country. “Today, Russia launched an attack just five days after the previous bombardment, using drones and ballistic missiles. We see that the enemy is going all in, deploying its forces to destroy Ukraine’s energy infrastructure,” he commented.

The current wave of attacks have hit the Ukrainian capital Kyiv particularly hard. “The Russians are trying to disconnect the city and force people to move outside Kyiv,” Ukrenergo CEO Vitaliy Zaichenko told the Kyiv Independent. According to Zaichenko, around 70 percent of the Ukrainian capital’s approximately 3.5 million residents were left without electricity on Tuesday. Meanwhile, large numbers of apartments also had no heating amid subzero winter conditions.

Kyiv is one of multiple Ukrainian population centers currently facing rolling blackouts that in many cases can last for over 24 hours. Russia’s air offensive has also struck energy infrastructure supplying Odesa, Kharkiv, Dnipro, Zaporizhzhia, Sumy, Chernihiv, and many other major cities.

Teams of engineers are working around the clock to repair damaged facilities, fix power lines, and reconnect Ukrainian homes and businesses to the electricity grid. However, repeated Russian attacks are making it increasingly difficult to patch up battered equipment and find the necessary replacement component parts.

The bombing campaign appears to have been timed to coincide with the coldest period in over a year, with temperatures plummeting to minus fifteen Celsius (five degrees Fahrenheit) for extended periods of time. “ They deliberately waited for freezing weather to make things worse for our people. This is cynical Russian terror specifically against civilians,” stated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

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This is not the first time Russian President Vladimir Putin has attempted to weaponize winter in his war against Ukraine. Russia launched a major air offensive against Ukraine’s civilian energy infrastructure in October 2022, establishing a pattern that would be repeated each year as the cold season approached. While this tactic is not new, the present destruction of the Ukrainian power grid is widely recognized as the most severe of the entire war.

In Kyiv and other cities, the Ukrainian authorities have established so-called Points of Invincibility in heavily populated areas featuring heating and internet access along with electricity sources that can be used to charge up personal devices and power banks. Visitors can also expect hot drinks and a warm welcome.

Throughout Ukraine the buzz of generators has become the background noise of the winter season. Many Ukrainians have installed backup power sources in their homes, which are typically able to provide electricity for a limited period of time. Portable gas stoves are also a common feature as people adapt and improvise in the extreme conditions caused by Russia’s bombardment.

With millions of Ukrainian civilians at risk of being trapped in freezing darkness for days at a time, the potential for a humanitarian catastrophe is obvious. Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko has already urged residents of the Ukrainian capital to temporarily leave the city if they are able to and move to less affected areas where power and heating are more readily available. With the present cold snap set to last for at least another week and further Russian attacks widely expected, fears are now mounting over a possible winter exodus to neighboring EU countries.

That may be exactly what Putin has in mind. Since the start of the full-scale invasion, Russia has repeatedly targeted Ukrainian civilians in a bid to break Ukraine’s resistance and depopulate large parts of the country. In addition to attacks on energy, heating, and other critical infrastructure, Russia has also launched large-scale drone strike campaigns designed to make entire towns and cities unlivable. A recent United Nations probe into Russia’s campaign of drone attacks throughout southern Ukraine’s front line regions concluded that Moscow’s actions amounted to the crimes against humanity of “murder and forcible transfer of population.”

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As Russia attempts to freeze Ukrainians into submission, Kyiv desperately needs a wide range of international support. This includes alternative energy supplies to replace domestic gas production damaged in Russia’s attacks, along with spare parts to mend the country’s power stations and associated infrastructure.

Ukraine also urgently requires additional air defense systems and interceptor missiles. At present, Ukraine’s existing air defenses are struggling to cope with the dramatically increased intensity of Russia’s aerial attacks, which now routinely feature hundreds of drones along with dozens of cruise and ballistic missiles.

Most of all, Ukraine needs to be able to strike back. However much Ukraine’s network of air defenses improves, the sheer scale of the Russian bombardment means that a percentage of missiles and drones will inevitably reach their targets. The only truly effective defense is deterrence. In other words, Russia’s attacks will continue until Putin is restrained by the knowledge that Ukraine has the capacity to reply in kind.

The next few weeks will be among the most challenging of the war for Ukraine’s civilian population that will test the country’s famed resilience to the limit. “I think the Russians want to break us. They want to make Ukrainians angry and unhappy. They think this will make us go out on the streets and protest but that won’t happen,” Kyiv resident Valentina Verteletska told Britain’s Guardian newspaper. “This makes us tougher and more determined. War doesn’t make people bad or good but it amplifies who you are. It allows people to show who they are inside and we have seen a lot of people volunteering to help their neighbors.”

Many believe Russia’s wintertime bombardment of Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure now represents Putin’s best chance to achieve some kind of breakthrough at a time when his army is struggling to advance on the battlefield. Russia gained less than one percent of Ukrainian territory in 2025 despite suffering hundreds of thousands of casualties, and is still fighting over villages located within walking distance of the front lines at the start of the invasion in February 2022.

Despite this lack of progress, Putin remains committed to his original invasion objective of extinguishing Ukrainian independence and forcing the country permanently back into the Kremlin orbit. He clearly has no qualms about targeting millions of Ukrainian civilians in pursuit of this criminal goal. “You can see with your own eyes what is going on,” commented Kyiv building manager Oleksandr Matienko. “They are trying to kill us. They can’t win any other way. So they are willing to do anything to destroy Ukraine.”

Peter Dickinson is editor of the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert service.

There are no signs that this trend will change anytime soon. Despite mounting economic challenges on the home front amid falling energy export revenues, Russia’s defense budget for 2026 remains close to record highs. Moscow will continue to prioritize domestic drone production this year, while also allocating large sums to finance the system of generous bonus payments and salaries for army recruits who volunteer to serve in Ukraine.

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Russia’s refusal to embrace the idea of a compromise peace should come as no surprise. After all, Putin has built his entire reign around the promise of restoring Russian greatness and reversing the perceived humiliations of the Soviet collapse. After nearly four years of full-scale war, a negotiated settlement that secured Ukraine’s status as an independent country would represent a major political failure.

Since 2022, Kremlin officials and Russian state media have consistently portrayed the invasion of Ukraine as an existential struggle against Western aggression with the aim of establishing a new world order and returning Russia to its rightful place as a great power. However, a peace deal based on the current line of contact would leave approximately 80 percent of Ukraine beyond Kremlin control and firmly anchored in the West. Such an outcome would be viewed in Moscow as an historic Russian defeat.

This framing creates a political trap of Moscow’s own making. Putin knows he would face a potentially disastrous domestic backlash if he accepted anything less than a clear Russian victory in Ukraine. Peace terms that failed to force Ukraine back into the Kremlin orbit would raise difficult questions about the enormous costs of the invasion. Russians would want to know why the country had spent vast sums of money and sacrificed so many men in order to achieve so little. Putin would risk entering Russian history as the man who lost Ukraine.

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Putin has begun 2026 in a challenging position. He remains reluctant to upset Trump, but he dare not accept the compromise peace the US leader is proposing. Instead, Putin needs either total victory in Ukraine or indefinite conflict. Any attempt to end the war without establishing complete political control over Ukraine would threaten the stability of Putin’s own regime. His interests are therefore best served by seeking to prolong negotiations while working toward a military solution.

If Western leaders wish to change the current political calculus in Moscow, they must first acknowledge that there is no alternative to increasing the pressure on Putin. At present, the Kremlin dictator views escalation as necessary for regime survival and has no plans to end the war.

Two scenarios could disrupt this trajectory. A collapse in global oil prices combined with successful secondary sanctions enforcement could create an economic crisis that would force Putin to revise his priorities. Alternatively, mass casualties during a failed spring 2026 Russian offensive could trigger domestic instability, while also highlighting the fading prospects of a military breakthrough.

Both these outcomes are realistic but would require significant additional action from Ukraine’s partners. If the West is unable to muster the requisite political will, escalation remains Moscow’s most rational path in 2026. Putin has little choice but to continue his invasion. Even if Russian victory remains out of reach in the coming year, he knows he cannot accept any peace deal that secures Ukrainian statehood.

William Dixon is a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Service Institute specialising in cyber and international security issues. Maksym Beznosiuk is a strategy and security analyst whose work focuses on Russia, Ukraine, and international security.

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Evidence of Belarusian involvement in Russia’s war against Ukraine is not new, of course. On the eve of the invasion, Lukashenka allowed Putin to station tens of thousands of Russian troops in Belarus. The country then served as the main gateway and logistics hub for Russia’s blitzkrieg offensive to seize Kyiv in spring 2022. The Lukashenka regime is also implicated in the Kremlin campaign to abduct and indoctrinate thousands of Ukrainian children.

Reports of Lukashenka’s ongoing involvement in the Russian war effort come amid speculation of a potential thaw in diplomatic relations between Belarus and the United States. In December, 123 political prisoners were freed by the Belarusian authorities, with the US easing sanctions measures in exchange. This followed two smaller scale trade-offs earlier in 2025 as the Trump administration seeks to increase diplomatic dialogue with Minsk as part of ongoing efforts to broker a negotiated settlement to end the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Despite these headline-grabbing humanitarian steps, there is little sign of a more comprehensive shift in Minsk away from domestic repression or any reduction in support for Russia’s aggressive foreign policy agenda. On the contrary, the available evidence indicates that while Lukashenka may seek increased engagement with the West, he has no intention of turning away from Moscow or ending human rights abuses inside Belarus.

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By continuing to provide Moscow with its full backing, Belarus enhances Russia’s ability to wage war in Ukraine. This is undermining the Trump administration’s efforts to end the Russian invasion and secure a lasting peace settlement. Belarus also remains deeply implicated in Putin’s hybrid war against Europe and stands accused of weaponizing everything from migrants to balloons against its EU neighbors.

US outreach to Minsk over the past year has secured the release of many prominent prisoners, but continued arrests mean that the overall number of political detainees in the country remains high. Naturally, Lukashenka is happy to reengage with American officials in order to secure a relaxation of sanctions pressure, but there are also concerns that the current approach risks incentivizing hostage-taking.

Yes, a less isolated and more neighborly Belarus remains a worthwhile goal, but in the current circumstances, Lukashenka has little motivation to compromise. He is looking at possible gains without actually reducing the current level of repression in Belarus.

Sanctions relief would be a significant gain for Lukashenka. In exchange for that, the US should be able to achieve some limits on Belarusian facilitation of Kremlin aggression in Ukraine or, at a minimum, a notable decrease in the number of political prisoners in Belarus.

Mercedes Sapuppo is a fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center.

Over the past year, Russian attacks on Ukraine’s agricultural sector have escalated alarmingly. According to research conducted by the University of Strasbourg, the University of Maryland, and NASA’s Harvest program, the number of farmland fires identified in Ukrainian-controlled areas of the Kherson region during 2025 rose by 87.5 percent.

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The Kherson farming community’s wartime experience is mirrored throughout Ukraine, particularly in areas close to the front lines of the invasion. By attacking agricultural infrastructure, Russia seeks to undermine Ukraine’s food security, just as it targets the country’s energy infrastructure to deprive Ukraine’s civilian population of access to electricity and heating.

The implications of Russia’s war on Ukrainian farmers are international in scope. Known historically as the breadbasket of Europe, Ukraine is home to around one quarter of the world’s black soil, the most fertile farmland on the planet. This makes Ukraine a potential agricultural superpower and a key contributor to global food security. Ukrainian farmers are among the leading exporters of foodstuffs to the European Union, with Ukrainian produce also playing a prominent role in aid programs to counter hunger throughout the developing world.

Russia’s invasion has had a devastating impact on Ukrainian agricultural output. In addition to mined fields, burned crops, and bombed facilities, large numbers of Ukrainian farms are currently in Kremlin-controlled regions, leading to seized harvests.

Kherson region farmers received a further blow in summer 2023 when a suspected Russian sabotage operation destroyed the Kakhovka Dam in Russian-occupied southern Ukraine. This act of ecocide undermined one of Europe’s largest irrigation systems, leaving hundreds of thousands of hectares without access to water. The impact on the environment was catastrophic, leading to drought conditions, failed crops, and the loss of farmland.

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Despite the unprecedented challenges posed by Russia’s ongoing invasion, Kherson’s farmers continue to work. In 2025, they managed to harvest a remarkable quantity of the watermelons that serve as the region’s unofficial calling card. Other key Kherson crops include wheat and potatoes.

Since 2022, domestic and international support programs have proved instrumental in bolstering the resilience of the Kherson agricultural industry. Initiatives in recent years have included subsidies for farmers and technical assistance focused on areas such as irrigation, with the goal of helping farmers adapt to the new wartime realities.

Kherson agricultural businesses are also responding to the changing conditions. Due to water scarcity and rising temperatures, some farms have reduced planting areas and turned to cultivating crops that utilize soil moisture more efficiently. Research is also underway to develop additional drought-resistant crops better suited to the current environment.

Further international support for Ukrainian farmers will be critically important during 2026. Ukraine’s agricultural industry is one of the cornerstones of the national economy and a major exporter to global markets. By targeting farmers and their land, Russia aims to make Ukraine unlivable and break the country’s resistance. This strategy poses a significant threat to international food security and must be addressed.

Oleksandr Tolokonnikov is Deputy Head of the Kherson Regional Military Administration.

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The current emphasis on UGVs is part of a broader technological transformation taking place on the battlefields of Ukraine. This generational shift in military tech is redefining how modern wars are fought.

Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, homegrown innovation has played a critical role in Ukraine’s defense. Early in the war, Ukrainian troops deployed cheap commercial drones to conduct reconnaissance. These platforms were soon being adapted to carry explosives, dramatically expanding their combat role. By the second year of the war, Ukraine had developed a powerful domestic drone industry capable of producing millions of units per year while rapidly adapting to the ever-changing requirements of the battlefield.

A similar process has also been underway at sea, with Ukraine deploying domestically produced naval drones to sink or damage more than a dozen Russian warships. This has forced Putin to withdraw the remainder of the Black Sea Fleet from occupied Crimea to Russia itself. Recent successes have included the downing of Russian helicopters over the Black Sea using naval drones armed with missiles, and an audacious strike on a Russian submarine by an underwater Ukrainian drone.

By late 2023, drones were dominating the skies over the Ukrainian battlefield, making it extremely dangerous to use vehicles or armor close to the front lines. In response to this changing dynamic, Ukrainian forces began experimenting with wheeled and tracked land drones to handle logistical tasks such as the delivery of food and ammunition to front line positions and the evacuation of wounded troops.

Over the past year, Russia’s expanding use of fiber-optic drones and tactical focus on disrupting Ukrainian supply lines has further underlined the importance of UGVs. Fiber-optic drones have expanded the kill zone deep into the Ukrainian rear, complicating the task of resupplying combat units and leading to shortages that weaken Ukraine’s defenses. Robotic systems help counter this threat.

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Remote controlled land drones offer a range of practical advantages. They are more difficult to jam electronically than aerial drones, and are far harder to spot than trucks or cars. These benefits are making them increasingly indispensable for the Ukrainian military. In November 2025, the BBC reported that up to 90 percent of all supplies to Ukrainian front line positions around Pokrovsk were being delivered by UGVs.

In addition to logistical functions, the Ukrainian military is also pioneering the use of land drones in combat roles. It is easy to see why this is appealing. After all, Ukrainian commanders are being asked to defend a front line stretching more than one thousand kilometers with limited numbers of troops against a far larger and better equipped enemy.

Experts caution that while UGVs can serve as a key element of Ukraine’s defenses, they are not a realistic alternative to boots on the ground. Former Ukrainian commander in chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi has acknowledged that robotic systems are already making it possible to remove personnel from the front lines and reduce casualties, but stressed that current technology remains insufficient to replace humans at scale.

Despite the advances of the past four years, Ukraine’s expanding robot army remains incapable of carrying out many military functions that require infantry. When small groups of Russian troops infiltrate Ukrainian positions and push into urban areas, for example, soldiers are needed to clear and hold terrain. Advocates of drone warfare need to recognize these limitations when making the case for greater reliance on unmanned systems.

UGVs will likely prove vital for Ukraine in 2026, but they are not wonder weapons and cannot serve as a miracle cure for Kyiv’s manpower challenges. Instead, Ukraine’s robot army should be viewed as an important part of the country’s constantly evolving defenses that can help save lives while raising the cost of Russia’s invasion.

David Kirichenko is an associate research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society.

Ukraine security guarantees are futile without increased pressure on Putin

Peter Dickinson — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 15:57:40 +0000

Kyiv’s allies hailed progress toward “robust” security guarantees for Ukraine on January 6 following a meeting in Paris attended by representatives of more than thirty countries who together make up the Coalition of the Willing.

As details of a possible security framework for postwar Ukraine continue to take shape, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron signed a joint declaration committing to deploy troops to Ukraine in the event of a peace agreement between Moscow and Kyiv. Crucially, US officials attending the talks in France also voiced American backing for security guarantees, with the United States expected to play a supporting role that will focus on ceasefire monitoring.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy praised the “substantive discussions” and suggested that he was now more confident about the credibility of the security commitments being proposed by Ukraine’s partners. “Military officials from France, the United Kingdom, and Ukraine worked in detail on force deployment, numbers, specific types of weapons, and the components of the armed forces required and able to operate effectively. We already have these necessary details,” he commented.

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This was the latest in a series of meetings over the past year that have sought to define workable security guarantees for Ukraine as a key element of the US-led push to end Russia’s invasion. Since early 2025, Britain and France have been at the forefront of ongoing efforts to establish a Coalition of the Willing bringing together countries prepared to contribute to postwar security measures. The objective is to prevent a resumption of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

The Paris Declaration signed on January 6 is a step in the right direction, but many key questions remain unanswered. The document does not provide the kind of NATO-style commitment to collective security that many believe is essential in order to deter Putin. Nor does it clarify the exact role of a potential European military contingent on Ukrainian territory, or define whether their mandate would include defending themselves in the event of a Russian attack. Instead, it contains vague references to “the use of military capabilities.” This language is hardly likely to convince the Kremlin, especially in light of the escalation fears that have dominated the Western response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The other obvious problem with the current peace plan is implementation. The signatories of the Paris Declaration all agree that the envisioned package of security guarantees for Ukraine can only be put in place once a ceasefire has been agreed. This will inevitably strengthen Moscow’s objections. Over the past year, Russia has repeatedly rejected ceasefire proposals while stressing its unwavering opposition to any Western military presence in Ukraine. That is exactly what the Coalition of the Willing is now proposing.

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As Ukraine’s partners discuss the technical aspects of security guarantees, the elephant in the room remains Russia’s lack of interest in peace. The Kremlin was not represented at talks in the French capital this week, just as it has been absent during a similar series of recent meetings between US, Ukrainian, and European officials.

While the Trump administration has sought to maintain a parallel dialogue with Moscow, there is no indication whatsoever that Russia shares the optimistic assessments being offered by Zelenskyy and other Western leaders. On the contrary, Putin and his Kremlin colleagues continue to signal that they have no intention of compromising and remain committed to the maximalist goals set out at the start of the invasion in February 2022.

Throughout the past year, Putin has been careful to avoid openly rejecting US peace proposals due to concerns over possible retaliatory sanctions. Nevertheless, his actions speak for themselves and underline his opposition to ending the war.

Just one day after Trump and Zelenskyy met in Florida in late December and announced significant progress toward a settlement, Putin called the US leader and accused Ukraine of launching an attack on his presidential residence. The news appeared to shock Trump and placed the entire peace process in jeopardy. However, it soon transpired that the incident had been hastily invented in a bid to discredit Ukraine and derail peace talks. Trump has since acknowledged that Putin’s resident was not targeted. “I don’t believe that strike happened,” he told reporters on January 4.

The Kremlin dictator’s apparent readiness to lie directly to Trump says much about his determination to disrupt peace efforts. The faked attack on Putin’s residence was the latest in a series of Russian steps over the past year to stall or otherwise obstruct negotiations. This has led to mounting claims that Putin is playing for time without having any intention of ending his invasion.

Putin’s rejection of a negotiated settlement should come as no surprise. His army is advancing in Ukraine and retains the upper hand in a war of attrition that strongly favors Russia. With the Ukrainian military suffering from increasingly acute manpower shortages and Kyiv’s allies showing growing signs of weakening resolve, Putin remains confident that he can achieve a decisive breakthrough in 2026.

Even if he did not believe that victory was on the horizon, Putin would be highly unlikely to risk a compromise peace involving limited territorial gains. After all, he is not fighting for land in Ukraine; he fighting for Ukraine itself.

Putin views the invasion of Ukraine in the broadest of possible historical contexts as a sacred mission to reverse the injustice of the Soviet collapse and revive the Russian Empire. The terms currently on offer would leave around 80 percent of Ukraine beyond Kremlin control and free to pursue further European integration. To Putin, that would not be a partial victory; it would be a catastrophic defeat.

In the coming weeks, Russia will almost certainly reject the latest peace framework agreed in Paris. How will the Coalition of the Willing respond to this setback? Unless they are willing to impose more costs on the Kremlin and bolster Ukraine’s ability to hurt Russia militarily, all talk of postwar security guarantees and reassurance forces will continue to ring hollow. If Western leaders are serious about ending the war in Ukraine and safeguarding European security, they must acknowledge that there is no alternative to increasing the pressure on Putin.

Peter Dickinson is editor of the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert service.

Unmanned systems of all kinds have emerged since 2022 as a fundamental element of modern military doctrine. This is radically changing everything from the structure of armies to the role of the individual soldier. Remotely controlled equipment no longer needs a large crew to support it, while individual models are becoming more compact and maneuverable. As a result, the power of unmanned weapons systems is increasing exponentially, while production is expanding to industrial scale and becoming significantly cheaper.

More and more soldiers now serve as unmanned systems operators. Those who remain in more traditional roles perform tasks such as special operations, guard duties, or logistical functions. The war being waged by Ukraine has demonstrated that the modern battlefield features a kill zone up to 25 miles deep and spanning the entire front line. This zone is controlled by drones that destroy any infantry or equipment. Combat operations are increasingly conducted by drone operators located deep in the rear or in underground bunkers.

In these conditions of drone dominance over the battlefield, any attempts to stage major breakthroughs are doomed to failure. Instead of tank columns and artillery duels, offensive operations require maximum dispersal of forces and the greatest possible camouflage. The main task of troops is to gradually shift the kill zone deeper into the enemy’s rear.

Success depends upon the ability to rapidly produce large quantities of inexpensive combat drones and continually update their control systems. Initial tactics involving single drones and individual targets are already becoming a thing of a past. Instead, operators can now use artificial intelligence to control entire fleets featuring large numbers of drones deployed simultaneously. This approach allows a single soldier to manage kilometers of front line space rather than just a few hundred meters. The result is a reduction in the need for mass mobilization and an emphasis on the professionalism and technical skills of each operator manning the front.

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Combat operations now boil down to two main scenarios: Either the collapse of an enemy who is not prepared for the new intensity of combat, or a positional struggle in the style of World War I. In a protracted positional war, it is crucial to ensure control over the kill zone and maintain sufficient supplies while depriving the enemy of similar capabilities. The protection of logistics networks and the infliction of maximum damage on the enemy’s rear areas is of decisive importance.

First and foremost, this means cutting off ground supply routes. To protect logistics, armies must develop fleets of maneuverable transport drones that are not dependent on road quality and can navigate minefields. Meanwhile, to ensure the steady supply of ammunition and spare parts to underground storage points along the front lines, a mobile air defense system featuring interceptor drones is necessary.

At the strategic level, key targets are now weapons factories, logistics centers, and command posts, which are often hidden deep in the rear or located inside underground bunkers close to the front lines. Destroying these high-value targets requires guided missiles or other air strike capabilities. Military planners are therefore faced with the challenge of moving away from expensive manned aircraft toward reusable strategic drones.

Testing of fully-fledged unmanned aircraft is already underway. The transition toward unmanned aviation will open up the mass deployment of guided aerial bombs, which are significantly cheaper than missiles. In addition, strategic drones will themselves be able to act as “aircraft carriers” for kamikaze drones.

The same principles apply equally to the maritime theater of operations. Ukrainian Sea Baby naval drones have already proven themselves by destroying numerous warships from Russia’s Black Sea Fleet and carrying out attacks on Russia’s shadow fleet of oil tankers.

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To ensure their future national security, states must focus on the mass production of unmanned systems and their components. China currently accounts for the lion’s share of component parts. This is a challenge for any country that seeks to play a role in global affairs. China must be deprived of the strategic advantages it enjoys due to its status as the leading producer of components for unmanned systems.

Many NATO generals appear to think that recent technological advances are making war cheaper and creating a more level military playing field. This is a mistake. In reality, any reduction in the cost of weapons is more than offset by the need for increased quantities.

It is also important to stress that unmanned technologies alone are not enough. Another key factor is an army’s access to reliable digital communications similar to Starlink. Without this capability, it is impossible to coordinate combat operations, collect data, and maintain connections between individual units and command structures. It is no coincidence that China is already investing billions to address this issue.

The transformation currently underway in the military sphere also increases the role of cyber warfare. Disruption to logistics, power outages, and communications breakdowns can all provide the enemy with the opportunity to advance. A hacked cyber system can expose vital defenses or dramatically reduce the possibility of recovery.

Looking ahead, technological innovation in the military must be recognized as a national priority when allocating defense budgets. This applies to everything from unmanned systems to the development of artificial intelligence.

The most important revolution must take place within the minds of today’s military generals. A comprehensive rethink of existing military doctrines is currently needed. Armies must be completely re-equipped. It is time for the top brass to acknowledge that they should either change or give way to a new generation of military strategists.

Ukraine’s experience since 2022 has confirmed that in order to be successful in modern warfare, armies should model themselves on technological giants like Amazon and SpaceX. They must embrace flexible thinking and be capable of competing in terms of implementing new innovations.

In an era of accelerated military change, all countries face a simple choice of adapting or accepting the inevitability of defeat. The winners will be those who embrace the lessons from the technological revolution currently underway on the battlefields of Ukraine.

Oleg Dunda is a member of the Ukrainian Parliament from the Servant of the People party.

Putin’s reference to “Novorossiya” (“New Russia”) raised eyebrows and was widely seen as a signal that Russia may be preparing to increase its territorial demands. The Czarist era term “Novorossiya” was first employed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by imperial administrators to describe large swathes of southern and eastern Ukraine then under Russian rule. It fell into disuse during the Soviet period, only to be resurrected by the Kremlin following the onset of Russia’s Ukraine invasion in 2014.

Russian nationalists have yet to agree on the exact boundaries of Novorossiya, but most envisage a territory stretching far beyond the partially occupied Ukrainian provinces of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson that are currently claimed by the Kremlin. Putin has indicated that his definition of Novorossiya encompasses approximately half of Ukraine, including the country’s entire Black Sea coastline and major cities such as Odesa and Kharkiv.

Then there is the question of Kyiv. According to Russia’s own national mythology, the capital of Ukraine is also the mother of Russian cities and the spiritual birthplace of Russian Orthodoxy. Putin has repeatedly referenced the sacred status of Kyiv in his many essays and speeches denying the legitimacy of Ukrainian statehood. It is therefore extremely difficult to imagine him accepting any peace proposal that secures Kyiv’s postwar position as the capital of an independent Ukraine. Putin can hardly claim to be reuniting Russia’s historic lands if he leaves the most Russian city of them all firmly in the hands of a hostile state.

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Based on his own public pronouncements and extensive writings on the subject, it seems reasonable to conclude that Putin’s understanding of historically Russian lands includes the whole of Ukraine. Indeed, he has made no real secret of this conviction. “I have said many times that I consider the Russian and Ukrainian peoples to be one people. In this sense, all of Ukraine is ours,” Putin told guests at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in summer 2025. The real question is whether his imperial agenda extends beyond the borders of Ukraine.

In a geographical sense, Putin’s vision of historical Russia is definitely not confined to Ukraine alone. Instead, it includes the vast additional expanses of the Czarist Russian Empire and its Soviet successor. “What is the Soviet Union? It is historical Russia,” Putin declared in 2022. A year earlier, he had lamented the fall of the USSR as “the disintegration of historical Russia” by another name. “We turned into a completely different country,” Putin stated. “And what had been built up over 1,000 years was largely lost.”

When European dictators start ranting about lost thousand-year empires, it rarely bodes well for international security. Putin is no exception. The Kremlin dictator’s determination to reverse modern Russia’s fall from grace has come to dominate his reign and has led directly to the biggest European war since World War II. His deeply felt sense of historical grievance over the Soviet collapse has fueled a poisonous obsession with Ukraine, which Putin regards as the ultimate symbol of the injustice resulting from the breakup of the USSR.

Due to its large size, geographical proximity, shared history, significant ethnic Russian population, and perceived cultural closeness, Ukraine occupies a prominent place in Russia’s imperial identity. However, it is wishful thinking to imagine that sacrificing Ukraine will appease Putin or persuade him to forget about the rest of the former Russian Empire. Instead, the same bogus historical arguments used to justify the invasion of Ukraine could easily be applied to a host of other nations. Any country that was previously subjected to Russian imperial rule could technically fall within Putin’s broad definition of historically Russian lands. “We have an old rule,” he commented earlier this year. “Wherever a Russian soldier sets foot is ours.”

Based on the boundaries of the Czarist Empire at its greatest extent on the eve of World War I, potential targets of future Russian aggression could include Finland, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Moldova, Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and the nations of Central Asia. Nor is this list exhaustive. A truly maximalist approach would also require the inclusion of the many former Soviet satellite states that made up the Eastern Bloc during the second half of the twentieth century.

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With the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine about to enter a fifth year, many in the West are now beginning to take Putin’s imperial ambitions increasingly seriously. According to Reuters, recent United States intelligence assessments confirm that Putin has not abandoned his aims of capturing all of Ukraine and reclaiming parts of Europe that once belonged to the former Soviet Empire. “The Europeans are convinced of it. The Poles are absolutely convinced of it. The Baltics think they’re first,” the report noted.

Not everyone is so sure. Skeptics tend to question Putin’s ability to wage a major war against the West, with many pointing to his army’s underwhelming performance in Ukraine as proof of Russia’s military limitations. This is comforting but dangerously misleading. In reality, Russia’s lack of progress since 2022 is not a sign of any fundamental weakness; it is testament to the formidable strength and staggering sacrifices of the Ukrainian nation. However, Ukraine’s remarkable resistance against overwhelming odds cannot continue indefinitely and must not be taken for granted. If Ukraine falls, Europe will face a challenge it is utterly unprepared for.

Today, the Ukrainian army is by far the biggest and most experienced fighting force in Europe, other than Russia itself. It is backed by a rapidly expanding and highly innovative domestic military industry that is rewriting the rules of modern warfare. If Putin is permitted to succeed in establishing control over Ukraine, all this will be rapidly integrated into the Kremlin war machine. A partially disarmed Europe will then find itself confronted by a dramatically emboldened Putin, who will have the continent’s two largest armies at his disposal. In such uniquely favorable circumstances, the chances of him choosing not to press home his advantage are next to zero.

The internal logic of the Putin regime is an additional factor driving Russia’s expansionist impulse. Economically, politically, and culturally, Russian society is now deeply militarized in ways that will be extremely difficult to reverse without destabilizing the country. Nor is the Kremlin in any hurry to deal with the hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers currently fighting in Ukraine. These men are now used to receiving vastly inflated salaries and have been brutalized by the bloodiest invasion in modern history. Keeping them occupied, and preferably as far away from Russia as possible, is now a very real national security priority for Moscow.

Putin may also be encouraged to act by the current geopolitical climate, which presents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to advance Russia’s imperial agenda. The return of Donald Trump to the White House has signaled a radical shift in US policy toward the war in Ukraine and the broader defense of Europe. This has led to a mounting sense of insecurity in European capitals amid unprecedented concerns over America’s commitment to NATO collective security. Would a Russian attack on the Baltic states trigger an Article 5 response from the US? Given Trump’s posturing on NATO budgets and his administration’s ambivalent attitude toward Europe, some believe this can no longer be taken for granted.

Europe alone is not yet in a position to defend itself against Russia. After decades of defense sector neglect, effective rearmament will take years to complete. European leaders have also failed to demonstrate the kind of collective political will necessary to deter the Kremlin. The recent failure to agree on the use of frozen Russian assets to fund Ukraine’s war effort was the latest in a long line of climb downs that have signaled Europe’s chronic disunity and crippling fear of escalation. There are many good reasons why Putin may not rush to expand the war, but concern over a potentially decisive European response is not one of them.

As evidence of Western weakness continues to mount, Putin is growing bolder. In recent months, he has escalated Russia’s hybrid war against Europe with sabotage attacks on critical infrastructure and drone incursions across the continent. In the diplomatic arena, Kremlin officials recently renewed calls for NATO to retreat from central and Eastern Europe, a move that would expose more than a dozen countries to the threat of Russian aggression for the first time in a generation. Meanwhile, rhetoric in the Russian state media targeting Finland, the Baltic states, and other front line countries now increasingly echoes the propaganda that preceded the invasion of Ukraine.

As he plots to rebuild the Russian Empire, Putin is unlikely to be working to any set schedule or clearly defined territorial goal. Instead, the gradual escalation of Russia’s Ukraine invasion over the past twelve years indicates that he is an opportunistic imperialist whose appetite grows with eating. At the same time, it is obvious that his radical revisionist agenda is not limited to Ukraine and poses a very real threat to European security.

Putin believes he is on an historic mission to restore Russia to its rightful place as a global superpower and the dominant force in Europe. Erasing Ukrainian statehood is just the beginning. While we cannot know for sure where he will strike next or how far he ultimately plans to go, it is delusional to think that handing Putin victory in Ukraine will convince him to stop. On the contrary, a Russian success in Ukraine would almost certainly mean more war and lead to decades of European instability.

Putin’s vow to liberate historically Russian lands is an open-ended excuse for imperial expansion that makes a complete mockery of US-led efforts to broker a compromise peace based on limited Russian gains in southern and eastern Ukraine. Clearly, this would not be enough to placate Putin and cannot serve as the basis for a sustainable settlement.

The peace terms currently being discussed would leave approximately 80 percent of Ukraine beyond Kremlin control and free to continue integrating with the West. This is exactly what Putin aims to prevent. After four years of fighting to reverse the verdict of the Cold War, any peace deal that safeguards Ukrainian independence would be recognized in Moscow as a Russian defeat of historic proportions. Instead, Putin knows he must continue the invasion until a fully subjugated Ukraine can become a stepping stone for the next stage in his expansionist agenda.

In his quest to secure a place in history among Russia’s greatest rulers, Putin has long since passed the point of no return. He will not deviate from this messianic goal for the sake of sanctions relief or minor territorial concessions. Any efforts to establish a lasting peace must be firmly grounded in this sobering reality. Peace is possible, but only if the pressure on Putin is increased to the point where he begins to fear defeat on the battlefields of Ukraine and potential collapse on the home front inside Russia.

Peter Dickinson is editor of the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert service.

The Lukashenka regime has clearly learned from similar agreements with the United States earlier this year, which also saw prisoners freed in exchange for sanctions relief. This is fueling a transactional approach to what should be primarily a human rights issue.

While this year’s prisoner releases demonstrate that sanctions relief can produce welcome results, any further reduction in sanctions pressure by the United States should be approached with caution. If prisoner releases are rewarded without any expectation of broader shifts away from authoritarian policies, repression itself becomes a bargaining tool. In such a scenario, there is a very real danger that political prisoners could become virtually inexhaustible bargaining chips for Lukashenka.

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In one if his first interviews following his release, Ales Bialiatski warned about the dangers of negotiating with Lukashenka without demanding wholesale change. He noted that releasing individual prisoners will not be enough to end repression in Belarus. The regime could easily exchange prisoners on a regular basis, he cautioned, freeing some and imprisoning others while asking for new concessions. Bialiatski’s insights should help inform international engagement with Belarus.

Looking ahead, the United States and European Union can play complementary roles in relations between Belarus and the democratic world. Washington’s sanctions tend to be intentionally more flexible. This makes it possible to offer targeted relief based on concrete humanitarian progress, while also allowing for an increase in pressure if Minsk backslides.

In contrast, European sanctions are more focused on systemic change. They are tied to ending policies of political persecution, embracing elements of democratic transition, and addressing Belarusian participation in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Any steps to weaken EU sanctions would reduce Europe’s ability to influence Minsk and rob Brussels of the tools to bring about more meaningful change.

Recent events have highlighted the lack of genuine progress toward constructive engagement between Belarus and the country’s European neighbors. Despite a number of goodwill gestures toward Belarus such as the reopening of EU border crossings, Minsk has continued to engage in provocative actions such as launching weather balloons into Lithuanian airspace.

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Lukashenka may have economic motives for seeking to secure sanctions relief in exchange for limited concessions. The Belarusian economy has benefited in recent years from a spike in wartime demand linked to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but this growth is now cooling. With less room to maneuver. the Belarusian dictator has good reason to engage in deals that can relieve the financial pressure.

He may also believe the time is right to reestablish his credentials on the geopolitical stage. As US-led negotiations to end Russia’s war against Ukraine continue, Lukashenka might see opportunities for a return to the mediator role he occupied during the initial stages of Russian aggression just over a decade ago. Many observers noted that during the latest prisoner releases, most of the freed detainees were sent to Ukraine rather than Lithuania, which has previously served as the main destination. This may have been an attempt to highlight ongoing cooperation between Kyiv and Minsk.

Greater engagement between the Lukashenka regime and the West could potentially be beneficial but a measured approach is essential. Future sanctions relief must be conditional and tied to verifiable steps such as the release of all political prisoners, an end to new politically motivated arrests, and the restoration of basic civic liberties. The rights of released prisoners must also be respected. This includes allowing them the option to remain in Belarus and providing them with full documentation.

Further steps to improve dialogue with Belarus should also be based on a realistic assessment of achievable goals. For example, it is wishful thinking to suggest that limited sanctions relief could somehow pull Minsk out of the Kremlin orbit. On the contrary, Lukashenka is now more dependent than ever on the Kremlin and will almost certainly never dare to distance himself from Russia, regardless of how skillfully sanctions are applied and relaxed.

What sanctions can do is constrain Lukashenka’s options and secure specific concessions. The ultimate objective should be an end to all human rights abuses and oppressive policies, rather than the targeted release of high-profile prisoners. Until that goal is within reach, the European Union in particular has a key part to play in maintaining pressure on Lukashenka.

Hanna Liubakova is a journalist from Belarus and nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.

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In June, the Department of Defense redirected 20,000 anti-drone air defense interceptors specially made for Ukraine under USAI to Israel and US forces in the Middle East. Congress is now using the NDAA to make it more difficult for the Pentagon to repeat this, while also requiring that any arms redirected into US stocks are ultimately replaced for Ukraine.

Though Congress doesn’t expect the White House to make use of USAI in the near future, the NDAA modifies the program so that these funds will now remain available until 2029. As the Trump administration looks for ways to both revitalize the US defense industrial base and provide Ukraine with credible security arrangements, USAI could make a return as a useful way to bolster Ukraine’s defenses.

During 2025, the Trump administration has sought to pressure Ukraine with the prospect of withholding US intelligence support. The NDAA creates strict new reporting requirements to discourage any such moves. As recently as November, the White House said that unless Kyiv agreed to a new US proposal to end the war, it would stop sending weapons and providing the intelligence Ukraine uses in its defense, including to detect Russian air raids.

The new legislation requires the US Secretary of Defense to submit reports to Congress within 48 hours of any decision to “pause, terminate, or otherwise restrict or materially downgrade intelligence support, including information, intelligence, and imagery collection,” to Ukraine. This does not concretely prevent the administration from ending intelligence support, but it is a clear signal from Congress that any action to do so would be met with sharp political backlash.

The NDAA also creates significant new reporting requirements related to the Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List (PURL), the primary mechanism for arms sales to Ukraine. In order to increase the transparency of the PURL system, Congress will use its oversight power to mandate quarterly reports.

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The NDAA includes the Abducted Ukrainian Children Recovery and Accountability Act, a bipartisan bill introduced by Senators Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) to support efforts to locate, return, and rehabilitate Ukrainian children abducted by Russia. The mass abduction of Ukrainian children has united Republicans and Democrats in Washington. In early December, Congress held a hearing with Ukraine’s ambassador to the United States and experts working to rescue and rehabilitate abducted children.

The bill authorizes the State Department and Department of Justice to assist Ukraine in locating and returning Ukrainian children as well as prisoners of war and civilian detainees, and to support the rehabilitation of returned children and seek accountability for the Russians who abducted them. It also authorizes the Secretary of State to provide support to Ukraine’s government and civil society groups in providing rehabilitation services for victims.

As it stands, unless Congress exercises its foreign policy powers, efforts to end Russia’s invasion will be stymied by limited US assistance to Ukraine. However, there are some signs that Congress is taking critical steps forward. Recently, Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) reportedly worked with Democrats to advance a discharge petition to force a vote on Russia sanctions and potential new military assistance to Ukraine. If passed, new Russia sanctions could deliver a much-needed shot in the arm to the Trump administration’s peace efforts.

While it includes measures that will be welcomed by Kyiv, the NDAA’s Ukraine provisions are largely about mitigating potential harm from the Trump administration. In order to provide significant new material assistance to Ukraine, Congress will need to advance other legislation that it has so far kept on ice while awaiting approval from the White House.

Doug Klain is a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center and the deputy director for policy and strategy at Razom for Ukraine, a nonprofit humanitarian aid and advocacy organization.

‘Putin is lying’: Zelenskyy visits front to expose false claims of Russian gains

Peter Dickinson — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 23:00:14 +0000

According to Russian President Vladimir Putin, the invasion of Ukraine is going entirely according to plan, with Russian troops advancing everywhere and conquering all before them. This swaggering stance is intended to bolster Russian support for the war while demoralizing Ukrainians and deterring Kyiv’s partners. Most of all, it is designed to secure US President Donald Trump’s support for a Kremlin-friendly peace by convincing him that Russian victory is inevitable.

In order to maintain this air of inevitability, Putin stands accused of routinely inflating Russian battlefield achievements. At a time when Kyiv is already coming under mounting pressure to make painful concessions, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is clearly conscious of the dangers posed by these exaggerated claims. In a bid to expose the Kremlin’s disinformation efforts, Zelenskyy traveled personally to the front lines in eastern Ukraine last week to visit a city that Putin and his colleagues have repeatedly bragged of seizing.

Zelenskyy’s trip to Kupyansk came amid a successful Ukrainian counteroffensive in the vicinity that resulted in significant gains. The selfie video he recorded during his visit was masterclass in wartime messaging that debunked Putin’s boasts while also underlining Ukraine’s continued ability to defeat Russia on the battlefield. “Putin publicly lied, claiming that Russian forces had already taken the city. So I went to Kupyansk myself to show the world that Putin is lying,” the Ukrainian leader commented. “We must keep exposing every single Russian falsehood because truth restores justice.”

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Kupyansk is a strategically important city located close to the Russian border in northeastern Ukraine’s Kharkiv region. It was occupied by Russian troops in the initial stages of the full-scale invasion before being liberated during Ukraine’s September 2022 counteroffensive. In recent months, the city has once again become a key target for the advancing Russian army, with Putin and his generals announcing the capture of Kupyansk on multiple occasions.

Putin’s proclamations of victory in Kupyansk began in late October, when he issued an invitation to international journalists and promised to provide them with safe passage to witness the encirclement of Ukrainian units trapped in the city. Days later, he told a meeting of Russia’s National Security Council that Kupyansk was “practically in the hands of Russian forces,” with victorious troops engaged in mopping up operations. “The city’s future has already been determined,” Putin stated.

On November 20, Russia’s top general Valery Gerasimov informed Putin that Russian forces had established full control over Kupyansk. The following day, Putin invoked the alleged fall of the city in an attempt to project Russian strength and intimidate Ukraine. “If Kyiv does not want to discuss President Trump’s proposals and refuses it, then both they and the European warmongers should understand the events that took place in Kupyansk will inevitably be repeated in other key areas of the front,” he warned.

Similarly bold Russian statements continued into the current month. On December 2, Putin remarked that Kupyansk had been under Russian occupation “for several weeks now,” and accused the Ukrainian authorities of being completely detached from reality. In fact, it is now apparent that Ukrainian assessments of the battle were broadly accurate, while Putin was guilty of spinning fantasies about the imaginary conquest of Kupyansk. Speaking on the outskirts of the evidently unconquered city, Zelenskyy openly mocked the Kremlin dictator’s dishonesty. “The Russians have had a lot to say about Kupyansk,” he commented. “The reality speaks for itself.”

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Zelenskyy’s latest front line appearance was much more than a high stakes photo opportunity or a chance to troll the Kremlin. In his selfie video, the Ukrainian leader acknowledged the importance of challenging false Russian narratives and stressed the need to shape international perceptions of the war in order to strengthen Ukraine’s negotiating position. “Today, achieving results on the front line is crucial so that Ukraine can achieve results in diplomacy,” he noted. “This is exactly how it works: All our strong positions within the country translate into strong positions in the negotiations to end the war.”

Ukraine’s recent gains in the Battle of Kupyansk do not alter the country’s precarious position at various other points along the vast front lines of Europe’s largest armed conflict since World War II. Nevertheless, Zelenskyy was right to shine a spotlight on the city. His headline-grabbing selfie video served as a timely reminder that Putin is a proven liar whose word cannot be trusted. It also confirmed that contrary to Kremlin propaganda, the Ukrainian army is far from collapse and remains a formidable fighting force.

These are exactly the messages Ukraine needs to convey to the current US administration. Donald Trump seems remarkably susceptible to Putin’s portrayal of Russia as an irresistible military force, and has repeatedly suggested that Ukraine should accept a Kremlin-friendly peace or risk destruction. The facts on the ground simply do not support this defeatist assessment.

While the Russian military holds the overall initiative and is currently advancing, it is grinding forward at glacial pace while suffering catastrophic losses. Nobody understands this better than Putin himself, who must be acutely aware that he would not need to exaggerate Russian gains and invent new triumphs if his invasion had not yielded such underwhelming results at so high a cost.

Last week’s front line visit by the Ukrainian leader underscored the fact that Russian victory is anything but inevitable. The military outlook for 2026 is actually far more nuanced. With enough international support, there is good reason to conclude that the Ukrainian army could replicate its recent Kupyansk success elsewhere and eventually stem the tide of Russia’s invasion. This is a realistic recipe for peace. Indeed, it may be the only way to pressure Moscow into serious negotiations. Putin wants the world to believe he cannot be beaten on the battlefield, but the Russian troops retreating from Kupyansk would likely tell a different story.

Peter Dickinson is editor of the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert service.

The only winner from Ukrainian wartime elections would be Putin

Yuriy Boyechko — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 19:34:10 +0000

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is once again facing pressure to hold wartime elections after US President Donald Trump accused the Ukrainian leader of using Russia’s invasion to postpone a vote and suggested it was now time for the country to go to the polls. Zelenskyy has responded to Trump’s recent comments by expressing his readiness to organize elections in the next two to three months, while calling on Ukraine’s Western partners to play a role in preparations. “I’m asking now, and I’m stating this openly, for the US to help me, perhaps together with our European colleagues, to ensure security for the elections,” he said on December 10.

Zelenskyy’s commitment to democratic principles is commendable, but he should nevertheless resist international pressure to rush into wartime elections. Attempting to hold a national vote at a time when the country is under relentless Russian bombardment and while millions of Ukrainians remain displaced by the war would not be a demonstration of democracy; it would be a strategic blunder that could hand a propaganda victory to Moscow.

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The issue of potential wartime elections in Ukraine has been raised on numerous occasions since spring 2024 when Zelenskyy’s presidential term officially ended, with Russia frequently referencing the absence of elections in Ukraine as part of efforts to undermine the legitimacy of the current Ukrainian authorities. These Kremlin claims of illegitimacy are inaccurate. The Ukrainian Constitution specifically forbids elections while martial law is in place, which has been the case in Ukraine since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

This constitutional barrier to wartime elections is not a mere legal loophole or a convenient excuse. It is a foundational safeguard designed to ensure the continuity of governance during times of national crisis. Of course, it is possible to argue that the relevant legislation could be revised. But any attempt to change the Ukrainian Constitution would risk a constitutional crisis in the middle of a major war. It would divert the attention of Ukraine’s parliament, the country’s judicial system, and the public away from the war effort, with obvious potential for political infighting and domestic instability.

The constitutional arguments against a wartime election are convincing, but the main reason why Ukraine cannot go to the polls while the Russian invasion continues is because any such vote would fall far short of recognized democratic standards in terms of freedom, fairness, and representation. A truly democratic election requires a level playing field, security for participants, and the ability for all eligible citizens to cast their ballots. None of these conditions can be met in today’s Ukraine.

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Security problems alone should be enough to rule out the idea of a wartime ballot. With Russia bombing civilian targets across Ukraine on a daily basis, candidates would be unable to stage any public campaign gatherings in safety. Likewise, polling stations would become high-value targets for Russian drones and missiles, creating unacceptable risks for thousands of election workers and millions of voters.

The logistical challenges of a wartime vote would be similarly overwhelming. Millions of Ukrainians are currently located abroad as refugees in the European Union and elsewhere. Millions more are internally displaced inside Ukraine. This creates huge issues for voter registries, which would need to be completely revised and updated. Furthermore, the voices of Ukrainian citizens living under Russian occupation would be silenced entirely, disenfranchising a large portion of the overall electorate and further undermining the credibility of any vote.

If Zelenskyy chooses to proceed with a wartime election, the potential for domestic political destabilization would be huge. An election held under wartime conditions would inevitably be a flawed process, with millions unable to vote and security restrictions placing limits on meaningful campaigning opportunities. Regardless of the outcome, Russia would seize on these flaws in order to declare the results illegitimate, sow internal discord, and undermine the credibility of the Ukrainian government in the eyes of the international community. The resulting instability could prove a far greater threat to Ukraine’s survival than any perceived democratic deficit.

According to his country’s constitution, Zelenskyy is the legally elected leader of Ukraine and will remain so until conditions in the country allow for the relaxation of martial law restrictions and the organization of genuinely free and fair elections. This will only become possible once a comprehensive and verifiable ceasefire is in place. Until the bombs stop falling, the Ukrainian government’s priority must remain the defense of the nation.

Ukrainians are fighting to defend their democracy against Russian authoritarianism, but they are also in no rush to hold a wartime vote. Instead, opinion polls consistently demonstrate that most Ukrainians oppose the idea of any elections while active hostilities continue. When the right moment arrives, Ukrainians will be the first to demand their democratic rights and will insist on new elections. However, they understand that the right moment has not yet arrived.

Yuriy Boyechko is CEO of Hope For Ukraine.

Russia’s insistence on a defenseless Ukraine betrays Putin’s true intentions

Peter Dickinson — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 08:21:08 +0000

As American, Ukrainian, and European officials continue to debate potential peace plans among themselves, there remains very little to indicate that Russia is genuinely interested in ending the war. On the contrary, many of the Kremlin’s key demands during negotiations appear tailored to facilitate a continuation of the invasion on more favorable terms.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s territorial claims alone should be enough to set off alarm bells. He insists that in order to secure a ceasefire, Ukraine must first hand over the remaining 10 percent of the Donbas region that his troops have failed to seize since the invasion first began eleven years ago.

As the ruler of what is by far the largest country in the world, Putin has no pressing need for the approximately 6600 square kilometers of Donbas territory still under Ukrainian control. Nor does the region contain any particularly important natural resources or historic sites that could justify its present position at the very heart of the peace process.

Putin’s true motivation is not difficult to discern. The unoccupied portion of the Donbas that he now so openly covets may seem relatively inconspicuous on the map, but it plays host to some of Ukraine’s strongest fortifications. Developed over the past decade, this fortress belt represents a formidable obstacle to Moscow’s invasion.

Analysts estimate that it could take years for Russia to occupy the area by force, and would likely cost the Kremlin hundreds of thousands of additional casualties. Beyond the fortress belt, the way would be open for further sweeping Russian advances into central Ukraine and toward Kyiv itself. This vital role in Ukraine’s overall defense explains why Putin is prepared to reduce his demands elsewhere but remains so eager for Kyiv to hand over this particular territory without a fight.

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Among Moscow’s many demands, the biggest red flag of all is the Kremlin’s determination to demilitarize Ukraine and deprive the country of international allies. Ever since the first round of peace talks during the initial months of the war, Putin has consistently sought to impose restrictions on the size of the Ukrainian military and the categories of weapons the country can possess. While recent drafts envision a Ukrainian army of 600,000 troops, the fact that Russia remains so keen on limiting Ukraine’s ability to defend itself is an unambiguous signal of Putin’s bad intentions.

Likewise, the Kremlin’s bitter opposition to continued international support for Ukraine betrays the reality behind Moscow’s current peace posturing. This extends far beyond Russia’s well-documented objections to Ukrainian membership of NATO. Putin’s negotiators also seek to block future arms supplies to Kyiv and have completely ruled out the possibility of even a symbolic Western troop presence in postwar Ukraine, while demonstrating a deep reluctance to accept anything resembling credible security guarantees.

Attempts to defend Russian objections on security grounds are unconvincing. Putin has debunked his own claims of a NATO security threat to Russia by reacting with obvious indifference to neighboring Finland’s NATO accession in 2022, just months after using the issue as a convenient pretext for the invasion of Ukraine. According to this bizarre Kremlin logic, Ukraine’s slim hopes of joining NATO in the distant future were sufficient grounds to unleash the largest European war since World War II, but Finland’s almost immediate membership of the alliance was “no problem” for Moscow, despite the fact that both countries share long land borders with Russia.

Putin’s refusal to countenance purely defensive commitments from Kyiv’s allies that are clearly designed to safeguard Ukrainian sovereignty is even harder to justify. If the Russian ruler intended to coexist with an independent Ukraine, he would surely recognize the need for international involvement in efforts to reestablish stability in the region. Instead, he has adopted the opposite approach. While Ukraine appeals for security guarantees, Putin seeks to guarantee Ukraine’s insecurity.

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The insincerity of Russia’s current approach to the US-led peace process should come as no surprise. After all, while Putin may be willing to consider a pause in hostilities if it comes on Kremlin-friendly terms, he simply cannot risk a peace deal that secures the continued existence of an independent Ukrainian state. Any settlement based on the present front lines of the war would leave around 80 percent of Ukraine beyond Kremlin control and free to continue along the path toward greater European integration. That is exactly what Putin is fighting to prevent.

The Kremlin dictator has always viewed his war against Ukraine in the broadest of historical contexts as a crusade to reverse the verdict of 1991 and return Russia to its rightful place as a global superpower. Like many of his contemporaries, Putin remains embittered by the Soviet collapse and determined to avenge what he perceives as modern Russia’s humiliating fall from grace. This has fuelled his obsession with independent Ukraine, which he has come to regard as the ultimate symbol of the historical injustice resulting from the breakup of the USSR.

Putin’s increasingly rabid opposition to Ukrainian independence reflects his Cold War experience as a KGB officer in East Germany, where he witnessed the disintegration of the Soviet Empire firsthand. This traumatic experience has helped to convince him that the Ukrainian state-building project now poses an existential threat to Russia itself. If Ukraine is able to consolidate its statehood and emerge as a recognizably European democracy, Putin fears this could serve as a catalyst for the next phase in a Russian imperial retreat that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Over the past two decades, Putin’s determination to undermine Ukrainian statehood has come to dominate his entire reign and has led directly to a new Cold War. From the 2004 Orange Revolution to the 2014 seizure of Crimea and the full-scale invasion of 2022, Ukraine has been at the epicenter of each new milestone in the deteriorating relationship between Russia and the West.

Time after time, Putin has demonstrated his readiness to sacrifice all other Russian national interests in his quest to subjugate Ukraine and force the country permanently back into the Kremlin orbit. He has reversed decades of integration into Western economies, placed Russian society on a wartime footing, and sent hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers to their deaths. It is deeply delusional to think that he is now suddenly ready to abandon all of this and accept the reality of Ukrainian independence in exchange for the marginal gains of a compromise peace.

Putin’s own position during peace talks betrays his complete lack of interest in ending the war. His territorial demands would rob Ukraine of crucial fortifications and set the stage for further Russian advances, while his calls for restrictions on the Ukrainian armed forces and Kyiv’s ability to maintain military ties with the West would leave postwar Ukraine disarmed and defenseless. In isolation, any of these demands would look deeply suspect. Taken together, they represent overwhelming evidence of Putin’s intention to continue the invasion.

Peter Dickinson is editor of the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert service.

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As the bombardment of Kharkiv intensifies, events taking place one hundred kilometers to the east are reshaping the city’s broader security outlook. In recent months, advancing Russian troops have attempted to reoccupy Kupiansk. This strategically important city came under Russian occupation during the initial phase of the full-scale invasion before being liberated during Ukraine’s successful September 2022 counteroffensive. Renewed Russian gains in this direction would further strain Ukraine’s defenses and expand the aerial threat looming over Kharkiv.

As the front line creeps closer to Kharkiv, the main threat remains air strikes. Russian attacks focus on civilian targets including energy infrastructure, apartment blocks, schools, hospitals, and shopping malls. The overall intention is clear: Russia aims to degrade municipal infrastructure, disrupt essential services, and make the city unlivable for its inhabitants.

One of the most shocking attacks in recent months took place on October 22, when Russia carried out a targeted drone strike on a Kharkiv kindergarten. On that occasion, images of firefighters carrying young children from the burning building made global headlines. However, the vast majority of attacks targeting the Kharkiv population do not attract the attention of international audiences.

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Alongside drones, Kharkiv residents must also now contend with extended periods of darkness. In early November, a major Russian bombardment caused the city’s energy supply system to collapse, leaving entire districts without electricity, heating, and light. Local residents have had to adapt to the realities of life without power while navigating the city in the winter gloom. For the Kharkiv population, this has meant returning to familiar blackout routines developed during earlier Russian winter bombing campaigns.

Despite these pressures, Kharkiv continues to function and maintain an air of normality. Everyday life in the city is in many ways defined by a culture of resilience that is both practical and disciplined, reflecting years of adaptation under fire.

Utilities crews repair power lines within hours of each new Russian attack. Municipal workers immediately clear away debris from air strikes and make sure the city remains tidy, even in the most extreme of circumstances. Teachers hold classes in specially constructed underground schools or metro stations. Doctors treat patients behind boarded up windows. Each individual demonstration of resilience is a direct rejection of Russia’s efforts to depopulate Kharkiv.

In order to maintain this remarkable resilience, Kharkiv requires continued international support. Most of all, this means additional air defenses. Supporting Kharkiv is not just a matter of humanitarian assistance. It is a strategic investment in European security.

Today, Kharkiv serves as a vital bastion in eastern Ukraine. The city’s endurance makes it possible to reinforce Ukrainian front line units, bolster the country’s defenses, offer a safe haven to the region’s civilian population, and prevent the war from spreading further west. A secure Kharkiv means a stronger Ukraine and a safer Europe, but this will only be possible with help from the international community.

Maria Avdeeva is a Ukrainian security analyst. The views in this article are her own and are expressed in a personal capacity.

Europe’s choice: Fund Ukraine now or pay a far higher price if Russia wins

Elena Davlikanova, Lesia Orobets — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 20:39:44 +0000

When European leaders convene in Brussels on December 18, continued funding for the Ukrainian war effort will be top of the agenda. However, it remains far from clear whether the European Council meeting will result in a breakthrough. Failure to reach a consensus could have catastrophic consequences for Ukraine and may prove disastrous for the future of European security.

The most realistic financing option currently under consideration is a so-called reparations loan backed by frozen Russian assets. With more than $200 billion of immobilized Russian Central Bank assets currently held in Europe, this loan would be sufficient to bankroll Ukraine’s defense for the coming two years, with Russian reparations set to cover repayments.

European officials are also mulling an alternative format that would involve a joint debt guaranteed by the EU budget. This approach would generate around $100 billion over the coming two years. However, while the reparation loan would place the financial burden on Russia, this approach would introduce new demands on the already overstretched budgets of individual EU member states.

Using frozen Russian funds as security for a major Ukrainian loan would send a message to Moscow about Kyiv’s ability to continue defending itself for years to come. Advocates of the reparations loan see it as a justified move to make Russia pay for the invasion, but the proposal faces obstacles on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Trump administration has reportedly been working behind the scenes to obstruct the reparations loan. US officials argue that the frozen Russian assets should instead become bargaining chips during negotiations with Putin to end the war.

Belgium, which hosts the largest portion of immobilized Russian funds in Europe, remains the main obstacle. The Belgian government has complained that seizing the Russian assets will expose it to legal liabilities that could bankrupt the country. Meanwhile, Belgian Prime Minister Bart de Wever claims that Moscow has “let us know that if the assets are seized, Belgium, and me personally, will feel the effects for eternity.”

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The debate over further funding for Ukraine comes at the precise moment when Russia’s own economic model is showing signs of fragility. Indeed, some forecasts indicate that Putin’s war economy will face mounting challenges in 2026 that could have a major impact on the Kremlin’s ability to continue the invasion. This may be a factor driving Moscow’s determination to block further EU funding for Ukraine.

As Russian military spending reaches new highs, the Kremlin is rapidly burning through strategic reserves. At the same time, revenues from Russia’s economically crucial energy exports have recently fallen to multi-year lows amid mounting sanctions pressures and escalating long-range Ukrainian attacks on oil and gas industry infrastructure across the Russian Federation.

For now, Putin can still afford to pay his military. However, as Russia’s economic outlook worsens, he will have to prioritize the invasion of Ukraine over other state expenditures, while shifting the burden increasingly onto the Russian public. These trends do not imply imminent collapse, but they do expose a vulnerability reminiscent of the late Soviet era that Western governments could exploit in order to push the Russian dictator toward the negotiating table.

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One of the best ways to pressure Putin is by backing Ukraine. Right now, Kyiv faces a massive funding gap for the coming year that could have serious implications for the war. Unless Ukraine can secure tens of billions of dollars in additional financing, it will be extremely difficult to pay for the military, rebuild battered energy infrastructure, and cover basic social expenditures.

Crucially, a lack of Western financial backing for Ukraine will also embolden Russia. Why should Putin consider ending the invasion when Ukraine is running out of money and Kyiv’s Western partners are showing such obvious signs of hesitation?

Europe’s reluctance to pay for Ukraine’s defense is shortsighted, to say the least. If Russia’s invasion succeeds, European governments will soon have to boost defense spending to levels that would dwarf the current cost of backing Ukraine.

A recent New York Post article highlighted the sheer scale of the likely price tag for Europe if Russia achieves victory in Ukraine. Citing research by Scandinavian think tanks, the report predicted that the expense of fortifying Europe’s eastern flank against a triumphant Russia would be approximately $1.6 trillion, or more than double the likely figure required to finance the Ukrainian war effort for four more years.

The EU’s reparations loan initiative is lawful, financially sound, and strategically necessary. By hesitating now, Western leaders risk repeating the same mistakes that shaped earlier phases of Russia’s invasion, when delayed decisions and piecemeal support only served to embolden the Kremlin and prolong the war. If European leaders are unable to act decisively on December 18, Putin will toast another strategic victory and the cost of stopping Russia will rise even further.

Elena Davlikanova is a senior fellow with the Center for European Policy Analysis and Sahaidachny Security Center. Lesia Orobets is the founder of the Price of Freedom air defense initiative and a former member of the Ukrainian parliament.

Industrial control systems were not designed for modern cyber warfare. The systems that operate electrical substations, power distribution logistics, and grid balancing typically prioritize availability and uptime rather than cyber defense. Russia exploited this structural vulnerability in 2015 and 2016, when Ukraine became the first country in history to suffer a nationwide power outage triggered by a cyberattack.

The same attacks that exposed digital fragility also revealed Ukraine’s greatest source of strength: Analog resilience. Even as digital control systems were compromised, engineers were able to manually isolate impacted grid segments, reroute power, and restore transmission through mechanical overrides and localized network segmentation.

The lessons are clear. While digital modernization delivers efficiency, full digital dependency creates systemic brittleness. Meanwhile, resilience can be enhanced through layered systems that incorporate manual fallbacks, localized control, and the ability to physically outmaneuver a digital attack. And while the ability to manually connect electricity to an electrical substation was not by design, the lack of digitalization at the time of the attacks proved to be an advantage in terms of service restoration speed.

The global takeaway from Ukraine’s grid defense is not a rejection of modernization; it is a rejection of exclusively digital modernization. True resilience requires hybrid architectures in which digital innovation is paired with analog redundancy, segmented control, and last resort options when networks are taken down.

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If the Ukrainian power grid demonstrated the value of technical redundancy, Ukraine’s banking sector has shown the value of institutional autonomy. The National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) has emerged since the onset of Russian aggression as one of the most effective national actors in defending and sustaining critical infrastructure under attack. This has not only been due to advanced cybersecurity measures, but also thanks to operational freedom to act in line with the pace of the threat environment. The NBU has rapidly introduced mandatory security protocols, created a dedicated incident response unit, synchronized directly with law enforcement, and deployed real-time regulatory updates to address emerging vulnerabilities.

This capacity for decisiveness has helped ensure continuity in one of the country’s most essential sectors. Even under sustained digital attack, Ukrainians could still access their bank accounts, make electronic payments, and rely on national financial infrastructure without systemic interruption.

The most innovative aspect of this resilience came in the form of the Power Banking Initiative, a nationwide network of bank branches retrofitted for operational continuity during extended outages. Equipped with alternative energy sources, satellite communications, secure cash storage, and offline transaction capacities, these branches ensured uninterrupted access to currency, transfers, and basic banking services during power blackouts and infrastructure disruptions.

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Ukraine’s experience confirms that the boundary between cyberattacks and conventional warfare is often blurred. In many cases, the two elements are sequenced, synchronized, and structurally interdependent. Cyber operations can blind infrastructure sensors, disrupt communications, compromise operational decision-making, and erode trust in essential systems, often in direct coordination with physical strikes.

Resilience does not depend on preventing breaches, but on the ability to sustain essential services when breaches succeed. This requires a hybrid framework that integrates digital security, infrastructure continuity planning, and decentralized operational responses.

Alignment with EU and NATO standards will accelerate interoperability with allied infrastructure defense systems and enable long-term investment security. Compliance must move beyond voluntary adoption to formal certification, standardized auditing, and enforceable resilience benchmarks for infrastructure operators.

Ukraine’s national bank has shown the importance of sector-specific response units. This model should expand to the energy, telecommunications, transportation, healthcare, and regional government systems. In order to be effective, response units require independent monitoring authority, 24/7 threat detection, digital forensics, and integration into NATO and EU cyber fusion hubs.

Infrastructure resilience also demands institutionalized public-private intelligence sharing. A legally protected, mandatory, real-time intelligence exchange will shorten detection timelines and prevent cascading failures. Critical infrastructure owners must integrate into national security information-sharing with liability protections, rapid alert systems, and reciprocal intelligence flows.

Looking ahead, a national resilience investment fund should pool Ukrainian government resources, EU support, World Bank guarantees, EBRD/EIB financing, and private capital to enable infrastructure segmentation, micro-grid deployment, backup power systems, secure cloud environments, and hardened data centers. However, none of these technical investments will succeed without sufficient human capital. Ukraine should aim to develop a minimum of 10,000 new security specialists through university partnerships, military-civilian pipelines, veteran reskilling programs, and national cyber reserves.

Today, Ukraine possesses infrastructure resilience tested continuously under real cyber-kinetic attack. This unique experience should form the basis of international efforts to enhance critical infrastructure resilience. Ukraine can lead an international training center, host multinational resilience exercises, publish attack anatomy case files, and shape new NATO and EU doctrine. This would allow Kyiv to position itself not only as a defender, but as an architect of resilient infrastructure strategy.

Ukraine’s warning to the West: A bad peace will lead to a bigger war

Myroslava Gongadze — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 22:04:35 +0000

Almost every night last week, I woke up in Kyiv to the piercing sound of air raid sirens. Like countless other Ukrainians, I scrambled out of bed, grabbed a few essentials, and headed down to the bomb shelter.

Not everyone follows this routine. Some people, tired of the nightly bombardments, choose to sleep through air raid alarms, even if that means risking potential death. Many others, including the elderly and those with physical impediments, are unable to make their way downstairs every time the sirens sound. Each new Russian attack is a reminder of how precarious life has become in wartime Ukraine.

While civilians struggle to maintain a sense of normality, the reality on the front lines could hardly be more dramatic. Ukrainian troops are overstretched and desperately short of reinforcements, ammunition, and equipment. Inch by inch, the Russian army continues to grind forward, testing each vulnerability and exploiting every weakness.

Despite these incredible challenges, the Ukrainian military continues to adapt and innovate as it seeks to hold the line with new tools and evolving strategies. The will to resist remains unbroken, but the toll this struggle exacts on soldiers, their families, and the entire Ukrainian nation often feels unbearable.

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As Ukrainians fight for national survival on the battlefield, another struggle is also playing out against domestic corruption. Ukraine’s efforts to move toward a more accountable and democratic system of government are a key cause of Moscow’s escalating aggression, with Putin viewing Ukrainian democracy as an existential threat to Russian authoritarianism. Ukrainians understand that battling corruption is just as vital in this war as resisting Russia on the battlefield.

Ukrainian society has been attempting to combat corruption for decades. Exactly twenty-five years ago, the Kuchmagate scandal rocked Ukraine. This implicated then-president Leonid Kuchma in the murder of my husband Georgiy Gongadze, a prominent investigative journalist and the founder of the Ukrainska Pravda news site. On that occasion, the pathway to the truth began with a lone whistleblower from the presidential security team, who took huge risks to expose what he saw as grave misconduct.

A quarter of a century later, there are strong indications that Ukraine is making progress in the fight against corruption. In late November, one of Ukraine’s most powerful men, presidential administration head Andriy Yermak, resigned following a search of his home by the country’s anti-corruption authorities amid a rapidly unfolding scandal involving figures close to the very highest levels of power.

Once again, Ukrainska Pravda journalists were instrumental in breaking the story, but the differences between then and now are also striking. Back when my husband was murdered, there were no institutional checks in place and no raids on the homes of senior officials. Today, Ukraine has built institutions capable of pushing back and producing results.

Clearly, the ghosts of corruption still haunt Ukraine’s corridors of power, but impunity is giving way to accountability. This is exactly the transformation that many Ukrainians are fighting for, and one of the main reasons why Ukraine scares Putin so much.

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After nearly four years of full-scale war, most Ukrainians want peace, but they also realize that peace will only be possible if accompanied by justice and security. For a generation, Ukrainians have fought for these goals. They know that simply stopping the shooting will not bring real peace, and are committed to ending the war in a way that will last.

From Kyiv to Lviv, I hear the same message from people who desperately want the war to be over but understand that a rushed peace could have disastrous consequences. “We have sheltered too long in the dark to accept a peace that isn’t just,” one woman commented. “Our sons and daughters are not only fighting to defend our land, but for the justice that must come after,” a taxi driver told me.

The world needs to understand that Russia’s invasion is already reshaping global security. Putin is not just seizing Ukrainian territory; he is trying to erase Ukraine as a nation and erode the entire international order. If the world lets this happen, a much larger war will no longer be a distant risk. It will become inevitable.

There is now a clear danger that Western leaders will support a hurried and unfair peace deal. This would send a dangerous message that aggression pays. Autocrats around the world would draw the obvious conclusion that they can change borders by force. This would undermine the foundational principles of international relations established in the post-World War II era. Europe cannot afford to set such a precedent.

With the Russian invasion entering a critical phase and Moscow’s hybrid war spreading across Europe, the time to act is now. Ukraine’s defense is Europe’s defense. The West must increase support and stop Putin before he goes even further. It is delusional to think that sacrificing Ukraine will satisfy Russia. Instead, a bad peace will only lead to a bigger war. The price of hesitation will be far higher than the cost of action.

Myroslava Gongadze is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center and a senior fellow at Friends of Europe.

At the start of the full-scale invasion, Ukraine’s vibrant tech sector represented an important asset that the authorities in Kyiv were quick to mobilize. This tech prowess helped cement the country’s strategic focus on drones, which could be designed and produced domestically to compensate for a lack of more conventional weapons.

Since 2022, the number of Ukrainian companies developing drones has skyrocketed, while annual output has risen to millions of units. This has allowed Ukraine to establish a “drone wall” along the front lines of the conflict, making any buildup of enemy forces extremely challenging. Over the past year, around three-quarters of all Russian casualties have been as a result of Ukrainian drones.

At sea, Ukraine has used drones to sink multiple warships and break the Russian navy’s Black Sea blockade, forcing Putin to withdraw the bulk of his remaining fleet from Russian-occupied Crimea. Ukraine’s growing drone capabilities have also made it possible to bring Putin’s invasion home to Russia with an escalating campaign of deep strikes on military and industrial targets across the Russian Federation.

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Russia has responded to Kyiv’s groundbreaking use of drone warfare by studying Ukrainian tactics and technologies, while also dramatically expanding its own domestic drone manufacturing base. The Kremlin has been aided in this by allies including China and Iran, who have provided vital components along with the blueprints for key drone designs.

The Kremlin strategy has focused on mass producing a limited range of models for use on the battlefield and in the bombardment of Ukrainian cities. This methodical approach has paid dividends. By the end of 2024, it was already becoming clear that the drone war was turning in Russia’s favor. This trend has only intensified over the past year.

One of Russia’s most important innovations has been the widespread use of fiber-optic drones. These drones are controlled by a wire connected directly to the operator, making them immune to jamming technologies and extremely difficult to intercept.

Russian commanders first began using large quantities of fiber-optic drones during fighting in late 2024 to push Ukrainian troops out of Russia’s Kursk region. The drones proved highly effective at disrupting Ukrainian logistics by targeting supply vehicles. This was widely seen as a crucial factor behind the success of the operation.

Russia has now replicated and scaled up these tactics throughout southern and eastern Ukraine, creating a drone wall of its own while reaching deeper and deeper into Ukrainian-controlled territory. Fiber-optic drones are being used to ambush supply vehicles far behind the front lines, forcing Ukraine to become increasingly reliant on ground robotics to supply combat units and evacuate the wounded.

In addition to striking Ukrainian logistics, Russian drone forces are also prioritising attacks on their Ukrainian counterparts, forcing Ukrainian drone crews to pull further back from the line of contact to ensure safety. This distance gives Russian operators room to move their own teams forward, increasing their ability to dominate the battlefield.

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Russia’s Rubicon drone unit has emerged during 2025 as a prominent symbol of the Kremlin’s rapidly evolving and increasingly effective drone warfare strategy. Highly trained and well funded Rubicon teams are leading the campaign to cut Ukraine’s supply lines and widen the kill zone.

Crucially, Rubicon pilots pass their experience on to newcomers and provide extensive training that is helping to improve the effectiveness of other Russian army drone units. According to Ukrainian drone commander Yurii Fedorenko, Rubicon can rapidly scale up drone units using manpower and financial advantages that Ukraine cannot replicate.

In the drone war between Russia and Ukraine, the Kremlin is betting on mass and hoping that a combination of smart choices, specialised production, extensive training, and sheer numbers will eventually overwhelm Ukraine’s technological edge. In contrast, Kyiv continues to rely on a highly decentralised ecosystem of volunteer groups, startups, and military workshops producing a wide variety of different drone models. This diversity helps to drive innovation but also creates coordination challenges.

The current effectiveness of Russia’s drone units does not mean the drone war has shifted decisively in Moscow’s favor, but recent trends do expose a gap that Ukraine must urgently close. In order to counter Russia’s increasingly centralised and well-resourced drone formations, Kyiv needs to adopt key elements of the Rubicon model. This means scaling up training pipelines, sharing front line experience more systematically, and ensuring Ukrainian drone units have all the resources they need to hunt down Russian operators and regain the initiative.

Since 2022, the Russian military has been widely mocked for its primitive “human wave” tactics and generally poor performance in Ukraine. However, the progress made by Russia in drone warfare indicates an army that is fully capable of learning, adapting, and innovating. Moscow has not been able to achieve any major technological breakthroughs, but Russian military strategists have significantly strengthened their country’s position by concentrating on scale, training, and relentless battlefield experimentation.

This progress should be a major wake-up call for European leaders. Small numbers of suspected Russian drones are already causing chaos and disruption across Europe. The longer the war in Ukraine lasts, the more advanced Russia’s drone capabilities will become.

David Kirichenko is an associate research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society.

Returning Ukraine’s abducted children should be central to any peace plan

Kristina Hook — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 21:30:17 +0000

This week, the US Senate is holding a landmark Congressional hearing on Russia’s mass abduction of Ukrainian children. Most will understandably frame the issue as a grave human rights crisis, but it is also much more. Rescuing Ukraine’s abducted children can help pave the way for peace, while allowing Russia’s crimes to go unpunished would set a disastrous precedent for global security.

Russia’s systematic removal, indoctrination, and militarization of Ukrainian children goes to the heart of the broader security dilemma that must be resolved before the war in Ukraine can end. Any credible conversation about peace negotiations or security guarantees for Ukraine must begin with a demonstration that the United States and its allies can meaningfully influence Russian behavior. Ensuring the safe return of these children is a concrete way to do that.

The scale of the crime is staggering. Ukrainian authorities have verified 19,456 children taken to Russian or Russian-occupied territories, while independent experts estimate the actual number of victims may exceed 35,000.

What is indisputable is that Russia’s mass deportations are now among the best-documented crimes of modern warfare. Among numerous other investigations, the Yale School of Public Health’s Humanitarian Research Lab identified at least 210 facilities inside Russia or Russian-occupied territory where deported Ukrainian children have been sent for “re-education,” forced assimilation, and in many places, military-style training.

The evidence is overwhelming and includes coerced relocations, illegal adoptions and naturalization under Russian citizenship, ideological indoctrination aimed at erasing Ukrainian identity, and numerous violations of international law. This is not incidental collateral damage. It is a deliberate state policy of population transfer and Ukrainian national identity destruction; a Russian program that mirrors the legal definitions of numerous atrocity crimes, including genocide.

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So far, it has only been possible to rescue a small fraction of abducted children. As of November 2025, 1,859 children have returned to Ukraine, while international experts estimate that 90 percent of the burden of rescue currently falls to Ukrainians themselves.

Moscow’s refusal to facilitate repatriation and its ongoing efforts to conceal identities and locations underscores the impossibility of any stable post-war order without addressing this crime. Humanitarian language alone obscures a critical truth: The forced transfer of children is not a peripheral human rights issue; it is a central obstacle to any credible security settlement in Europe.

For months, United States and European officials have been exploring frameworks for eventual peace talks with Russia and long-term security guarantees for Ukraine. But these conversations often treat Russian atrocities, including child deportations, as adjacent to the real business of hard security. This is a mistake.

Russia’s abduction of children is a window into its strategic intent. The Kremlin campaign to kidnap young Ukrainians and turn them into Russians reveals that Moscow’s war is not merely about territory but about imperial restoration. If Vladimir Putin only sought to adjust borders, the millions spent on relocating, indoctrinating, and militarizing thousands of Ukrainian children would make little sense.

Putin’s ominous intent becomes clearer when viewed alongside Russia’s broader atrocities. The Russian ruler clearly seeks to diminish the demographic future of an entire neighboring nation, while preparing the next generation for future Russian military aggression.

The issue of abducted Ukrainian children is especially relevant for Ukrainians as they debate painful political compromises, territorial concessions, and security guarantees premised on Western assurances. If world leaders cannot secure the return of the most vulnerable victims of Russia’s aggression, how could Ukrainians trust that those same leaders can prevent Russia from reigniting the war or committing new atrocities?

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Western policymakers insist that any post-war settlement must include credible enforcement mechanisms. But credibility is not defined by rhetoric; it is a matter of capability and political will. Right now, both are in question.

If the United States, with its immense military, diplomatic, and economic power, cannot compel Russia to return thousands of abducted Ukrainian children, it becomes harder to argue that Washington can deter further aggression or prevent violations of a future peace agreement. Ukrainians understand this reality well.

Demonstrating US leverage over Russia is therefore not merely symbolic. It is a strategic prerequisite to any durable peace. The United States has untapped tools at its disposal. These include sanctioning individuals and institutions directly involved in the abduction of Ukrainian children, while supporting multilateral accountability efforts. It should be also possible to condition further diplomatic engagement on verifiable steps toward repatriation. Meanwhile, the United States could lead a coordinated information effort to identify children and counter Russian concealment tactics.

These measures are proportional responses to atrocity crimes recognized under international law. The forcible transfer of children is a premeditated crime designed to shatter Ukraine’s future. A successful effort to bring Ukrainian children home will demonstrate that the United States can influence Russian behavior. This is a critical condition for any effective peace initiative.

Securing the return of abducted children would also help to build the trust needed for Ukrainian society to accept Western-backed security frameworks. After many failed efforts to constrain Russian aggression, Ukrainian society needs to know that Western promises are not empty.

Ignoring the issue, or relegating it to the humanitarian margins, undermines the very negotiations that the Trump administration is seeking to advance. Ending the war requires Ukrainian faith in international guarantees.

Child abduction is among the clearest moral red lines in global conflict. Failure to uphold this red line in Ukraine will invite repetition elsewhere. If Russia can abduct tens of thousands of children with impunity during a major European war and face no real consequences, then no norms protecting children in conflict can hold anywhere.

This week’s hearing marks an opportunity for Congress, the Trump administration, and Ukraine’s other partners to clarify that returning abducted Ukrainian children is not optional, negotiable, or separate from security discussions. It is central.

Kristina Hook is assistant professor of conflict management at Kennesaw State University and a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center.

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One of the most striking provisions in US President Donald Trump’s recently unveiled 28-point Ukraine peace plan was a full amnesty for all parties for their actions during the war in Ukraine and an agreement not to make any claims or consider any complaints in future. While Trump’s initial plan has already been subject to multiple revisions, the idea of a blanket amnesty has sparked alarm and outrage among Ukrainians, with critics viewing it as a move to pardon all Russians responsible for war crimes in Ukraine.

The Trump peace plan first emerged just days after a Russian missile strike on a residential building in Ternopil that killed more than thirty people including seven children. Many Ukrainians recalled this attack following the publication of Trump’s plan, noting that it served to highlight the injustice of offering an amnesty for the vast quantity of crimes committed since the start of the full-scale invasion almost four years ago.

Some have also pointed out that failure to prosecute war crimes in Ukraine could have disastrous implications for the future of global security. “It would ruin international law and create a precedent that would encourage other authoritarian leaders to think that you can invade a country, kill people and erase their identity, and you will be rewarded with new territories,” commented Ukrainian Nobel prize winner Oleksandra Matviichuk.

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Addressing Russian war crimes in Ukraine is not only a matter of providing justice for victims. It is also essential in order to prevent further Kremlin aggression. While the legitimacy of the Nuremberg Tribunal continues to provoke discussion, few would argue that it provided important lessons for Germany and sent an unambiguous message that international aggression ends in defeat and accountability.

Russian society has never experienced anything comparable to Nuremberg. They was no accountability for the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968, or the invasion of Afghanistan. Since the fall of the USSR, there have been no systematic investigations into crimes committed during Russia’s Chechen wars, the 2008 invasion of Georgia, or the initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014.

This absence of accountability has fueled a sense of impunity in the Kremlin and throughout Russian society that has been instrumental in creating the political climate for the current attack on Ukraine. Unless addressed, this historically rooted sense of Russian impunity will inevitably fuel further aggression.

Advocates of the US-led peace initiative have suggested that the priority now should be securing peace rather than seeking justice. In reality, however, the two goals are interlinked. It is delusional to think that any future treaty obligations or declarations of non-aggression from Russia’s leaders can be trusted, especially if they are not held to account for the crimes of the past four years.

It is important to recognize that many of the 28 points featured in the United States plan are realistic and could serve as the basis for a viable peace settlement. At the same time, it is also abundantly clear that the proposed amnesty for war crimes will only embolden the Kremlin. If adopted, it would encourage Russia to continue the invasion of Ukraine or escalate elsewhere in the Baltic region, the southern Caucasus, or Central Asia. That is clearly not in the interests of the United States, Europe, or the wider international community.

It is therefore vital to thoroughly investigate all war crimes committed in Ukraine and establish the facts in a manner that challenges Russia’s sense of impunity and allows for the rehabilitation of victims. The Nuremberg Tribunal did not succeed in ending wars of aggression, but it did establish a precedent of legal responsibility. If we now forego this principle of accountability entirely, progress toward a safer world will not be possible.

Ivan Horodyskyy is an associate professor of the School of Public Management at the Ukrainian Catholic University.

The decree, entitled “Russian National Policy Until 2036,” was published on November 25 and is set to come into force in January 2026, Reuters reports. It calls on the Russian authorities in occupied Ukraine to “adopt additional measures to strengthen overall Russian civic identity.” The policy document also praises the invasion of Ukraine for “creating conditions for restoring the unity of the historical territories of the Russian state.”

This bureaucratic language is an attempt to sanitize the Kremlin’s ongoing campaign to erase Ukrainian national identity. Throughout Russian-occupied regions in the south and east of the country, Moscow has instituted a reign of terror against the civilian population while systematically targeting the symbols of Ukrainian statehood, language, heritage, and culture.

Wherever Russian troops advance, local populations are subjected to large-scale arrests, with anyone deemed a potential threat to the occupation authorities likely to disappear into a vast network of camps and prisons. Victims typically include elected officials, journalists, religious leaders, activists, and military veterans. A UN investigation published in spring 2025 found that these detentions constituted a crime against humanity.

Those who remain are pressured to accept Russian citizenship or face being deprived of access to essentials such as healthcare, pensions, and banking services. In line with Kremlin legislation adopted earlier this year, property owners who refuse Russian passports can be evicted from their homes and deported. Meanwhile, schoolchildren are being taught a heavily militarized Kremlin curriculum that demonizes Ukrainians while praising Russian imperialism and glorifying the invasion of their country. Any parents who resist these policies risk losing custody of their children.

The most notorious element of Moscow’s campaign to extinguish Ukrainian identity is the mass abduction of Ukrainian children. Since the start of the full-scale invasion, around twenty thousand victims are believed to have been taken to Russia and subjected to ideological indoctrination designed to rob them of their Ukrainian heritage and impose a Russian identity. In 2023, the International Criminal Court of The Hague issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin over his personal involvement in these child abductions.

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Russian policies in occupied Ukraine serve as a chilling blueprint for Putin’s future actions if he is able to establish control over the entire country. Indeed, Russia is already actively seeking to depopulate large parts of Ukraine that remain beyond Moscow’s grasp. In front line areas throughout southern Ukraine, the Russian military has embarked on an unprecedented campaign of targeted drone strikes against the civilian population that has killed hundreds and been branded a “human safari.” A recent United Nations probe concluded that these attacks are war crimes with the goal of making whole towns and cities unlivable.

Likewise, during 2025 Russia has intensified the missile and drone bombardment of Ukraine’s civilian population and the country’s critical infrastructure in an apparent attempt to spark fresh waves of refugees. Due in part to these attacks, Ukrainian civilian casualties rose by 27 percent during the first ten months of the year, according to the United Nations Monitoring Mission in Ukraine.

Putin’s posture during peace talks has raised further fundamental questions over his willingness to coexist with an independent and sovereign Ukraine. Ever since the initial round of negotiations in spring 2022, Russia has consistently demanded the comprehensive demilitarization of Ukraine. This has included calls for strict limits on the size of the Ukrainian army and the categories of weapons the country is allowed to possess, along with a ban on NATO membership or any other form of military cooperation with Western partners.

Russia’s insistence on an internationally isolated and disarmed Ukraine remains at the heart of the current negotiations. This should serve as a massive red flag for anyone who still believes that Putin is ready for peace. The Russian dictator obviously has no intention of abandoning the reconquest of Ukraine and aims to resume the invasion in more favorable circumstances once Ukraine has been stripped of allies and rendered defenseless.

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Putin’s determination to continue the invasion of Ukraine should come as no surprise. While Trump sees the current war as a geopolitical real estate deal, Putin believes he is on an historic mission to reverse the Soviet collapse and revive the Russian Empire. This explains his otherwise inexplicable obsession with ending Ukrainian independence, which Putin has come to view as the ultimate symbol of modern Russia’s humiliating fall from grace.

On the eve of the full-scale invasion, Putin called Ukraine “an inalienable part of our own history, culture, and spiritual space.” But his desire to extinguish Ukrainian statehood goes far beyond any toxic feelings of shared kinship. For Putin, the consolidation of a democratic, European Ukraine poses an existential threat to authoritarian Russia that could serve as a catalyst for the next stage in an imperial retreat that begin with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Haunted by the people power uprisings that brought down the USSR, he will do almost anything to prevent a repeat.

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine first began with the 2014 seizure of Crimea, Putin’s crusade to force Ukraine back into the Kremlin orbit has come to dominate his reign. In pursuit of this goal, he has sacrificed Russia’s relationship with the democratic world, while also doing untold damage to the country’s economic prosperity and international standing. After everything that has happened, he can hardly now accept a peace deal that leaves 80 percent of Ukraine permanently hostile to Russia and firmly embedded in the West. Putin’s propaganda machine is perhaps the most powerful in the world, but even his most skilled media managers would struggle to spin such an outcome as anything other than a disastrous Russian defeat.

Putin’s latest presidential decree demanding further efforts to create a Ukraine without Ukrainians underlines the absurdity of attempts to find any meaningful middle ground between Moscow and Kyiv. With a compromise peace out of the question, Putin’s plan is to keep fighting while hoping to outlast the West and exhaust Ukraine. He will continue to engage in negotiations with the United States as a tactic to stall further sanctions and divide his enemies, but there is virtually zero chance of Russia voluntarily accepting any deal that guarantees the continued existence of a Ukrainian state.

This does not mean that Putin cannot be forced to end his invasion. But it does mean that current efforts to broker a negotiated settlement are doomed to fail. Putin is convinced that in order to correct the historical injustices of the past three decades and safeguard Russia’s place in the world, he must destroy Ukraine as a state and as a nation. It is delusional to think that a man committed to criminality on such a grand scale could be swayed by talk of sanctions relief and minor territorial concessions.

Instead, the objective should be to increase the economic and military pressure on Putin until he begins to fear a new Russian collapse in the tradition of 1917 and 1991. This will require the kind of political courage from Ukraine’s partners that has been in short supply since 2022, but it is the only way to secure a sustainable peace in Europe. Putin dreams of taking his place in Russian history alongside Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and Joseph Stalin, but he most definitely does not want to share the ignominious fate of Czar Nicholas II and Mikhail Gorbachev.

Peter Dickinson is editor of the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert service.

The proposal drew criticism from a number of congressional Republicans. “Those who think pressuring the victim and appeasing the aggressor will bring peace are kidding themselves,” wrote Senator Mitch McConnell, who likened the plan to “a capitulation like [former US President Joe] Biden’s abandonment of Afghanistan.”

“This so-called ‘peace plan’ has real problems, and I am highly skeptical it will achieve peace,” said Roger Wicker, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

A Wall Street Journal report that Trump would withhold arms sales to Ukraine if Kyiv didn’t accept the proposal by Thanksgiving elicited a rebuke from Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, who wrote: “Correction: The United States wants Russia’s answer on an unconditional withdrawal of Ukraine by Thursday. This Russian-drafted propaganda must be rejected and disregarded for the unserious nonsense that it is.”

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Comments from US Vice President JD Vance indicate that the White House has received significant pushback from Republicans in Congress over its recent handling of the Russia-Ukraine peace process. “The level of passion over this one issue when your own country has serious problems is bonkers,” he posted on November 24.

Perhaps the biggest challenge to the Trump administration’s position on Ukraine peace talks has come from Fitzpatrick, who filed a discharge petition to force a vote in the House of Representatives on Russia sanctions once a majority of members have signed on. This is the same mechanism used in 2024 to pressure Speaker of the House Mike Johnson to pass a $61 billion aid package for Ukraine.

A more prominent congressional role in Russia-Ukraine peace efforts would mark a departure from recent trends. At present, 2025 is the first year since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion that Congress has not passed any legislation to assist Ukraine. From the US-Ukraine minerals deal to shuttle diplomacy in Istanbul and arms sales to NATO, the White House has made it clear that ending the war in Ukraine is Trump’s portfolio.

This helps to explain why the Sanctioning Russia Act, introduced in April 2025 by Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), has gone nearly eight months without a vote despite pledges of support from 85 percent of senators. Originally written to signal strong congressional support for Russia sanctions, the legislation has since undergone technical changes to improve the effectiveness of the sanctions and gain Trump’s approval, according to congressional staff.

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Fitzpatrick’s initiative could now change things. The discharge petition, which he says would force a vote on a version of the Sanctioning Russia Act and potentially also the Democrat-led Ukraine Support Act, which includes both sanctions and new military support for Kyiv, could mobilize Republicans uneasy with current peace efforts.

After nearly a year of deferring to Trump to manage a peace process, Republican criticism in Congress is growing. “The President’s appeasement plan to Russia is forcing our hand,” commented Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE), who says he considered resigning from Congress in protest over the recently proposed peace plan.

To force a vote, the discharge petition will require majority support from House members. Most Democrats will likely back the move, though some are privately sharing concerns about granting Trump increased authority to levy tariffs, should that provision remain in the final legislation attached to the petition. A handful of Republicans could push it over the line.

Further action to back Ukraine and pressure Russia is likely to find support among Trump’s base. Fresh polling from the right-leaning Vandenberg Coalition found that only 16 percent of Trump voters agree with the proposal that Ukraine should surrender territory to the Kremlin, while 76 percent support sanctioning Russia.

The reality is that without serious additional pressure on Russia, Putin is unlikely to agree to any of the peace frameworks currently being floated. However, if Congress pushes to enact crippling sanctions, extend military assistance to Ukraine, and codify security guarantees, the Trump administration’s peace efforts could finally bear fruit.

The last few days have shown that Congress is eager to help Trump force Russia to end its war in Ukraine. Capitalizing on the revised peace framework agreed by US and Ukrainian negotiators in Switzerland will now require action from both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue.

Doug Klain is a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. He also serves as deputy director for policy and strategy at Razom for Ukraine, a US-based nonprofit humanitarian aid and advocacy organization.

Every city the Russian military bombs, every child it kidnaps, every Ukrainian life it destroys today can only be understood within the long genealogy of Russia’s imperialistic state ideology. For centuries, this violent brand of expansionism has been directed at Ukraine.

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The present full-scale invasion of Ukraine will soon pass the four-year mark, but the war did not begin in 2022. It was preceded by eight years of warfare in eastern Ukraine following Russia’s 2014 seizure of Crimea. This has been recognized by the European Court of Human Rights, which has ruled that Russia has been conducting sustained military operations in Ukraine since at least 2014. But even this is only the most recent chapter in a far older story.

During the eras of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, the authorities consistently pursued policies aimed at dismantling Ukrainian identity. Tactics included banning the Ukrainian language, repressing cultural and religious leaders, and imprisoning advocates of Ukrainian independence.

Most devastatingly, Stalin and his regime engineered an artificial famine in the 1930s that killed at least four million Ukrainians in less than two years. Today, this deliberate mass starvation of Ukrainians is known as the Holodomor (“killing by hunger”). No outlier, the Holodomor was central to a broader Soviet campaign aimed at breaking Ukrainian resistance and other assertions of political autonomy. The lawyer who coined the term “genocide,” Raphael Lemkin, identified this attempt to destroy the Ukrainian nation as the “classic example” of Soviet genocide.

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What unites these episodes is not only the violence itself but the ideology behind it. Moscow’s long history of crimes in Ukraine reflects an imperial worldview that treats human beings as resources to be harnessed for the state and as obstacles to be eliminated in the pursuit of total domination.

This ideology has evolved over time, but its core logic has remained remarkably consistent. Crucially, it has never faced sustained, meaningful repudiation by the international community. Because it was never confronted, Russia’s imperial ideology has been allowed to regenerate. A clear line of impunity links Stalin’s starvation of Ukrainian society in the 1930s to today’s Kremlin rhetoric insisting Ukraine is not a real nation at all.

This continuity is not abstract; it directly shapes present-day atrocities. When a state views humans as raw material for empire, the kidnapping and forced Russification of thousands of Ukrainian children becomes an acceptable instrument of policy rather than an aberration. This logic also applies to other aspects of the current invasion including filtration camps, torture chambers, rape and sexual violence, and mass deportations, along with the systematic destruction of Ukrainian cultural and religious life throughout every area under Russian control.

Ukraine’s top prosecutor notes that the number of open war crimes investigations has reached 178,391 documented cases. Indicating deliberate Kremlin policy, the former US ambassador-at-large for global criminal justice recently stated that Russian atrocities in Ukraine are “systematic” and have been identified “literally everywhere that Russia’s troops have been deployed.”

The current actions of Putin’s occupation forces in Ukraine are the same state practices that have long defined Russian imperial rule: Absorb what can be absorbed, erase what cannot, and turn the conquered into fuel for the next stage of expansion.

Russia’s genocidal intent is not limited to eliminating Ukrainian identity. Putin’s extreme ideology drives him to pursue the incorporation of Ukrainians into Russia’s war machine against the West. The danger is not only the destruction of Ukraine as a nation, but the possibility that Russia will assimilate as much of Ukraine’s territory, cutting-edge technology, and population as it can before continuing further.

Contemporary Russian rhetoric makes this explicit. Strikingly, the Putin era has witnessed the resurgence of the slogan “We can do it again.” Originally graffiti scrawled on the Reichstag by Red Army soldiers in 1945, the popularity of this phrase surged after Russia’s 2014 occupation of Crimea to become a menacing mantra of modern Russian nationalism that signals a society intent on conquest and domination.

The atrocities we are witnessing today in Ukraine reflect centuries of Russian impunity. Impunity not only allows perpetrators to continue; it invites them to escalate. Russia’s imperial ideology has never been confronted with the kind of accountability needed to dismantle it. As long as this ideology persists unchallenged, the threat will not stop at Ukraine’s borders.

The international community now finds itself confronted with the consequences of a genocidal worldview that has been left intact for generations. The urgent question is not only how to halt Russia’s genocidal actions against Ukrainians today, but how to ensure that the world finally repudiates the extremist ideology that made this war possible. Without that repudiation, millions of Russians will remain convinced that they can, in fact, “do it again.”

Kristina Hook is assistant professor of conflict management at Kennesaw State University and a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center.

While recent US sanctions on two Russian energy giants mark an important step forward in efforts to pressure Putin, their immediate impact is limited as China and India are unlikely to stop buying Russian oil. Moreover, sanctions alone will not force Putin to abandon an invasion that he regards as central to his entire reign.

The coming fourth winter of the war will arguably be Ukraine’s most arduous since the full-scale invasion began in February 2022. Ukraine faces a constant barrage of Russian missiles and drones, along with a persistently worsening economic outlook and acute manpower crisis on the front lines. Russian President Vladimir Putin is confident that he can wear down Ukrainian military and civilian resistance, and is also counting on Western support to dwindle.

The war is now as much a test of economic endurance as it is a military struggle. The United States and Europe should be under no illusions that Putin is unlikely to compromise on Ukraine unless he is forced to accept that continuing the war will be prohibitively costly.

The Kremlin dictator’s intransigence was underscored by a recent US intelligence assessment stating that he is more determined than ever to prevail. This makes it even more important to underline the West’s own unwavering determination to continue supporting Ukraine economically as well as militarily.

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To effectively support Ukraine, Washington and Brussels need to move beyond short-term crisis responses and embrace a longer term strategy. The goal should be to help Ukraine strengthen its wartime economy and put the country in a position to continue military operations throughout 2026 and beyond.

The most pressing issue is removing obstacles to the use of immobilized Russian assets. Before the end of 2025, EU leaders must resolve internal disagreements that are currently preventing Europe from utilizing these frozen assets to cover large gaps in Ukraine’s budget for the coming year.

Plans for a $160 billion reparations loan have so far been blocked by Belgium over concerns of retaliatory Russian lawsuits and other potential Kremlin countermeasures. In order to minimize the threat, Belgium wants all EU member states to offer political guarantees for the loan. One option is to have Norway step up as guarantor, but Oslo has so far refused to take on that role alone. The United States could use its influence and leverage to offset European concerns. Alternatives to the reparations loan are subpar and would signal a weakening of Western resolve to Moscow.

Any breakthrough on the issue of immobilized Russian assets would set the stage for a proposed “mega deal” that would see Ukraine purchase large quantities of arms from the United States using $90 billion backed by European partners. Washington’s weapons deliveries to Ukraine could also be accelerated by working with Brussels through the EU’s $170 billion Security Action for Europe (SAFE) funding mechanism. This kind of transatlantic coordination would ensure that Ukraine receives the weapons it so urgently needs while strengthening NATO’s industrial base.

Support for Ukraine’s energy sector will also be vital as Western partners seek to provide Kyiv with greater economic stability. The Kremlin has dramatically expanded domestic drone production over the past year, making it possible to increase the bombardment of Ukraine’s cities and energy infrastructure. This is leading to widespread blackouts that undermine Ukrainian morale while impacting economic activity and military production.

Brussels must do more to persuade EU member states including Romania and Slovakia to lift existing restrictions on gas exports to Ukraine. This would help Kyiv cover energy supply shortfalls. Increased funding is equally crucial. Energy experts currently estimate that it will take $2.5 billion for Ukraine to import enough gas to get through the coming winter heating season. Meanwhile, the US and EU should take steps to encourage investment in Ukraine’s energy security to help repair, replace, and upgrade critical infrastructure.

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As Russia’s full-scale invasion approaches the four-year mark, policymakers in Washington, London, and across the EU must recognize that strengthening Ukraine’s wartime economy is a top strategic priority. Ukraine’s economic resilience will shape the outcome of the war and help determine European security for decades to come.

Funding Ukraine is expensive, but the arguments in favor of such an investment are convincing. After all, the cost of supporting the Ukrainian economy today would be dwarfed by the far higher price Western governments will have to pay in terms of increased defense spending if Putin’s invasion succeeds.

At present, there is little reason to believe a just and lasting peace is close. Ukraine is suffering on the battlefield, while the credibility of the country’s leadership has been seriously undermined by the largest domestic corruption scandal of the wartime period. Nevertheless, the public mood across Ukraine remains defiant and determined. In Russia, Western sanctions and Ukrainian airstrikes are causing real pain for Putin’s wartime economy, but his fixation on establishing political control over Ukraine far outweighs his need to address these mounting costs.

The United States and Europe must adopt a long-term perspective to effectively counter Moscow’s maximalist aims. Current efforts to broker a hasty peace deal risk emboldening Putin, sacrificing Ukrainian sovereignty, and compromising European security. Instead, Western leaders should send a clear message to the Kremlin that their own resolve is as strong as ever. Taking steps to strengthen Ukraine’s economic resilience would certainly underline this message, and could help to convince Putin that his hopes of outlasting the West are futile.

Zahar Hryniv is a Young Global Professional at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center.

While Zelenskyy is understandably eager not to alienate Trump, there is little optimism in Kyiv or across Europe that this latest US initiative can end the continent’s largest invasion since World War II. Multiple similar attempts to secure a settlement by offering the Kremlin generous terms have already been made without success.

This approach reflects a fundamental failure to recognize that Russian President Vladimir Putin is not driven by the same straightforward cost-benefit rationality as his Western counterparts. On the contrary, Putin believes he is engaged in an existential struggle to revive Russia’s great power status and secure his own place in history. It is therefore delusional to think that he can be satisfied by promises of minor territorial concessions or future economic opportunities.

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The disconnect between Moscow and Western capitals over Russia’s war aims has been most immediately apparent during Trump’s attempts to broker a peace agreement. Since February 2025, US-led discussions over a possible negotiated settlement have featured plenty of vague talk about lucrative joint ventures and potential US investments in Russia. Some Trump administration members may have interpreted the prominent role of Putin’s economic envoy Kirill Dmitriev as a positive signal that Moscow is open to such overtures. However, promises of business opportunities have not translated into any meaningful progress toward peace.

Trump has also often given the impression that he views the issue of a territorial settlement between Russia and Ukraine from the perspective of a real estate developer solving a property dispute. The US leader has spoken of the need for “land swaps” and described Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine as “prime territory,” while indicating that the two sides should sit down and agree on new boundaries. This overlooks the awkward but important fact that Putin is not actually fighting for Ukrainian land. He is fighting for Ukraine itself, and will regard the war as lost unless he is able to reassert complete Russian dominance over the whole country.

Another issue that highlights the tendency of Western leaders to project their own logic onto Putin is the topic of Russian military losses. Western officials and media outlets often identify the extremely high Russian casualty figures in Ukraine as a key argument for ending the war, while pointing to Russia’s slow advance as evidence that the invasion has reached a strategic stalemate.

From a Western perspective, this makes perfect sense. But high casualty rates are a traditional feature in the Russian army, which has always relied on mass to win wars. Furthermore, Putin has been careful to make sure his army’s heavy losses in Ukraine do not destabilize the domestic front. Since 2022, the Kremlin has focused recruitment efforts on the poorest provinces of Russia and has enlisted large numbers of inmates from the country’s vast prison network, while also offering extremely attractive financial packages to volunteers. This has helped reduce any social pressures to a minimum, despite the high death toll of the invasion.

Some Western leaders have sought to strike a chord by underlining the damage Putin is doing to Russia’s long-term prospects and his own legacy. Outgoing British MI6 chief Richard Moore offered a good example of this in his September 2025 farewell speech, which highlighted the threats posed by the ongoing invasion of Ukraine to Russia’s economic and demographic outlook. Moore’s logic would certainly have resonated with Western policymakers and electorates, but it meant little to an ageing autocrat guided by imperial delusions and his own distorted reading of history.

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If Western leaders wish to end the war, they must stop trying to implement peace plans that they themselves would find persuasive and accept that Putin’s motivations are altogether different. He sees the invasion of Ukraine as part of a sacred historic mission that will define his reign and determine Russia’s place in the world for decades to come. Extinguishing Ukrainian independence is only one part of this process. Putin ultimately aims to reshape the global order and end what he sees as the period of geopolitical humiliation suffered by Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Most of all, Western policymakers must finally come to grips with the sheer scale of Putin’s imperial ambitions and acknowledge the central role these ambitions play in fueling Russian aggression in Ukraine and beyond. This would be long overdue. Since 2022, Putin has publicly compared himself to Russian Emperor Peter the Great. He frequently claims to be returning historically Russian lands, and has declared that “all Ukraine is ours.”

Attempting to bargain with such a man by appealing to common sense or offering limited concessions is worse than futile; it actually helps convince Putin that his Western opponents are too weak and overindulged to grasp the historical significance of the moment. This makes him more confident than ever that his enemies will ultimately back down and hand him victory in Ukraine.

Instead of trying to appease Russia, Ukraine’s allies must first admit that Putin is playing for the highest possible stakes and has no interest whatsoever in a compromise peace. They must then demonstrate that they have the political will to prevent his twisted imperial fantasies from becoming reality.

Axis of authoritarians poses mounting threat on the global information front

William Dixon, Maksym Beznosiuk — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 20:19:56 +0000

Ever since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, there has been growing alarm over the support that Moscow is receiving from fellow authoritarian regimes including Iran, North Korea, Belarus, and China. However, while Western officials have publicly raised concerns over material support for the Russian war effort, the issue of cooperation in the information sphere has received less attention.

This is short-sighted. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has demonstrated the critical importance of the information front in modern conflicts. The lessons of the war in Ukraine have not been lost on the Kremlin, which invests vast sums to finance information operations and has repeatedly used disinformation to destabilize its opponents. China is also well aware of the increasing role played by information capabilities and has established a range of powerful tools. This is creating potentially significant challenges for Western policymakers.

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Many Western countries continue to view the issue of information warfare as primarily a matter of fact-checking and debunking fakes. In contrast, there are growing indications that Moscow and Beijing share a vision of the information space as a key element of their power projection and national security strategies.

A recent meeting between Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin and his Chinese counterpart Li Qiang signaled deepening cooperation between Moscow and Beijing on the information front. The annual summit held in Hangzhou in early November featured commitments from both sides to partner on media initiatives, countering disinformation, and promoting traditional values.

Moscow already has extensive experience in information operations designed to disrupt and reshape Europe’s political landscape, and is widely regarded as a global pioneer in the use of multimedia information operations to advance foreign policy objectives. Beijing has also faced accusations of playing a role in these activities, which are aimed at exploiting social divisions and boosting polarizing narratives with a view to generating support for anti-establishment political forces throughout the Western world.

While measuring the success of information operations is not an exact science, there is certainly no shortage of evidence to suggest that these tactics are having an impact. Support for far-right political parties is now surging across Europe. While each party has its own individual agenda, these populist political forces tend to share a sympathetic stance toward Russia while enjoying extensive coverage on Kremlin-linked media platforms.

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Perhaps the clearest indication of cooperation between Russia and China in the information arena is the growing Russian state media presence on TikTok. This is alleged to include coordinated campaigns and the use of AI technologies.

Disinformation watchdogs from Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council have accused the Kremlin of using the TikTok platform to conduct information campaigns designed to demoralize Ukrainian society and undermine resistance to Russia’s invasion. Ukrainian officials claim Moscow has employed AI to create videos featuring “ordinary Ukrainians” conveying pessimistic messages.

Russia is also reportedly using Chinese social media platforms to recruit Chinese citizens for the war in Ukraine. The large volume of recruitment adverts across China’s strictly controlled and monitored social media sphere has been interpreted by some as a sign of tacit approval from the authorities in Beijing.

Chinese and Russian information ecosystems appear to be engaging in significant cross-promotion. Kremlin outlets actively promote war-related content on platforms such as China’s Weibo. Meanwhile, Chinese state media and officials amplify key Kremlin narratives blaming the West for the Russian invasion of Ukraine and framing sanctions policies as self-defeating. Both Beijing and Moscow employ similar language to describe the war in Ukraine, which they typically depict as a defensive reaction to the West’s provocative policies.

As information cooperation between Moscow, Beijing, and other authoritarian regimes expands, Western policymakers must recognize that information warfare is now a tier-one national security threat requiring a comprehensive response. This should include signaling that information offensives will be treated as comparable to other violations of sovereignty, with the European Union and NATO working to establish clear diplomatic, legal, and economic red lines in the information domain.

Efforts must be undertaken to defend the information space more effectively by combining the initiatives of individual governments along with civil society. This could draw on a wide range of specific examples, such as Ukraine’s wartime experience and recent elections in Romania and Moldova. Greater accountability for hostile information operations is also crucial. Western governments must be prepared to publicly expose attacks and impose tangible costs.

The authoritarian axis that has taken shape since the onset of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is currently setting new standards in terms of coordinated information operations across media platforms. The West’s response must be equally systematic. The tools and frameworks exist; Western governments must now demonstrate the necessary political will.

William Dixon is an associate fellow of the Royal United Service Institute specializing in cyber and international security issues. Maksym Beznosiuk is a strategic policy and security analyst with a focus on Ukraine, Russia, European security, and EU-Ukraine cooperation.

Vladimir Putin fears entering Russian history as the man who lost Ukraine

Peter Dickinson — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 21:47:02 +0000

The invasion unleashed by Vladimir Putin almost four years ago has often been called unprovoked, but nobody can say it was entirely unexpected. On the contrary, the full-scale invasion of 2022 was merely the latest and most extreme stage in a prolonged campaign of escalating Russian aggression aimed at preventing Ukraine from leaving the Kremlin orbit and resuming its place among the European community of nations.

During the early years of Putin’s reign, this campaign had focused primarily on massive interference in Ukrainian domestic affairs. Following Ukraine’s 2014 Revolution of Dignity, the Russian dictator opted for a far more forceful combination of military and political intervention. When even this descent into open aggression failed to derail Kyiv’s westward trajectory, Putin sought to solve Russia’s Ukraine problem once and for all by launching the largest European invasion since World War II.

As the fifth year of the war looms on the horizon, there is very little to indicate that Putin’s hard line tactics are working. While Russia has managed to occupy around 20 percent of Ukraine, opinion in the remaining 80 percent of the country is now overwhelmingly hostile to Moscow and supportive of closer European ties. For the vast majority of people in Ukraine, the invasions of 2014 and 2022 represent watershed moments that have profoundly impacted their understanding of Ukrainian identity while radically reshaping attitudes toward Russia.

The transformation in Ukraine’s geopolitical orientation is being mirrored by changes taking place domestically as the country’s center of gravity shifts decisively from east to west. For the first decade or so of independence, Ukraine was politically and economically dominated by the industrial east, with major cities including Donetsk, Kharkiv, Dnipro, and Zaporizhzhia serving as power bases for billionaire oligarch clans who shaped the Ukrainian national narrative and helped maintain high levels of Russian influence across the country. At the time, the comparatively quaint cities of central and western Ukraine lacked the wealth and general wherewithal to compete.

The first indication of a significant change in this dynamic was the 2004 Orange Revolution, which saw an unprecedented nationwide protest movement erupt over an attempt to falsify the country’s presidential election orchestrated by Kremlin-backed political forces rooted firmly in eastern Ukraine. This popular uprising represented a clear and unambiguous rejection of the idea that Ukraine was inextricably bound to Russia. A decade later, the onset of Russian military aggression would turbo-charge modern Ukraine’s historic turn toward the west.

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Since 2014, traditional east Ukrainian bastions of Russian influence such as Donetsk and Luhansk have been occupied by Kremlin forces and effectively cut off from the rest of Ukraine. More recently, the full-scale invasion has left the broader Donbas region devastated and depopulated, while the formerly preeminent metropolises of the east face an uncertain future as fortified front line cities under relentless Russian bombardment.

The situation in western Ukraine is strikingly different. Cities throughout the region are experiencing rapid growth thanks to an influx of families and businesses seeking to relocate away from the war zone. The experience of Lviv since 2022 illustrates this trend. The largest city in western Ukraine, Lviv’s population has expanded by around a quarter since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion to reach approximately one million. The Lviv real estate market has comfortably surpassed the regional capitals of eastern Ukraine and now rivals Kyiv itself. Likewise, Lviv is also second only to the Ukrainian capital in terms of new companies and investments.

Politically and diplomatically, Lviv is clearly in the ascendancy. Many Kyiv embassies partially relocated to the city in 2022 and continue to maintain a presence. Over the past three years, Lviv has hosted a number of high-level international events including presidential summits and gatherings of EU ministers. The rise of Lviv has been so striking that it has sparked rumors of jealousy among the establishment in Kyiv, with some suggesting that the potential reopening of Lviv International Airport has been deliberately sidelined in order to prevent the further eclipse of the Ukrainian capital.

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Whatever happens in the war, the shift in Ukraine’s national center of gravity toward the west of the country is unlikely to be reversed. In addition to the urgent impetus provided by Russia’s ongoing invasion, the emergence of western Ukraine is also being driven by the pull factor of EU integration. Over the past decade, Ukraine has secured visa-free EU travel and been granted official EU candidate status. This is transforming the investment climate in western Ukraine, which shares borders with four EU member states.

Large-scale infrastructure projects are already helping to cement western Ukraine’s status as the country’s most attractive region and gateway to the EU. Work on a 22km European-gauge railway line from the EU border to Uzhhorod was completed earlier this year, while construction of a far more ambitious Euro-gauge line connecting Lviv to the Polish border is scheduled to begin in 2026. As the EU accession process continues to gain momentum, these logistical links will only strengthen.

It remains unclear exactly when Ukraine will become a fully fledged EU member state, but there is a growing sense of confidence throughout the country that the once distant dream of EU membership is now finally within reach. For western Ukraine in particular, joining the European Union will complete the region’s historic journey from imperial outpost on the fringes of the Soviet Empire to economic engine nestled in the heart of the world’s largest single market.

All this is very bad news for Vladimir Putin. The Kremlin dictator’s Ukraine obsession reflects his fear that the consolidation of a democratic, European, and genuinely independent Ukraine could serve as a catalyst for the next phase in the long Russian retreat from empire that began almost four decades ago with the fall of the Berlin Wall. As Putin’s reign has progressed, his determination to prevent Ukraine’s geopolitical defection has only intensified, as has his readiness to sacrifice Russia’s more immediate national interests in pursuit of his anti-Ukrainian crusade. It is now increasingly obvious that his decision to invade Ukraine has backfired spectacularly, eroding centuries of Russian influence while accelerating the European integration he so bitterly opposes.

Unless Putin succeeds in dismantling Ukrainian statehood entirely and erasing the very idea of the Ukrainian nation, he must surely realize that the Ukraine of the postwar period is now destined to establish itself within the wider Western world while remaining implacably hostile to Russia. Rather than acknowledging this disastrous outcome, he will seek to continue the war indefinitely. If he stops now and accepts a compromise peace, Putin knows he will be doomed to enter Russian history as the man who lost Ukraine.

Peter Dickinson is editor of the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert service.

According to NABU officials, the investigation uncovered a criminal enterprise run by Timur Mindich, a film producer and a former business partner of Zelenskyy. Additional suspects include former Minister of Energy and recently appointed Minister of Justice Herman Halushchenko; former Naftogaz CEO and Deputy Prime Minister Oleksii Chernyshov; former Minister of Defense and current National Security and Defense Council member Rustem Umerov; and Ihor Myroniuk, former deputy head of the State Property Fund and former advisor to Halushchenko.

Mindich fled Ukraine the day before his premises were raided and is reportedly now in Israel. Both Chernyshov and Mindich have long had ties with Zelenskyy, who co-founded the latter’s production company in 2003. Thus far, formal charges have been filed against eight of those implicated. Halushchenko has said he would defend himself against the accusations.

The alleged theft took the form of 10-15 percent inflated prices for infrastructure project contracts, which contractors were forced to pay in order to avoid losing their supplier status. The kickback scheme reportedly included security measures for the Khmelnytskyi Nuclear Power Plant. The Ministry of Energy is suspected of facilitating the scam.

The stolen funds were allegedly laundered through an office linked to fugitive ex-Ukrainian MP and now Russian Senator Andrii Derkach before being extracted from Ukraine. Derkach has been sanctioned since 2021 and was stripped of his Ukrainian citizenship in 2023.

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While the investigation is still underway, the scandal is already proving extremely damaging to Zelenskyy and his entire administration. The alleged involvement of a former Ukrainian MP turned Russian fugitive in the middle of the Kremlin’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine may be the most scandalous aspect of the accusations.

Meanwhile, Zelenskyy’s long contact with many of the accused and their high-level appointments has raised the political stakes for the President. This has led to speculation over whether the scandal could topple Zelenskyy and cost Ukraine the war.

The investigation comes in the wake of a recent standoff between Zelenskyy and his administration with Ukraine’s anti-corruption institutions. In July 2025, a law proposed by Zelenskyy’s political party was passed by the Ukrainian parliament stripping NABU and other anti-corruption institutions of their independence.

This led to vocal condemnation from Ukraine’s civil society and the international community, including the largest street protests since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion. Days later, Zelenskyy reconsidered and signed a law that restored and guaranteed the independence of the country’s anti-corruption agencies.

That guarantee has now been tested and proven credible. While the sheer number of criminal investigations and indictments targeting prominent Ukrainian officials has raised concerns about possible political prosecutions by NABU, the apparent success of Operation Midas and its exposure of alleged corruption on the part of some of the most powerful people in Ukraine would seem to confirm the agency’s independence and its efficacy.

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Zelenskyy appears to recognize the dangers of the situation and has begun responding to the crisis. The Cabinet of Ministers is looking at sanctions against Mindich and businessman Oleksandr Tsukerman, who was also implicated in the scandal. The Ukrainian leader has already forced the resignations of Halushchenko and newly appointed Minister of Energy Svitlana Hrynchuk.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko has announced a comprehensive audit of all state-owned companies, especially in the energy and defense sectors. Anastasia Radina, head of the parliament’s anti-corruption committee, has called for a parliamentary inquiry into the transfer of funds to Russia.

These steps are significant but are unlikely to prove adequate. The stakes are extremely high, not just for Zelenskyy’s political future, but for Ukraine’s conduct of the war. European leaders answer to their citizens, many of whom might now be wondering why they are sending massive aid to Ukraine if large sums are being siphoned off by privileged insiders. In the US, while Trump is slowly moving in the right direction with recent sanctions on Russia, there are still influential figures in his orbit who are looking for ways to end all American support for Ukraine’s defense against Kremlin aggression.

This means that Zelenskyy must turn his attention to the crisis energetically. A good next step would be for him to speak up on the issue publicly and strongly, much as he did in the first days of Russia’s full-scale invasion.

Zelenskyy might start by acknowledging, as former US President Harry Truman did when he said the buck stops with him, that as President of Ukraine, he is ultimately responsible for failures in his government. He should recognize the magnitude of the scandal and the underlying problem of corruption, while explaining how he intends to take the lead in fixing it. This means bringing to justice, in accordance with the law, all those responsible, no matter who they are and where they are. He can do this by vowing to empower NABU and other relevant state institutions fully.

Zelenskyy could frame the scandal as proof that despite clear progress made by Ukraine in dealing with corruption, much more remains to be done. He could demonstrate his openness by inviting advice from Ukrainian civil society and the country’s international partners. This current crisis has clearly demonstrated the dangers of relying on just a small circle at Bankova to get things done.

Such a speech should not be a one off. It should be the start of a dialogue with the Ukrainian public, much like Zelenskyy’s masterful wartime communications. This dialogue should include regular updates on efforts to bring those responsible for this theft to justice, and news about steps to strengthen state institutions against the scourge of corruption. Zelenskyy has the skills to take this on. Now is the time to do it.

Suriya Evans-Pritchard Jayanti is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center.

Iakovenko is a small part of a big story about how Ukrainian entrepreneurship is contributing to local economies across the United States. A new report by the ISE Group, a think tank and startup accelerator with offices in Warsaw, Washington DC, and Kyiv, estimates that Ukrainian-American companies generate nearly $60 billion in annual revenue and support about 300,000 US jobs.

The findings are the first attempt to quantify the economic footprint of Ukrainian-American businesses in the US. Researchers mapped and verified 2,270 Ukrainian-American firms across all fifty states and surveyed a network of more than 45,000 diaspora enterprises. Collectively, the report says, these firms bring in around $55 billion in annual sales, pay out roughly $24 billion in wages, and contribute at least $8 billion in federal, state, and local taxes.

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Study lead Alexander Romanishyn said the team defined “Ukrainian-American” based on self-identification by business owners including diaspora firms, relocated companies, immigrant-founded ventures, and joint US–Ukrainian enterprises. “We estimate there are roughly 45,000 Ukrainian-American businesses in the US today, about one-third of which employ staff,” said Romanishyn, a former deputy minister of the economy in Ukraine. “We deliberately took a conservative approach to avoid overstating the diaspora’s economic weight.”

Technology is a particular strength, accounting for around 130,000 people, or nearly half of the total workforce in Ukrainian-American companies. With pockets in the Bay Area, New York, Boston, Austin, Dallas, and Seattle, they specialize in software development, AI and machine learning, and cloud integration. Many maintain teams in both the US and Ukraine, helping sustain both economies.

Beyond tech, Ukrainians run businesses in nearly every industry including consulting, healthcare, logistics, manufacturing, retail, construction, real estate, finance, and agriculture. Their presence is spread across the entire country, with concentrations in California, New York, Illinois, Florida, Texas, and New Jersey.

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While Ukrainian entrepreneurship in the United States dates back to the 1880s, most Ukrainian-American owned businesses have been launched recently, with around 40 percent opening since 2022. Approximately 180,000 Ukrainians have arrived in the US following the onset of Russia’s full-scale invasion, often through humanitarian programs. Most are still finding their footing. In many cases this means opening small, necessity-driven ventures like home bakeries or cleaning services.

The potential for growth is significant. The report cites surveys indicating that many recent Ukrainian refugees have business experience. Projections suggest they could create 18,000–27,000 new enterprises in the next few years. New arrivals face steep barriers such as lack of savings, no US credit history, and complex visa requirements. Community networks have stepped in to help. In Silicon Valley, for example, the Ukrainian Syndicate Club co-invests in startups founded by Ukrainians.

The big picture is that Ukrainians in the US are builders not beneficiaries. Roman Nikitov, General Partner at United Heritage, a Polish–Ukrainian private equity firm that supported the study, put it this way: “The results mirror what we’ve already seen in Europe. Ukrainians are not beggars but builders, active contributors who strengthen every economy they become part of.” In Poland, for example, where more than a million Ukrainian refugees have settled since 2022, 69 percent are now employed and pay more in taxes than they receive in social support.

The Ukrainian Embassy in Washington DC welcomed the report’s findings. “This study highlights a reality often overlooked, that Ukrainian-American founded businesses in the US are driving local growth and job creation while serving as trusted partners for America’s engagement in Ukraine’s recovery,” said Ihor Baranetskyi, Minister-Counsellor for Economic Issues. “They understand both markets and are uniquely positioned to channel US capital and technology into Ukraine’s reconstruction, advancing prosperity and security for both nations.”

Melinda Haring is a senior advisor at Razom for Ukraine and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center.

Ukraine’s drone war lesson for Europe: Technology is nothing without training

David Kirichenko — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 00:47:02 +0000

As Europe races to strengthen its defenses against the mounting threat posed by Russian drones, more and more countries are looking to learn from Ukraine’s experience. Speaking in October, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen acknowledged that Ukraine is currently a world leader in drone warfare and called on her European colleagues to “take all the experiences, all the new technology, all the innovation from Ukraine, and put it into our own rearming.”

It is clear that Europe has much to learn. A spate of suspected Russian drone incursions during the second half of 2025 have highlighted the continent’s vulnerability to drone-based aggression and raised fundamental questions over whether European armies are currently preparing for the wrong kind of war. While Europe’s rearmament efforts continue to gain ground, even big spenders like Poland remain focused primarily on traditional weapons systems. This is fueling concerns that European defense policymakers may not fully appreciate the growing dominance of drones on the battlefields of Ukraine.

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Ukraine’s embrace of drone warfare since 2022 can provide Kyiv’s partners with a wide range of important insights. Following the onset of Russia’s full-scale invasion almost four years ago, Ukraine has turned to relatively cheap drone technologies in order to offset Moscow’s often overwhelming advantages in conventional firepower and reduce the country’s dependence on Western weapons supplies. As a result, the number of Ukrainian drone producers has skyrocketed from a handful of companies to hundreds, while overall drone output has shot up to millions of units per year.

Ukraine’s vibrant prewar tech sector has proved a major asset, serving as fertile ground for the dynamic expansion of the country’s defense sector. Meanwhile, Ukrainian initiatives like the government-backed Brave1 defense tech cluster have helped to empower innovators and optimize cooperation between the army, the state, and individual drone producers. In summer 2024, Ukraine became the first country to establish a separate branch of the military dedicated to drones with the launch of the Unmanned Systems Forces.

The results speak for themselves. Drones are now thought to be responsible for up to three-quarters of Russian battlefield casualties, with Ukrainian army units creating a “drone wall” around ten kilometers in depth along the front lines of the war. At sea, Ukraine has used naval drones to break the Russian blockade of the country’s ports and force Putin to withdraw the bulk of his fleet away from occupied Crimea to the relative safety of Novorossiysk on Russia’s Black Sea coast. Kyiv has also deployed an expanding arsenal of long-range drones to strike high-value targets with increasing frequency deep inside Russia.

In addition to these offensive roles, drones have become a vital element in Ukraine’s air defenses. Since 2024, Russia has dramatically increased the production of kamikaze bomber drones, making it possible to launch hundreds of drones at targets across Ukraine in a single night. The sheer scale of these attacks has meant that traditional missile-based air defenses are no longer practical due to the high cost and limited availability of interceptor missiles. Instead, Ukrainian defense companies have focused on developing and producing interceptor drones in large quantities.

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So far, European efforts to learn from Ukraine’s drone warfare experience have concentrated primarily on securing access to the latest Ukrainian drone innovations. This approach certainly makes sense. However, many Ukrainian specialists have stressed that as their European partners look to develop drone capabilities of their own, effective training programs will be just as important as advanced technologies.

Maria Berlinska, who heads Ukraine’s Victory Drones project, has argued that up to 90 percent of success in drone warfare depends on the training of the team behind the drone rather than the technology involved. “A drone on its own, without the coordinated work of the team, delivers nothing,” she commented in an October 2025 article addressing the need for skilled drone crews.

Training an effective drone pilot is a complex task that can take at least three months. Many categories of drone operators must also be able to act as engineers and mechanics with the ability to repair and reconfigure their systems in the field. To help meet this challenge, Ukraine has developed a strong network of volunteer organizations dedicated to training new drone pilots and preparing them for combat operations. By late 2024, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense had certified over thirty training centers for drone operators. Novel innovations include a mobile drone school located inside a converted bus.

Speaking to Euronews in October, Ukrainian drone warfare expert Fedir Serdiuk warned that Europe was currently focusing too much on drone technologies while overlooking the need to train operators and commanders in the effective battlefield use of drones. “I don’t see as many training centers being built as factories. It’s a major mistake. Not only for technical skills but also for tactical skills,” he commented.

Ukraine appears poised to play a central part in the training of Europe’s drone forces. Ukrainian trainers have already reportedly begun sharing their expertise with a number of countries including Britain, Denmark, and Poland. This trend reflects an important eastward shift in Europe’s defense landscape, with Ukraine emerging as a key contributor to the continent’s future security. This contribution will draw heavily on technological innovations developed during the war with Russia, but it will also emphasize the importance of effective training.

David Kirichenko is an associate research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society.

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Jolie’s visit struck a chord with the Ukrainian public at a time when concerns are mounting that the country’s fight for national survival is slipping out of the international headlines. With the fourth anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion now approaching, Ukrainians are painfully aware that global audiences have become jaded by endless war coverage and are now no longer shocked or even particularly surprised by reports of fresh Russian war crimes. The high-profile actor’s decision to personally visit some of the most dangerous places in Ukraine was therefore welcomed as a particularly timely and meaningful gesture.

Many Ukrainians praised Jolie for exposing herself to considerable risk in cities that few international guests dare to visit. “Much respect and many thanks for your kind heart, Angelina Jolie!” commented the deputy speaker of the Ukrainian parliament Olena Kondratiuk. “Angelina Jolie went to Kherson, where Russian drones hunt civilians daily. That takes courage,” wrote Ukrainian journalist Svitlana Morenets. “I can’t help but praise her selflessness and kindness in choosing to help draw attention to Ukrainian civilians, especially children, suffering from the war.”

Ukrainian human rights lawyer and Nobel Laureate Oleksandra Matviichuk called Jolie “one of Hollywood’s bravest hearts” and expressed her hope that press and social media coverage of the star’s trip could help educate international audiences about “the cynical drone safaris on civilians that the Russians love to do.” Fellow Ukrainian civil society activist Olena Tregub said she had been personally moved by Jolie’s visit and noted that it sent a “powerful message” to the local population that they have not been forgotten.

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Angelina Jolie is not alone in attempting to focus international attention on Russia’s ‘human safari’ tactics in Ukraine. A United Nations probe recently addressed the issue and confirmed that the Russian military is purposely targeting Ukrainian civilians in a coordinated campaign of drone killings with the aim of depopulating large parts of the country. In an October report by the UN Human Rights Council-appointed Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine, investigators concluded that Russia’s actions in southern Ukraine amount to the crimes against humanity of “murder and of forcible transfer of population.”

The UN investigation covered Russian drone activity across three provinces of southern Ukraine including the regions visited by Jolie. It found evidence of systematic attacks against civilians including drone strikes on pedestrians, public transport, essential infrastructure, and emergency services workers, leading to the deaths of at least 200 people since July 2024. As a result of this relentless and coordinated bombing campaign, some of the targeted areas are now said to be “almost entirely vacated.” Crucially, the drones used in these attacks all featured video cameras allowing operators to methodically select and track victims, leaving no room for doubt regarding the deliberate nature of the killings.

Russia stands accused of committing a staggering quantity of war crimes in Ukraine, ranging from the destruction of entire towns and cities and the bombing of vital civilian infrastructure, to the mass detention Ukrainian citizens and the torture of prisoners. The International Criminal Court in The Hague has issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin on war crimes charges for his personal involvement in the mass abduction and indoctrination of Ukrainian children, which may qualify as an act of genocide.

So far, there has been little concrete progress toward holding Russia legally accountable for the invasion. Ukraine and the Council of Europe signed an agreement in summer 2025 to establish a special tribunal, but is remains unclear when further steps can be expected. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has signaled that the United States will no longer back international efforts to prosecute Putin. Despite these setbacks, Russia’s ‘human safari’ is worthy of special attention as it provides such conclusive proof of the Kremlin’s intention to kill Ukrainian civilians.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is an attempt to shatter the existing international order and rewrite the rules of war. If Western leaders fail to impose additional costs on the Kremlin over the deliberate use of drones to hunt down civilian populations, this will set a potentially disastrous precedent that could soon be extended to the rest of Ukraine and beyond. Angelina Jolie’s efforts to highlight this crime against humanity will not prove decisive, but her celebrity intervention has at least made it more difficult for others to claim they did not know.

Peter Dickinson is editor of the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert service.

The Kremlin dictator is particularly fond of showcasing new weapons with nuclear capabilities. In late October, Putin announced the successful testing of the nuclear-powered and nuclear-capable Burevestnik missile. “This is a unique product that nobody else in the world has,” he commented. Days later, Putin hailed the similarly successful testing of the Poseidon drone, an atomic-powered and nuclear-capable underwater weapon. He trumpeted the Poseidon’s supposedly unmatched capabilities and stated that “there is no way to intercept it.”

It is impossible to independently assess the veracity of Putin’s claims or confirm the effectiveness of his latest alleged “wonder weapons.” Many have noted that neither weapon is entirely new, with the development of both being first announced back in 2018. In reality, the timing of these alleged tests is probably far more significant that the weapons themselves, and reflects Russia’s desire to engage in yet more nuclear saber-rattling.

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Russia’s latest bout of nuclear posturing reveals much about Moscow’s frustration over continued Western support for Ukraine, and is likely a direct response to strong energy sector sanctions imposed in recent weeks by US President Donald Trump. It is a tactic that could eventually backfire on the Kremlin. By threatening to renew nuclear tests and boasting of unstoppable nuclear-capable wonder weapons, Putin risks highlighting Russia’s inability to project strength via more conventional means. In other words, the Kremlin dictator’s increasingly frequent use of nuclear blackmail may actually be a sign of weakness rather than strength.

Like a geopolitical gangster, Putin has come to rely on Mafia-style intimidation tactics as he seeks to reassert Russia’s great power status amid mounting evidence of his country’s steadily eroding military capabilities. Putin’s nuclear threats are at least in part an attempt to distract attention from the lackluster performance of the Russian army in Ukraine. While Russian forces currently hold the battlefield initiative and continue to advance, they have only managed to seize around one percent of Ukrainian territory over the past three years while suffering exceptionally high losses. This underwhelming outcome led Trump to brand Russia a “paper tiger” in September. The insult is believed to have struck a particularly raw nerve with Putin.

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By brandishing his nuclear arsenal on the international stage, Putin aims to menace risk-averse Western leaders and deter them from opposing Russia in Ukraine. He also hopes to underline that victory over Ukraine remains Moscow’s overriding goal. Putin seeks to demonstrate his readiness to prioritize this quest for victory above all other considerations, including the nuclear deterrence system established over decades by Russia and the United States.

So far, Trump has offered a fairly robust reaction to Russia’s nuclear saber-rattling. This has included ordering US nuclear submarines to be moved closer to Russia in response to “provocative statements,” and indicating a readiness to resume nuclear testing “on an equal basis.” The US leader’s stance is a welcome sign that he is no longer easily swayed by Putin’s dramatics and recognizes the dangers of allowing himself to be intimidated.

Other Western leaders should now follow Trump’s example and acknowledge that the only way to bring Putin’s reckless nuclear blackmail to an end is by demonstrating resolve and reviving deterrence. This must include regenerating sufficient European and American conventional forces to deter Russia from attacking its neighbors. In parallel, sanctions on Putin’s war economy should be tightened, while Ukraine must finally be provided with the weapons its needs to defeat Russia’s invasion.

Nobody can afford to to take the risk of nuclear war lightly, of course. Nevertheless, it is unfortunately necessary to remind the Kremlin that Russia is not the only country with a nuclear arsenal. Genuine conventional and nuclear deterrence must be restored to deprive gamblers like Putin of the ability, let alone the desire, to employ nuclear blackmail in order to enable further acts of international aggression. Unless this is achieved, Putin will continue to use nuclear threats as a tool to intimidate his opponents and disguise Russian weakness.

Stephen Blank is a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

Ukraine’s youth exodus highlights mounting demographic challenges

Kateryna Odarchenko, Zoryana Golovata — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 20:26:31 +0000

A large number of young Ukrainian men have left the country in the past two months following an August 2025 decision allowing males aged between eighteen and twenty-two to travel internationally. While there are no exact figures confirming how many men have exited, the exodus has sparked a lively debate within Ukrainian society and added to existing concerns over the deteriorating demographic situation in wartime Ukraine.

With millions of Ukrainians crossing the border in both directions each week, it is difficult to gain a clear sense of the recent surge in young men traveling abroad. Britain’s Daily Telegraph reported in late October that almost one hundred thousand Ukrainian males in the eighteen to twenty-two age bracket had entered Poland during the previous two months. Meanwhile, Germany’s Interior Ministry noted that the number of young Ukrainian men registering in the country had risen tenfold from around one hundred per week to almost a thousand.

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With men younger than twenty-five not currently subject to mobilization by the Ukrainian military, the recent outflow has been primarily felt in the employment sector. Since the relaxation of martial law travel restrictions in August, many labor-intensive industries that have traditionally relied on large numbers of young employees have reported a sharp decline in the workforce.

Ukraine’s low birth rates and high levels of economic migration meant that the country was already experiencing mounting labor shortages prior to 2022. Following the onset of Russia’s full-scale invasion, these demographic challenges have become far more acute, with millions displaced internally or crossing the border into the European Union. A 2024 survey conducted by Ukraine’s European Business Association found that 71 percent of companies were experiencing significant workforce deficits.

Ukrainian companies are responding to these new recruitment realities in a variety of ways. With hundreds of thousands of men now serving in the military, more and more women are being recruited to take on professional roles traditionally occupied by males. In an August 2024 article highlighting this employment trend, the New York Times claimed that the unprecedented wartime influx of women was “reshaping Ukraine’s traditionally male-dominated workforce, which experts say has long been marked by biases inherited from the Soviet Union.”

There has also been increased focus on retraining opportunities and vocational programs as business owners and educational institutions seeks to fill gaps in the workforce. With current shortages most severe in skilled blue collar professions, many of these training initiatives are geared toward producing candidates with the skills to address immediate shortages in strategically important sectors of the economy. According to Ukraine’s State Employment Service, the industries experiencing the largest shortfalls include construction, manufacturing, and transportation.

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In the Ukrainian retail sector, some companies are turning to teenagers and seeking to employ those aged fifteen to seventeen during vacation periods and after school hours. This trend is expected to gain momentum as employers search for practical solutions to staffing shortages. As a result, large numbers of Ukrainian teens may now be set to gain an unprecedented degree of economic independence, with possible knock-on effects for the job market and beyond.

Nobody currently anticipates a wave of returning Ukrainian refugees anytime soon. Instead, Ukrainians living in the EU are now widely recognized as an economic asset for their host countries. Research conducted in summer 2025 for the UN Refugee Agency found that Ukrainian refugees living in Poland generate around 2.7 percent of Polish GDP. “All evidence shows that Ukrainian refugees will continue having a positive economic impact while they remain in Poland, vastly outstripping the cost of any support they received,” the report concluded.

As the wartime Ukrainian diaspora becomes increasingly well established in the European Union, fewer and fewer refugees will seek to relocate back to Ukraine. At the same time, however, many of those living and working abroad continue to maintain strong ties with friends and relatives in their home country. These transnational networks are often led by Ukrainian women. They serve as an informal but importance source of economic support for families separated by the war and those based in Ukraine.

Ukraine’s demographic challenges were present long before Russia’s full-scale invasion, but the outlook has worsened significantly as a result of the war. Addressing these challenges will require coordinated efforts to integrate young Ukrainians into the workforce, mobilize underutilized labor, provide more opportunities for vocational training, and take steps to support return migration. For now, the Ukrainian labor market reflects the harsh realities of the Russian invasion, while also highlighting the resilience, resourcefulness, and ingenuity of the Ukrainian population.

Kateryna Odarchenko is a partner at SIC Group USA and president of the PolitA Institute for Democracy and Development. Zoryana Golovata is head of the Expert Group on Cognitive Management at the Ukrainian Political Science Association and founder of Women’s Voice in Action, focusing on economic resilience and mental health recovery for women in wartime Ukraine.

Ukraine’s cyber defense is critical to international security and the stability of the global digital environment. As a testing ground for Russian cyber tools, Ukraine faces attacks that, once refined, can be directed against allied governments, critical infrastructure, and private sector entities. The question is not whether such attacks will occur, but when this will happen, how costly these attacks will be, and how quickly recovery can be achieved.

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Unlike conventional warfare, cyberspace has no borders. A criminal or adversary can strike targets in Kyiv, Washington, or New York with equal ease. Sustained collaboration between Ukrainian, United States, and allied cyber specialists is therefore critical, especially given the escalating cyber threat posed by China, North Korea, Iran, Belarus, and their state-backed proxy groups.

Despite the growing threat, institutional capabilities for a coordinated response by Ukraine, Europe, the US, and other allies are still underdeveloped. The NIS2 Directive, the legal framework that sets minimum cyber security standards across the EU, was an important step toward increasing coordination around risk management, threat sharing, and supply chain security. However, the process of building a dynamic cyber defense coalition has been slow, given the large number of jurisdictions in Europe.

To compound these challenges, Western governments have often been hesitant to share sensitive information with Ukrainian counterparts, or even with each other. Thankfully, there are measures that can be adopted to offer more effective support to Ukraine while still safeguarding classified information. These include sharing tiered or sanitized intelligence reports, conducting joint cyber security operations, and expanding advisory access to expertise. Sustained knowledge exchange, international assistance, and cooperative engagement remain essential to countering the breadth and sophistication of Russian cyber operations.

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Ukraine’s experience highlights the importance of increased investment in critical infrastructure protection. Since 2014, Russia has repeatedly targeted Ukraine’s critical infrastructure with cyber offensives designed to disrupt vital services. The cyber defense of these assets is highly specialized and requires specific strategies.

Cooperation between the public and private sectors is crucial in the fight against Russian cyber warfare. Civilian engagement and private sector partnerships have played important roles in Ukraine’s cyber defense, with both groups filling gaps that government and military structures cannot fully cover, especially under conditions of relentless hybrid warfare. However, there are a number of problematic related issues that need to be resolved.

One of the most difficult topics in terms of legislation is the issue of cyber volunteers. Ukrainian initiatives such as the IT Army have shown that civilians are prepared to work long hours to protect their country. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s private sector and international companies have provided a multi-layered defense by combining technical expertise, rapid incident response, and coordination with state authorities and civilian volunteers.

These contributions have proved vital in the struggle to preserve Ukraine’s digital sovereignty, protect citizens, and support the broader war effort. But many questions remain. How can large numbers of volunteers be effectively vetted? How should they be organized, when in many cases they are not cyber security specialists? Who should lead? Do volunteer cyber defenders become legitimate military targets? One solution could be to formalize a framework for civil-military-tech collaboration integrating vetted civilian volunteers with appropriate oversight.

There is a strong case for strengthening sanctions against Russia’s IT sector. Sanctions already play a critical role in constraining the Kremlin’s offensive cyber capabilities, but additional measures could further limit access to advanced technologies and signal the risks of collaboration with sanctioned entities, thereby reducing opportunities for knowledge transfer.

Potential measures include technology export bans, targeted entity designations, secondary sanctions, restrictions on software and cloud services, limitations on talent pipelines, and the financial isolation of IT firms. Implemented multilaterally, these steps could weaken Russia’s ability to innovate in cyber warfare, increase the Kremlin’s reliance on less advanced domestic technologies, and raise the cost of sustaining long-term cyber operations against Ukraine and its allies.

Finally, it is important to underscore that people remain the central element of effective cyber defense. Even with regular training designed to strengthen the skills of cyber defenders, individuals remain vulnerable to cyber fraud and social engineering techniques. Addressing these risks requires not only technical safeguards but also robust organizational policies and a sustained commitment to individual vigilance. Continuous awareness, preparedness, and adaptability are therefore essential components of a comprehensive cyber security posture.

Dr. Oleksandr Bakalinskyi is a Senior Researcher at the G. E. Pukhov Institute for Modeling in Energy Engineering at the National Academy of Sciences in Ukraine. Maggie McDonough is currently affiliated with the Center for Education & Research in Information Assurance and Security at Purdue University, where she serves as a technical advisor on global cyber security resilience programming.

EU praises Ukraine’s progress but warns Zelenskyy over corruption

Peter Dickinson — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 22:01:55 +0000

Ukraine’s bid to join the European Union received a boost this week with the release of an annual assessment praising the war-torn country’s progress toward future membership. The European Commission’s yearly overview of potential future EU members identified Ukraine as one of the best performers among ten candidate countries, acknowledging advances made by Kyiv in a number of reform areas including public administration, democratic institutions, rule of law, and the rights of national minorities. “Despite Russia’s unrelenting war of aggression, Ukraine remains strongly committed to its EU accession path, having successfully completed the screening process and advanced on key reforms,” the report noted.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy welcomed this positive appraisal of his country’s efforts and said the European Commission report confirmed that Ukraine “is confidently moving toward EU membership.” It was not all good news for the Ukrainian leader, however. EU officials also raised concerns over Zelenskyy’s domestic policies amid mounting allegations of backsliding in Kyiv on core anti-corruption reforms that are widely regarded as vital for Ukraine’s further European integration. “Recent negative trends, including pressure on the specialized anti-corruption agencies and civil society, must be decisively reversed,” the annual accession review underlined.

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The criticism currently being leveled at the Ukrainian authorities in Brussels is not entirely unexpected. In July 2025, Zelenskyy stunned Ukraine’s Western allies and sparked domestic outrage by backing a controversial parliamentary bill that was widely interpreted as an attempt to end the independence of the country’s anti-corruption agencies.

The scandal provoked Ukraine’s largest street protests since the onset of Russia’s full-scale invasion, with thousands of Ukrainians braving possible Russian bombardment to rally in cities across the country against Zelenskyy’s apparent power grab. Kyiv’s partners were also quick to voice their alarm and signal that the move could put future international support for the Ukrainian war effort at risk.

Faced with overwhelming opposition at home and anger in key foreign capitals, Zelenskyy quickly backed down and reversed efforts to assert control over Ukraine’s anti-corruption institutions. Nevertheless, this week’s European Commission Enlargement Report has highlighted the lingering damage done by this brief and entirely self-inflicted crisis to the Ukrainian leader’s credibility.

Nor is this the only fly in the ointment. In addition to his headline-grabbing summer 2025 U-turn over Ukraine’s anti-corruption reforms, Zelenskyy is also facing accusations from political opponents and civil society representatives of using lawfare to silence critics and consolidate power in his own hands. This is not a good look for a man who has sought to position himself as one of the leaders of the democratic world.

Zelenskyy has pushed back hard against his critics. He has pointed to Ukraine’s unprecedented success in meeting EU accession targets amid extremely challenging wartime conditions, while underlining the scale of his country’s anti-corruption reforms. “We have implemented the widest, the broadest anti-corruption infrastructure in Europe. I don’t know about any country that has as many anti-corruption authorities,” he commented in response to this week’s report. “We are doing everything possible.”

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For the time being, any disquiet over Zelenskyy’s anti-corruption credentials is unlikely to derail Ukraine’s EU membership momentum. While there is no agreement on how soon Ukraine can expect to join, the country’s eventual accession is now viewed in most European capitals as crucial for the continent’s future stability and security.

Ukrainian aspirations to join the EU first began to take shape in the wake of the country’s 2004 Orange Revolution, leading to years of meandering negotiations over a possible Association Agreement between Kyiv and Brussels. When this document was finally ready to be signed in 2013, Russia intervened and pressured the Ukrainian authorities to reject the deal. This led directly to a second Ukrainian revolution and the fall of the country’s pro-Kremlin government.

With Moscow’s efforts to thwart Ukraine’s European integration rapidly unraveling, Russian President Vladimir Putin chose to escalate and launched the invasion of Crimea in February 2014. This watershed moment marked the start of Russian armed aggression against Ukraine. Following the seizure of the Crimean peninsula, Moscow established Kremlin-controlled “separatist republics” in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region. When this limited Russian military intervention failed to derail Ukraine’s EU ambitions, Putin raised the stakes further with the full-scale invasion of 2022.

As Russian aggression has escalated, Ukrainian public support for EU membership has increased and opposition has withered away. An issue that once divided Ukrainians fairly evenly now unites the nation. This is hardly surprising. For millions of Ukrainians, the quest to join the EU has become synonymous with the country’s civilizational choice of European democracy over Russian autocracy.

Zelenskyy would be well advised to keep this in mind as he seeks to balance domestic political considerations with Ukraine’s EU aspirations and the urgent need to maintain international support for the war effort. Ukrainians have made staggering sacrifices along the road toward EU membership and will not take kindly to anyone who places this progress in jeopardy. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s EU integration currently enjoys strong public and political support across Europe, but backsliding on core values could still undermine Kyiv’s case and provide fuel for Russia as it seeks to discredit Ukraine and prevent the country’s historic exit from the Kremlin orbit.

Peter Dickinson is editor of the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert service.

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A number of legislative complexities will need to be addressed during negotiations to determine the final version of the ban, with talks expected to continue into next year. The European Commission published the first draft of the phaseout roadmap for imports of Russian pipeline and liquefied natural gas during summer 2025. The document stipulated that short-term contracts of less than a year would be discontinued in 2026, while longer-term contracts would be terminated by January 2028.

The draft proposal raised some eyebrows, particularly due to the introduction of an article suggesting that the ban could be temporarily lifted in case of market emergencies. Contrary to expectations, the clause was not pushed through by Hungary and Slovakia, the EU’s most Kremlin-friendly Russian gas buyers. Instead, it was introduced under pressure from Spain, where several companies still hold long-term LNG import contracts with Russian producers.

The text has been reviewed by both the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers, with the former pushing for even more ambitious terms. For example, MEPs would like to see all imports terminated by 2027, a year earlier than initially stated by the European Commission. They also insist on closing loopholes by targeting circumvention risks.

The draft version adopted by the Council of Ministers aligns to a large degree with the version circulated by the European Commission and continues to include an emergency brake. The final text will have to be negotiated as part of talks involving the European Parliament, Council of Ministers, and European Commission.

To further complicate matters, the EU recently adopted its nineteenth Russian sanctions package, which includes a ban on Russian LNG imports from 2027, a year earlier than the deadline proposed by the EU’s own phaseout roadmap. This fast-tracked LNG ban was likely introduced in response to pressure from US President Donald Trump, who has singled out Europe for continuing to buy Russian fossil fuels.

While this sanctions-mandated ban may lead to an earlier block on Russian LNG exports, many observers fear that it is insufficiently robust and could be overturned, since EU sanctions are up for review every six months and require unanimous backing in order to be extended. This means the fast-tracked LNG ban could be vulnerable to opposition from any individual EU member.

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While the legislative path toward a full EU ban on Russian gas imports remains long and complex, enforcement may prove even more difficult. The ban enjoys strong political backing across Europe, but there are widespread concerns that the Kremlin will try to identify potential loopholes to evade the ban.

Russian gas is currently exported to Europe via the Black Sea and Turkey, using a dedicated pipeline transporting the gas to the Balkans and Hungary. The EU has included this entry point in legislation and notes that flows must stop from 2028, but Russian gas arriving in Turkey via an interconnection point nearby could be relabelled and sold under a different name. The risk of relabelling Russian gas also extends to the entire bloc because there are still a number of companies with large import portfolios which hold long-term LNG contracts with Russian producers.

Regulations related to the enforcement of the EU ban, including penalties for potential breaches, will need to be reviewed and tightened up. Existing EU proposals may not be sufficient, while it is still unclear how violations will be penalised. This must be addressed in order to deter non-compliance.

EU officials are well aware that Moscow will fight efforts to exclude it from lucrative European markets. Deprived of fossil fuel revenue and with its economy facing mounting difficulties, the Kremlin will seek any opportunity to continue selling oil and gas to Europe. Allowing loopholes to remain could create large grey areas in European energy markets that would fuel Russia’s war in Ukraine and allow the Kremlin to retain leverage over Europe.

Dr. Aura Sabadus is a senior energy journalist who writes about Eastern Europe, Turkey, and Ukraine for Independent Commodity Intelligence Services (ICIS), a London-based global energy and petrochemicals news and market data provider. Her views are her own.

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The mobilization issue has been exacerbated by President Zelenskyy’s reluctance to lower the age for compulsory military service from twenty-five to eighteen. This has led to criticism from Ukraine’s Western partners, who have argued that it is unrealistic to wage a major war while exempting so many young Ukrainians from mobilization. Rather than take the politically dangerous decision to reduce the conscription age, Zelenskyy has backed an incentive scheme to attract volunteers in the eighteen to twenty-five age bracket. However, the initiative has so far failed to fill the gaps in Ukraine’s decimated front line units.

The recent decision to lift international travel restrictions on young Ukrainian men aged eighteen to twenty-two has further complicated Ukraine’s manpower problems. Around 100,000 Ukrainian males have left the country since restrictions were eased around two months ago, Britain’s Daily Telegraph reports. This exodus deprives the country of potential future army recruits and has created a range of more immediate personnel issues that are already reverberating throughout the Ukrainian economy. While some of these men may plan on returning to Ukraine, experience since 2022 suggests that many will seek to settle elsewhere in the European Union.

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Moscow is also facing difficulties replenishing its invasion force amid catastrophic losses in Ukraine that dwarf the death toll from every other Kremlin war since 1945. Putin initially sought to address this problem by launching a partial mobilization in September 2022, but the move proved hugely unpopular and led to around one million young Russians fleeing the country. Instead, the Kremlin has introduced a system a lavish financial incentives including huge enlistment bounties and generous monthly salaries in order to attract volunteers willing to join the invasion of Ukraine. While it has proved necessary to repeatedly increase the sums on offer, this approach has made it possible to secure around thirty thousand new recruits per month.

Based on the current trajectory of the war, Russia’s manpower advantage over Ukraine will only grow wider during the coming year. This is already making itself on the battlefield, with Russian forces exploiting gaps in Ukraine’s defenses along the more than one thousand kilometers of front line and edging forward at multiple points. While Putin’s troops have so far been unable to achieve any major breakthroughs, Russia’s territorial gains are slowly but surely adding up.

The most intensive fighting is currently taking place in the Donetsk region as Russia seeks to complete the capture of Pokrovsk. If Putin’s commanders succeed in taking the city, it will be seen by many as vindication of the Kremlin strategy to grind out victory by relying on the sheer size of the Russian army. Putin has long believed that he can win the war by outlasting the West and overwhelming Ukraine. He will view Kyiv’s increasingly evident infantry shortage as a strong indication that time is on his side.

For Zelenskyy, there are no easy options. Lowering the mobilization age would generate a new wave of recruits but could also pose a significant threat to Ukrainian national morale. Reforming the terms of military service to provide greater rotation guarantees while also adopting a more meritocratic approach to the appointment of army commanders may help restore flagging public confidence and attract more volunteers, but this would take time that Ukraine quite frankly no longer possesses.

For now, the battle-hardened but exhausted and outnumbered Ukrainian army has little choice but to remain in a defensive posture. Ukraine’s commanders must be prepared to cede ground when necessary in order to preserve precious fighting strength, while looking for opportunities to maximize enemy casualties. The goal should be to withstand the Russian onslaught until a combination of punishing front line losses, escalating long-range strikes inside Russia, and deepening economic woes finally forces Putin to the negotiating table.

Peter Dickinson is editor of the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert service.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen echoed Nausėda’s comments and expressed solidarity with Lithuania, calling the Belarusian balloons a “hybrid threat” that Europe will not tolerate. She linked the issue to the European Union’s broader push for enhanced military readiness, particularly in terms of airspace defense capabilities against the growing threat posed by Russian drones and aircraft.

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Belarusian dictator Alyaksandr Lukashenka has dismissed European concerns and attacked the Lithuanian decision to close the border as a “crazy scam,” while also accusing the West of waging a hybrid war against Belarus and Russia. His denials lack credibility, however, given the recent spate of airspace violations across Europe and along the EU’s eastern frontier with Russia and Belarus.

Around twenty Russian drones penetrated Polish airspace in early September, leading to an unprecedented armed response from NATO jets. Some of the Russian drones entered Poland via Belarus, highlighting Minsk’s role in Moscow’s campaign of hybrid aggression. Days later, a small group of Russian fighters violated NATO airspace off the coast of Estonia.

There have also been numerous incidents over the past two months involving suspected Russian drones close to strategic sites throughout Europe including military bases and international airports. Speaking in September, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen claimed the drone incursions were part of a Russian hybrid war and said Europe was facing its “most difficult and dangerous situation” since the end of World War II.

European airspace violations serve a number of purposes for Putin and his Belarusian proxy. In practical terms, they allow the Kremlin to probe NATO defenses and test the alliance’s readiness to combat incursions. Russian drones and Belarusian balloons also inconvenience the European public and intimidate European leaders at a time when the continent is already increasingly alarmed by US President Donald Trump’s mixed messaging over America’s commitment to European security.

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In response to Lithuania’s border closure, Lukashenka has warned that he may now stop cooperating with Brussels on migration issues. Given his regime’s well-documented prior weaponization of migrants on the Belarusian border with the European Union, this is a very thinly-veiled threat.

At the same time, the Belarusian ruler is also attempting to engage in renewed outreach to the West, with a particular emphasis on the US. Lukashenka has held a number of meetings with United States officials in recent months, leading to the release of political prisoners held by Belarus and an easing of American sanctions against Belarusian national airline Belavia.

This apparent thaw has been hailed in Washington as a sign of progress, but not everyone is convinced. Human rights groups have identified 77 new political prisoners in Belarus during September 2025, more than the total number of detainees freed in US-brokered releases since the start of the year. In other words, it would appear that Lukashenka is seeking sanctions relief without committing to end repressive policies at home and while continuing to serve Moscow’s strategic interests.

The Trump administration has signaled its dissatisfaction over recent Belarusian balloon violations of Lithuanian airspace. “I made clear we stand in solidarity with Lithuania amidst recent balloon incursions. Belarus should prevent further such incidents,” commented US Special Envoy John Coale, who has been directly involved in this year’s talks with the Lukashenka regime.

Growing tensions on the Lithuanian border with Belarus should serve as further confirmation that Lukashenka remains fully committed to participating in Russia’s confrontation with the West. Belarusian balloon violations of EU airspace are part of a Kremlin-led campaign to test Western resolve, strain NATO solidarity, and intimidate Europe. As long as Lukashenka continues to play a supporting role in Putin’s hybrid war against the West, he should be regarded as an adversary.

Hanna Liubakova is a journalist from Belarus and nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.

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Putin is counting on Western disunity to hand him victory in Ukraine

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