As the worst winter in many years settled across Ukraine late last year, the 600,000-strong Russian invasion force innovated to embrace the cold — and briefly gained a tactical edge all along the 700-mile front line.
The Ukrainians innovated right back, ultimately blunting that edge. That dance — measure versus countermeasure — should reassure friends of a free Ukraine that a much smaller country can continue to battle a much bigger invader as long as it can use advanced technology.
But the breakneck speed of the tactical and technological development cycle in Russia’s 47-month all-out war on Ukraine, which analysts estimate at just a few weeks, should also alarm Western powers. They’re simply not ready to match that. And it’s unclear what it would take to shake up the current lethargy.
In the months leading up to this winter, Russian regiments relentlessly attacked front-line cities across Eastern Ukraine. They did so mostly on foot, hoping that scattered infantry would be able to avoid the tiny explosive drones that were usually everywhere all the time, watching and waiting to strike.
For the Russians, that meant parking their armored vehicles. The shift to infantry-first tactics preserved precious armor, but it also limited how quickly and deeply Russian forces could advance after breaking through Ukrainian lines.
But as the temperature dropped, the Russians sensed an opportunity to restore mobility to the battlefield. They waited for the thick fog that frequently blankets Ukraine during the coldest winter months.
They had a plan. The fog could, according to analyst Michael Kofman with the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, DC, “significantly degrade” Ukraine’s drones, most of which still relied on optical — that is to say daylight — cameras. Fog could obscure Russian vehicles from overhead surveillance and attack, giving mechanized forces their first opportunity in a long time to break through.
And for a few weeks starting in October, it worked. Russian vehicles advanced. Most notably, in early November, Russian mechanized forces rolled out under thick fog and penetrated Ukrainian lines around the fortress city of Pokrovsk in Donetsk Oblast, accelerating the collapse of Ukrainian defenses in the city.
But the Ukrainians adapted, and fast. That wouldn’t surprise Samuel Bendett, a drone expert with the CNA think tank in Virginia. Surveying the tech landscape in Ukraine last summer, Bendett concluded the Ukrainians and Russians were developing new drones and defenses against drones on a cycle ranging from two weeks to three months.
Ukrainian-American war correspondent David Kirichenko, who is also a contributor to Europe’s Edge, agreed with this assessment. “The adaptation and countermeasure cycle typically is a few months,” he concluded around the same time. “At times, they may shorten it down to a few weeks. For instance, the Russians may experiment with frequencies or do frequency hopping to evade jamming.”
Ukrainian forces are also “often adjusting,” Kirichenko said.
Shortly after those Russian vehicles rode into Pokrovsk, the vast Ukrainian drone force evolved. Thermal cameras that detect radiating heat began replacing optical cameras on a significant percentage of the millions of small drones the Ukrainians deploy every year.
A thermal drone can see right through the fog. Their foggy advantage erased by the rapid, widespread adoption of new and better tech, the Russians lost their mechanized momentum. Russian territorial gains spiked… and then collapsed. “The seven-day moving average of Russian gains in late 2025 peaked on December 1 and 2” at around 27 square miles a day, “and then steadily declined through the end of the year”, to just four miles a day, the Washington, DC-based Institute for the Study of War reported. Russian losses in killed and wounded reached 35,000 in December alone.
Can US and European forces match the Ukrainians’ speedy tech development cycle? Short of these forces engaging in a major war, maybe not — and that should worry planners in Washington, DC, Paris, and Berlin.
The innovation we observe in Ukraine is born of battlefield urgency, Kirichenko explained. “The way to stay ahead is to ensure there is very close communication between the developers and front-line soldiers,” he said.
But who are the front-line soldiers in the US, French, or German armies who can learn tactical lessons the hard way? And where are the American, French, or German tech companies that are motivated not just by profit, but also by national or regime survival? Even if firms were motivated to spend big on fast and constant innovation, regulatory burdens could prove to be a debilitating drag.
Absent some profound institutional reforms, Westerners are merely observing the wider war in Ukraine very closely — and trying to copy, as fast as possible, the tactical and tech developments that spring from the front line.
But a copy necessarily lags behind the original. It’s worrying that the US Army is only now buying its first heavy bomber drones, a key class of unmanned systems that the Ukrainians developed in haste in the spring of 2022. The Americans are laboring within a three- or four-year tech development cycle in response to a war where the tactics and techs evolve 12 times faster.
David Axe is a journalist, author, and filmmaker in South Carolina. For 20 years, he has covered war for Forbes, Rolling Stone, The Daily Beast, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vice, The Village Voice, Voice of America, and others. He has reported from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and elsewhere. Right now, he is focused on covering Russia’s wider war on Ukraine.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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