Ukraine’s pioneering use of unmanned systems has profoundly changed the character of war. What was born out of necessity has turned out to be a massively effective way to fight a more powerful enemy.
Innovations and industrial policy enabled Kyiv to scale up the production and use of tactical drones, which account for as many as 80% of casualties on the battlefield and degrade the enemy’s capabilities in the kill zone and surrounding territories.
Its commanders gamified unmanned warfare, giving incentives to the most capable units while expanding the tools of networked warfare and AI. As a result, Russia’s spring counteroffensive has stalled, and Ukraine liberated 480 square km (185 sq miles) in the first four months of 2026.
Russia’s casualty rate surpassed its recruitment rate in January, with unmanned systems alone killing nearly 29,700 enemy personnel.
At the same time, Ukraine is reducing its military’s exposure to kill zones and using robotic systems to supply troops and evacuate wounded personnel. It has already achieved the first-ever capture of prisoners of war using a ground robotic system and is moving towards remotely operating unmanned systems from virtually anywhere in the world, enhancing operator safety.
With Ukraine’s goal of reaching 50,000 enemy casualties a month, Vladimir Putin will face a dilemma: pause the war or call a general mobilization. Neither option is affordable ahead of the upcoming parliamentary “elections,” which may explain the further tightening of his grip on the internet, Telegram, and restive war bloggers.
Ukraine also scaled up its long-range strikes to 7,347 in March, from just 110 in January 2024, surpassing Russia for the first time. And the range of its strikes has extended to 1,750 km (about 1,090 miles) from Ukraine’s border.
While Russia targets civilian housing, energy infrastructure, railway facilities, and defense-related objects, Ukraine focuses on energy export facilities, defense-related enterprises, ammunition depots, and air-defense systems.
The Kremlin shows no willingness to stop the war, but mounting economic troubles at home, combined with battlefield losses and the absence of significant advances, may provide a strong incentive. That’s why Ukraine’s strikes are aimed at degrading the financial and materiel supply for Russia’s war machine.
But fighting and winning the war (by surviving) won’t be enough for Ukraine. That’s why even as hostilities continue, Ukraine must think about building its future deterrence. There is little reason to believe that either the new security arrangements promised by the Trump administration or those envisaged by the coalition of the willing led by France and the UK would amount to credible guarantees against future Russian aggression.
However, Ukraine should continue on its course toward NATO membership, or whichever security framework it may become in the years ahead.
Ukraine should strengthen its capacity to inflict significant damage on Russia, denying Moscow any realistic prospect of achieving its objectives should it choose to attack again.
Having established deterrence by denial, Kyiv should then progress towards deterrence by punishment, by integrating long-range precision strike capacity into a coherent operational framework.
Modelling survivability, assurance of delivery, and damage criteria against a target list of Russian critical assets would allow commanders to identify the capabilities Kyiv needs to deter the Kremlin.
Ukraine should also partner with allied countries to develop hypersonic capabilities and systems enabled by electromagnetic technologies (referred to as EMI/EMP — electromagnetic interference/electromagnetic pulse), capable of disabling electronics through powerful electromagnetic pulses. Combined with Western-supplied extended-range precision munitions, these capabilities could underpin a credible deterrence-by-punishment posture.
Autonomous systems represent perhaps the most promising domain, and scaling up AI-driven platforms at low cost would mitigate Ukraine’s manpower disadvantage even further.
Backed by robust situational awareness and seamless intelligence sharing, Ukraine and its allies should build a joint, dynamic, adaptable, and scalable defense research, development, and production system.
Recognizing that Russia poses a direct threat to Europe, and that Ukraine is central to European security, is a solid basis for turning support into an equal partnership, enabling Kyiv to develop the deterrent capabilities it requires.
At the same time, while allied assistance with satellite imagery and signals intelligence has been crucial, Ukraine must balance reliance on external capabilities with developing its own assets. This should include navigation, communications, intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition, and reconnaissance.
It will need a whole-of-society model of defense, which integrates military preparedness, civil resilience, economic capacity, and political cohesion into a coherent framework.
However, maintaining a large, well-equipped military, functioning civil defense, and a viable economy places an immense burden on the state, and Ukraine’s ability to manage without sustained Western financial and material assistance is limited.
The political sustainability of that support, which is shaped by electoral cycles, domestic priorities, and varying risk appetites, is a structural vulnerability that cannot be remedied by domestic policy alone. Kyiv will therefore need to pursue proactive diplomacy.
The country must institutionalize its wartime innovations into a system for peacetime deterrence, embedded in a European security framework and backed by defense-industrial integration with Europe and mutual investment in shared security.
Credible deterrence demands the alignment of political, diplomatic, economic, technological, industrial, and military instruments toward a coherent long-term objective.
For Ukraine, mastering this alignment and building a state that can sustain confrontation across all domains is not just one reform among many; it is the condition of survival.
Oleksandr Khara is Executive Director of the Kyiv-based Centre for Defence Strategies. He has previously been a diplomat, foreign affairs and security policy expert, Assistant Minister of Defence of Ukraine (2020), a former expert of the Maidan for Foreign Affairs think tank, and an official of the Office of the National Security and Defense Council of 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.
War Without End: Deterring Russia’s Shadow War
Either Europe will continue allowing Russia’s shadow war to set the terms of escalation, or it will act now to prevent a larger war.
