One of Ukraine’s small and cheap but highly effective designs of anti-Shaheed drone.

The Easter ceasefire is over, and the fighting has resumed where it left off.  It left off at a very interesting point.  Something almost impossible to credit is taking shape in Ukraine.  Its potential seems wholly at odds with the narrative of Russian inevitability which we have grown used to hearing from Moscow and its allies, including the White House and the State Department.  Yet it hasn’t come out of nowhere.  By the second-half of last year it was already apparent that Moscow could not bring to bear sufficient military force to realise its maximalist aims.  Far from granting an inevitable victory as the adversary with the larger economy and population, the favoured Russian strategy of attrition was not producing the expected results.  Then, as winter set in, Russia’s employment of unmanned aerial warfare in the form of terror attacks on Ukrainian civilians and on civilian power generation targets likewise did not yield the expected general demoralisation of the Ukrainian people and the sapping of their war-will.

This characteristically crude twin approach was failing because the Ukrainian command (a) avoided the meat-grinder tactic by giving-up territory when necessary to preserve Ukrainian soldiers’ lives, and (b) found ways to nullify the most effective weapon the Russian forces could deploy on the contact line, the glide bomb or KAB.  The Ukrainian strategy throughout 2025 was to bleed the enemy while conducting deep strikes against Russian military-industrial and economic targets (the most famous of which was Operation Spiderweb, of course).  Though effective enough to slow the Russian advance to a snail’s pace, it was still only a containing measure.  But with the turn of the new year that began to change.  There was a step-change in Ukrainian tactical capacity involving more sophisticated, more integrated, and more numerous drones.  The term “drone swarm” became a reality.

At the same time an extraordinary array of new Ukrainian short-range, surveillance, and cruise weapons began arriving in theatre, much of it enhanced by unjammable AI.  Over three hundred AI-related developments are registered with Brave1, Ukraine’s centralized defense-tech platform platform.  More than seventy systems based on AI and computer vision are already in active use on the battlefield.  On top of all that a ballistic weapon is undergoing live combat trials.  A home-grown Patriot missile replacement is now planned.  The pace of innovation is staggering.

All taken together, the Russian rear, which reaches between fifteen and sixty miles behind the contact line, is now under sustained pressure.  Russian forces can’t effectively organise because the logistics can’t be secured, particularly given that four hundred and ninety-two Russian air defense systems were recorded destroyed between June last year and early March this year.  Add the loss of Starlink and the Telegram shut-down and those difficulties are greatly compounded.  Moreover, new Ukrainian weapons are striking ports, pumping stations, oil storage depots, and pipelines.  Some targets are over 1000 kilometres away from the fighting.  With or without US sanctions Moscow can’t earn what it needs to pay for its war.

The next major Ukrainian development on the battlefield is the most significant of all.  It’s ground robotics, first introduced by Ukraine in trial numbers as early as 2023.  They were then introduced systematically and on an ever widening scale.  The current range of mostly FPV fibre-optic machines are already far in advance of Russia’s efforts, and have been undertaking a variety of support actions - 22,000 in the first quarter of 2026 according to Zelensky.  These include autonomous combat missions.  Again the pace of development has been frenetic.  Subject to the challenges of scaling up manufacture, they have the potential to resolve Ukraine’s structural disadvantage in manpower.  Commercially, the global sales potential of these systems is vast, and are likely to play a significant role in the reconstruction of the Ukrainian economy.  Here is the excellent Paul Warburg explaining both the military and economy potential of these systems:

The upshot of Ukraine’s drone development has been threefold.  First, the Russian Spring offensive has been nullified.  It is already a failure.  Russian casualties have reached the point where more soldiers are being taken out of the fight than Moscow can recruit.  Far from being pushed further back, Ukrainian forces are actually advancing in four areas.  A sense of foreboding is setting in among Russian milbloggers.  As the Kiev Post reports:

Some pro-Russian bloggers are predicting the situation will worsen. Oleg Tsaryov, a political scientist born in Ukraine who joined Russia’s first invasion in 2014, in a Wednesday review of the situation on the front, said the next Ukrainian drone upgrade will be bigger swarms.

“A lot has changed. The Ukrainians said they would significantly increase the number of drones at the front…they have managed to achieve much of what they set out to do…Ukraine has managed to double the number of drones it uses to strike our rear areas. We can see it…according to the military, that’s the situation on the front line is similar…and according to the information we see from Ukraine, right now their production capacity is at 30%, notwithstanding all the drones they produce,” Tsayrov said.“This [the way Ukraine is manufacturing drones] doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world. It’s cutting-edge. This is where we come up short,” he said.

Second, Donald Trump’s precipitate action in Iran has made very public the IRGC’s exact drone and missile capabilities, which are not inconsiderable. The Saudis and the Gulf States along with the Europeans have also now witnessed modern assymetric warfare, which is making redundant the old model of high cost machinery and the doctrine of force concentration.  Both the Ukrainian success against Russian armour and their daily experience of drone and missile bombardment offer powerful commercial arguments for the extraordinary innovativeness of the Ukrainians.  It has made them the undisputed world-leader in all these technologies; and suddenly everyone wants either to buy from them or manufacture products on a joint-venture basis.  Kiev’s desperation for money and weapons, which Trump was able to leverage for Putin’s benefit, can now become a thing of the past.  Trump is losing his power to bully and blackmail Kiev.

Third, this is a time of growing optimism in Ukraine’s military strategy.  There is a sense that Trump’s call for the surrender of all Donetsk was a bluff that has now been trumped.  The MAGA hostility has been borne with patience and grace, and seen off.  Europe has not caved.  Western and Arab governments are coming to Kiev’s door for weapons tech.  The prospect, finally, of money flows from commerce and not just from charity and loans has materialised.  A peacetime future as the world’s leading manufacturing nation of affordable advanced drones and battlefield robotics is beckoning.  Some housewives!

Which, of course, begs the question as to what kind of peace that might be.  From Kiev’s perspective the only peace Putin will observe is one of abject Russian military defeat.  He can be given no opportunity to return in a few years time to his expansionism and to realising his geopolitical ambitions.  He must fail.

Three versions of that failure, and thus of the Ukrainian’s place in history, suggest themselves:

1. Expulsion of Russian Army from all Ukraine. Putin holds his nerve, gathers his forces, and goes for a strategy of blaming the army and “elements” in Moscow.  There are sweeping arrests and the lid is just about kept on the situation.  Longer-term, the FSB ratchets up political oppression.  Putin’s rivals are scattered and hunted.  But the Eurasianist dream is over.  All thought of expansionism is sacrificed to the struggle to keep the Federation intact.  But after that?

2. Expulsion of Russian Army from all Ukraine.  The defeat is too structural for Putin to survive.  He is arrested by his own security service. The militarisation of the economy proves disastrous now the war is over.  Rapid de-industrialisation is the cost.  The release onto the streets of three-quarters of a million embittered and unemployable soldiers creates further instability.  A power struggle ensues between the various oligarchic factions picking hungrily over the bones of Putin’s Kremlin until, by some mysterious means, a unifying figure - a strongman, of course - takes up the reins. The tzar-isation of Russia begins anew.  Kiev and all Europe wait and watch.

3. Expulsion of Russian Army from all Ukraine.  The shock brings not just the end of Putin’s long reign but the collapse of the Russian Federation itself.  The eastern republics convulse in nationalism and seize the moment to break away.  Some terrible revenge on local FSB personnel is taken by armed groups, many whom are soldiers returned from Ukraine.  Inevitably, strongmen barge to the fore, not a few noisily Islamist.  But fifteen or even twenty old nations arise anew from the ashes of the Federation, some of them nuclear-armed. Even west of the Urals there are regional efforts to achieve independence.  The ancient colonial drive of Muscovy is dead.  In Minsk, Lukashenko boards a flight and flees the country.  The miniscule army of Moldova walks into Transnistria unopposed. Warsaw waits to find out with whom it will negotiate its re-absorption of Königsberg.  An age of European peace lies in prospect.

And Ukraine?  At a minimum, the fruits of victory (be it simply military, military and fatal to Putin, or military and fatal to Putin and the Federation too): a secure peace and a prosperous future as the world-leader in modern arms supply, plus entry to the west as its people so desire and deserve.