Summary

WASHINGTON -- When President Vladimir Putin sent his forces into Ukraine, the Kremlin appeared to be betting on a familiar axiom of European security: sheer Russian mass, backed by vast Soviet-era stockpiles and nuclear power, would overwhelm resistance. More than four years into Moscow’s full-scale invasion, that assumption has been all but obliterated. Ukraine survived, derailed Russia's expected quick victory, and turned the conflict into a high-tech war of attrition. It has developed an innovation cycle that Joshua Huminski, senior vice president for national security and intelligence at the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress, said is moving faster than anything the US or other NATO countries are doing. Yet Moscow's growing reliance on North Korea for ammunition, missiles, and troops should not be mistaken either for proof that Russia is collapsing -- or, on the contrary, that its military will emerge from the war stronger than before, experts said. The picture they draw is more complicated. Ukraine has inflicted severe damage on Russia's conventional forces and exposed profound failures in its planning and doctrine. At the same time, Moscow continues to adapt to the battlefield, expand weapons production, and learn from a war unlike any it had previously fought. “Russia's conventional ground forces in Ukraine are being consistently and severely degraded," Huminski told RFE/RL. But he warned that judging Russian military power solely through that lens would be "a mistake.” Russia's Northern and Pacific naval fleets retain important capabilities, he said, while its strategic nuclear forces have been largely untouched and Moscow still possesses capable cyber and space assets. The question, then, may no longer simply be whether Russia remains the world's second-most-powerful military. It is what Ukraine has exposed about the limits of Russian power -- and whether adaptation can prevent those weaknesses from becoming decisive. The Failed Blitzkrieg And The Race To Adapt Russia's problems began with its assumptions. Putin's intelligence services, Huminski said, had portrayed Ukraine as a "house of cards" expected to collapse quickly. Instead, Ukrainian resilience, Russian operational failures, Western assistance, and rapid adaptation produced a very different war. The defense of Hostomel, outside Kyiv, where Ukrainian forces repelled elite Russian airborne troops, became an early example of how Moscow's plans could unravel. Small-unit tactics and Western anti-tank weapons also exploited weaknesses in advancing Russian armor. Since then, the war has become a relentless contest of adaptation. Drones, electronic warfare, and long-range strikes have transformed the battlefield, making movement increasingly dangerous and helping create the heavily surveilled "kill zone" along the front. Maria Snegovaya, a senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, told RFE/RL that Ukraine has built significant technological momentum and increasingly used drones to compensate, at least in part, for manpower shortages. That advantage is real, but she did not describe it as permanent. Technological momentum has shifted several times during the war, Snegovaya said. Ukraine is currently ahead in important drone technologies, but Russia has repeatedly caught up, reverse-engineered successful innovations, and developed countermeasures. The cycle is accelerating: What once took much longer is now unfolding in a matter of months. That is why neither Huminski nor Snegovaya sees the war as a simple story of Ukrainian technological brilliance overwhelming an obsolete Russian army. Both describe a far more dynamic contest: Ukraine has gained important technological momentum and exposed serious Russian weaknesses, while Russia continues to adapt and absorb battlefield lessons even as its conventional ground forces suffer severe degradation and extraordinary losses. North Korea Is Filling Gaps Moscow's partnership with Pyongyang is perhaps the clearest illustration of the war's extraordinary demands. North Korea has supplied ammunition and missiles and sent troops, some of whom were deployed in Russia's Kursk region to help fight off a surprise Ukrainian incursion in 2024. But Snegovaya said Russia's reliance on outside help must be understood alongside its enormous domestic production effort. Moscow is fighting a war of attrition in which losses extend far beyond manpower to ammunition and weapons systems. "Russia actually has been able to produce a lot," she said, emphasizing that Moscow has "significantly scaled up its production" of systems including drones, electronic warfare equipment, air defenses, tanks, and missiles. But Russia's industry has not solved its problem. The demands of the war are so high, Snegovaya said, that even dramatically expanded production cannot fully satisfy the battlefield's needs or allow Russia to build up significant reserves. That helps explain North Korea's role. Huminski also said North Korean troops help Moscow manage a politically sensitive manpower problem. Their use can hold positions and free Russian contract soldiers for other tasks without requiring Putin to undertake a politically risky full-scale mobilization. This is therefore neither simple military collapse nor evidence of an effortless Russian resurgence. Russia is using foreign partners to fill specific gaps while straining to sustain and expand its own military-industrial base. According to Snegovaya, the Kremlin continues to expand production facilities and prepare for a long war. But that effort comes with accumulating costs. Russia's military-industrial sector is heavily financed by the state, while the economic strain of sustaining the war continues to grow. Ukraine Changed The Math -- But Drones Have Not Won The War Ukraine entered the war with a severe conventional disadvantage. It could not match Russia tank for tank, shell for shell, or soldier for soldier. Its answer has been to change the cost equation. Cheap drones and other rapidly developed systems can threaten far more expensive equipment and, Snegovaya said, Ukraine has been able to use drones to compensate to a significant degree for shortages of manpower. But she also stressed the limits of that advantage. Drones have not made soldiers irrelevant, and Ukraine's manpower problems remain serious. The defensive "kill zone" may help hold the line, but it has not won the war. Russia, meanwhile, is adapting its own methods. Snegovaya described a force combining Soviet-style approaches and legacy production capacity with drones, electronic warfare, and rapidly evolving battlefield practices. Russia is suffering extraordinary losses and facing mounting pressure on its economy. But it retains some asymmetric advantages, including the capacity to deploy drones in enormous numbers, experience in using them, and a vast amount of battlefield data accumulated by combat units and operators. Western countries “must not only look at what Ukraine is doing, but also pay attention to what Russia is doing,” what lessons it is learning, and how it is adapting, Huminski said. "If we don't, and we just see that as a conventionally degraded Russian force, that could come back to haunt us in the future." Novorossiisk Shows How The War Is Expanding Ukraine's technological adaptation is also changing the geography of the war. In the Black Sea, Ukraine has repeatedly threatened Russian naval forces and infrastructure despite beginning the conflict without anything close to a conventional navy capable of matching Russia's fleet. As Russian assets shifted away from Crimea, Ukraine's ability to strike Novorossiisk, its naval hub further east, demonstrated that moving farther from the front does not guarantee safety. "The Russian fleet is definitely very much jeopardized anywhere in the Black Sea at this point," Snegovaya said. The broader significance is strategic. Ukraine is increasingly pairing its defensive effort at the front with deep strikes against military and other targets inside Russia, seeking to impose costs beyond the battlefield. Snegovaya said the strikes have helped increase anxiety inside Russia and demand for the war to end. But she cautioned that public opinion plays only a limited role in the Kremlin's decision-making. Putin, not public sentiment, remains the decisive factor. Ukraine may currently have technological momentum, she said, but Russia is continuing to respond -- including with faster jet-powered drones and efforts to overcome other technological constraints. Degraded But Deadly The old measures of military power have been seriously challenged by the war. Prewar tank numbers and troop totals did not predict Russia's failures in 2022. But neither do Russia's enormous losses prove that it has ceased to be a formidable military power, experts cautioned. Ukraine has shattered the myth that Russian mass alone guarantees victory. It has demonstrated how resilience, rapid innovation, and relatively cheap technology can allow a smaller military to impose extraordinary costs on a much larger one. Russia, however, still has substantially greater resources than Ukraine, a large defense-industrial base, nuclear forces untouched by the war, and military capabilities extending well beyond the devastated ground formations fighting in Ukraine. That does not mean Russia is winning the process of adaptation. Snegovaya stressed that Ukraine currently has technological momentum, while Russia's economy and military-industrial network face growing strain. Nor is there, she said, an analytical consensus on whether Russia can still meaningfully be called the world's second most powerful military. The sustainability of Western support for Ukraine may ultimately be one of the most important variables. Ukraine has repeatedly punched above its weight, Snegovaya said, but its ability to sustain the fight remains tied in important ways to outside financial, technological, intelligence, and military support. Huminski's broader conclusion is that Russia and Ukraine will emerge as two of the world’s most battle-tested and battle-hardened militaries. Ukraine has battered Russia’s military, destroyed vast quantities of its equipment, and exposed weaknesses that Moscow expected to hide behind its reputation for overwhelming power. Russia is paying heavily to adapt and is far from solving the fundamental problems the war has revealed. Whether Russia’s learning is enough to compensate for its losses -- and whether Ukraine can sustain its own extraordinary pace of innovation -- may go a long way toward determining the outcome of the war.