Arms Race in Ukraine

As I was waiting outside Kyiv’s main military hospital at the end of April, I saw a man in a wheelchair come out of the main gate. He wove gingerly past seven “hedgehogs”—the large metal antitank traps that were deployed across the capital’s streets at the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. Now they have almost all been cleared away. Soldiers were walking out of the gate carrying bags of medicine and large flat folders with their X-rays, while visitors were checking in.

Amid this morning rush the man wheeled himself to the end of the short, blocked road leading to the street. There he lit a cigarette and watched the world go by. He was wearing a T-shirt in the yellow and pale blue Ukrainian colors. One of his legs had been amputated below the knee, and the other one was gone entirely. Both stumps were still bound with dressings. Maybe he suffered from phantom limb pain. In a few weeks perhaps he will be out of the wheelchair, learning to walk again on prosthetic legs.

The man was almost certainly one of the 380,000 Ukrainians who President Volodymyr Zelensky said in February had been wounded in this war. A few days earlier I had been in a bunker talking to a Ukrainian commander. We were watching live drone feeds from the front line when he showed me a grainy one zooming in on a wounded Russian solider. “See, he has lost his leg,” he said. “So, are you going to finish him off?” I asked naively. “No, no!” he replied. A badly wounded soldier was worse for Russia than a dead one, he explained. First he would endanger the lives of any men who tried to rescue him, who would be diverted from holding their positions, and finally he would need long-term care, rehabilitation, and a pension, just like the man at the Kyiv hospital. The next day I met a senior Ukrainian security official who told me something that he would never say in public. We were talking about the war and how it had consolidated Ukrainian identity for many for whom being Russian or Ukrainian had not mattered much before. He said that the Russians saw themselves as the heirs of the Imperial and Soviet legacies, but that Ukrainians were too. Then he told me, “I will tell you something very strange: we are twins!”

Like the legless man smoking his cigarette, all Ukrainians are wondering what the future holds for them. They have lost a fifth of their country to the Russians, and for now there is no prospect of getting any of it back. They feel the phantom pain of the loss of homes and families and memories, not to mention businesses and resources, in the Russian-occupied territories in the east and south. But while soldiers and civilians continue to die every day, the country, just like that man, is still very much alive.

This spring, as President Donald Trump tried to secure a cease-fire in a war that he once boasted would be so easy to end that he could do it in twenty-four hours, Ukrainians were left bewildered by his mood swings and the parroting of Kremlin propaganda about Ukraine by him and his team. One minute US officials were pouring bile on Zelensky and accusing him of being responsible for President Vladimir Putin’s invasion, and the next Trump was grumbling about Putin’s “very bad timing” in killing thirteen civilians with a missile strike on Kyiv the night of April 24. He did not venture how the timing for these strikes could be improved.

When Zelensky asked to buy more Patriot missiles, which are crucial for defending Ukraine’s cities from long-range Russian drones and missiles, Trump mocked him. The assumption in Kyiv had been that whether a cease-fire happened or not, the US would no longer provide weapons and crucial intelligence to Ukraine. Then, on April 30, Kyiv and Washington signed a deal giving the US preferential treatment in future exploitation of Ukrainian minerals—something that may never happen. Trump’s argument is that an “American presence at the excavation site will help protect the country.” But since the deal comes with no security guarantees, no major company will invest before Ukraine is actually secure.

A Ukrainian business source described the deal as a “performative political act,” because it gave Trump something to present as a success to MAGA true believers. If it kept Trump happy, that was fine with him. At the beginning of May, Trump began selling weapons to Ukraine again, and it was reported that an extra Patriot missile battery was being transferred. All this was a big surprise. Russian commentators began to wonder if Trump, who they had been crowing was their man in the White House, was not going to deliver for them after all.

I like going to see the security official because, in the decade that I have known him, he has always had a clear-eyed perspective on what the future holds. Now he told me, “It is easier to predict what Ukraine will look like in ten years rather than in ten days!” Indeed, for days before this article went to press, everyone was wondering whether Putin would turn up for peace talks with Zelensky in Istanbul on May 15. He did not.

In Pobuzke, a three hours’ drive south of Kyiv, you can visit the Strategic Missile Forces Museum. On a gray and drizzly April day it can be hard to muster much enthusiasm for rusting old Soviet warplanes with dead wasps crushed against their cockpit windows or parking lots full of shattered Russian armor from this war. But those things are not really why people come here. In the Soviet period about one third of the USSR’s intercontinental ballistic missiles were based in Ukraine. As you enter the bunker, Yurii, the sixty-seven-year-old guide, who served in Soviet forces nearby, flicks a switch to turn on the air-conditioning. Then you squeeze into a tiny elevator with him and finally clamber down a ladder into the tiny control room from which the ICBMs in silos in this part of Ukraine would have been launched. There are bunks, a toilet, a samovar, a teapot, teacups, and an electric hot plate for one saucepan. Six men could have survived Armageddon in this complex for forty-five days.

Everything is perfectly preserved, and Yurii reels off numbers about missiles and payloads. You sit behind a desk with switches and buttons: Yurii explains that once orders to launch came through from Moscow, two people in that room would both have had to press a button, which my colleague and I were invited to do. On a screen we watched missiles being fired, circling the planet and destroying cities.

In 1994 the US helped Ukraine get rid of its nuclear missiles. All of its eighteen command centers, except this one, which was preserved as a museum, were destroyed. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the missiles in Ukraine could not have been launched by its government, because the command-and-control systems remained in Moscow. While those could have been recreated in Ukraine, it would have taken years and a lot of money. The ICBMs were sent to Russia, and in return the US, Russia, and Britain signed the Budapest Memorandum, which committed them to the territorial integrity of Ukraine. They agreed that they would seek UN Security Council action to help Ukraine should it “become a victim of an act of aggression.” Perhaps at the time the idea that Russia might attempt to conquer and annex parts of its neighbor was considered so outlandish that the absurdity of going to the Security Council, where Russia has a veto, never seemed important. It would be as futile as asking it to act if the US tried to use force to annex Canada or Greenland.

Back aboveground I asked Yurii if he thought it had been a mistake for Ukraine to give up its missiles. Would Russia have dared to seize Crimea in 2014 and then tried to destroy Ukraine as a state if it still had them? Yes, he said, the fact that Ukraine had voluntarily given up the missiles “makes me a little depressed.” More to the point, as the demilitarization of Ukraine is now one of Putin’s main demands, along with its giving up all those areas of the four provinces in the east and south that Russia claims to have annexed but has not yet occupied, the Budapest Memorandum and the nuclear disarmament of the 1990s cast a dark shadow.

The lessons that most Ukrainians draw from this are that allies cannot be relied upon, that Russia, under Putin and probably under his successors too, will never give up the desire to subjugate their country, and that their country needs to be armed to the teeth to defend itself. But how to accomplish this? Without negotiating, Trump has already acceded to Putin’s demand that Ukraine never join NATO, and he says that the Ukrainians have no cards to play. He is wrong about that. They may not have as strong a hand as the Russians right now, but they still have plenty of cards, and they plan on having a lot more.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, Ukraine’s formidable military industries went into a steep decline. Now Ukrainian missiles are striking Russian military and oil industry targets deep inside the country. Since the beginning of the Russian invasion in 2014 and especially since 2022, Ukraine’s military industry has risen like a phoenix, and if there were more money, it could produce even more weapons. In 2024, according to Herman Smetanin, the Ukrainian minister of strategic industries, the country’s military production was $35 billion—thirty-five times more than in 2022.

In the autumn of 2022 Ukrainian forces routed the Russians and chased them out of much of the territory they had occupied after the initial February assault. That November the Russians were forced to retreat from the city of Kherson, which lies on the banks of the mighty Dnieper River. I wrote about the jubilation there a few days later.^* Crowds thronged its central Freedom Square, and Zelensky came to deliver a triumphant address. It is all very different today. The Russians pulled back across the river, and while they continue to shell the city, it is above all a drone war here.

Artem, a Ukrainian soldier, drove me through the city’s almost deserted streets. Close to the river we skirted a district that has become too dangerous for anyone to live in. When we passed Freedom Square the only person there was a lone pensioner with a shopping bag. Under the trees of an empty boulevard a woman was putting out food for birds or cats. In a nearby village, in a school basement that has now been converted into classrooms, Oleksandr Prokudin, the head of the region’s military administration, described the battle for Kherson as “Star Wars.” Both sides are testing their latest drones. Artem said that an “electronic curtain” had been erected along this part of the river for the jamming and spoofing of drones. When a drone is jammed it can be downed or is simply lost. Spoofing means that the enemy can change the drone’s home base and then divert it “home” to its destruction. As we talked, he showed me a live feed on his phone from a hacked Russian drone that was somewhere nearby. In theory, he said, this meant you could watch it fly toward you and kill you.

In February 2022 the Ukrainians had virtually no military drones. Last year they made 2.2 million, and this year they hope to make 4.5 million. The majority of these are “first-person view” (FPV) drones, which means that the operator wears goggles or controls them from a screen. Ukrainian forces, says Yevhen Hlibovytsky, the head of the Frontier Institute think tank, have been faced with recruitment problems, and this has forced the country “to turn to technology to compensate for that deficit.” The speed with which drones have emerged as the leading weapon of the war is a direct result of manpower shortages and having a homegrown industrial capacity to make them.

But jamming, accidents, and the lack of skilled pilots mean that two thirds or more of Ukrainian and probably Russian FPV and other drones don’t hit their target. The arms race is moving so fast, though, that things are already changing in reaction to these problems. Some 70 percent of battlefield casualties are now reported to be caused by drones. The new generation of drones is controlled by a fiber-optic filament up to fifteen kilometers long—akin to a fishing line—so they have no radio signal to jam. They also give the pilot a higher-quality picture. But even if fiber-optic drones dominate the battlefield by the end of summer, they are only a short-term solution.

So now the race is on for lasers to blind enemy drones and AI to make Ukrainian ones autonomous. When I first met Yaroslav Azhnyuk more than two years ago, he told me about Petcube, a successful company he had set up in 2012. It allowed you to watch onscreen as your dog jumped to grab a treat you had just launched remotely from a dispenser. I guess it is a logical progression from flying dog biscuits to flying drones. The Fourth Law, Azhnyuk’s new company, is working on drone autonomy, including, he said,

autonomous bombing missions, autonomous target recognition, and autonomous navigation towards a kill zone.

That is an area clear of your own troops and civilians and deadly for your enemy. What he foresees is that “in the end there will be operators operating maybe thousands of drones each.” Autonomous drones will transform the battlefield just as FPV drones have.

Ukraine has been testing laser weapons, and kill zones are already very much with us. Line of Drones is a program that aims to make it almost impossible for the Russians to move in a belt of up to fifteen kilometers along the front line. Ivan, a soldier I met whose unit has been fighting in Toretsk, gave me a graphic example of what it meant when they were in the kill zone and could not move. Two weeks earlier Ukrainian troops here had had to give ground, but five soldiers had found themselves marooned under the rubble of a house two and a half kilometers beyond the new front line and seventy meters from a new Russian position. The men were disoriented, injured, and asking to be rescued. Ukrainian drones were dropping them food and batteries and bombing the Russian position, but otherwise there was no way anyone could cross that stretch of land to rescue them.

While it is easy to drop small amounts of provisions to a position like this, logistics are becoming ever harder. Kamikaze drones can land and wait by a road, and when a surveillance drone spots a target such as a vehicle, they can take off and ambush it. Illia was a soldier, but now he is an engineer working with SkyLab, a company that has pivoted from making large bomb-dropping drones to smaller land drones. These are little unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) that can transport cargo across a kill zone. Earlier in the war you could load up a car or armored vehicle with ammunition and drive it to the front, but drones have made that too dangerous. One of the reasons that in March the Russians were able to drive Ukrainian forces out of the part of Russia’s Kursk region that they had occupied was that fiber-optic drones had given them the edge.

Illia and Yevhenii Rvachov, the head of SkyLab, took me to some rough ground outside Kyiv, unloaded one of their meter-long UGVs, and sent it trundling off into the distance. This one had a mount into which they had slotted four land mines, which it proceeded to lay. When it came back, they took off the mount. Now it was ready to transport two hundred kilograms of ammunition or anything else. They said they thought there might be two thousand land drones currently at the front, but by the end of the year there could be tens of thousands. I remarked that these could become the equivalent of the donkeys of wars past, and they showed me a video of Russian troops using donkeys today. A drone does not need to be fed, they remarked, just charged for two hours. They were now working on AI for the next generation of UGVs, which will come with six lidar sensors to help them navigate around obstacles. The beauty of these land drones is that, being so small, they are hard to spot from the air, and they move so fast that they are hard to hit. If they are destroyed, however, no lives are lost, and they only cost the equivalent of a cheap car.

Olena, who runs military evacuation units for the wounded, told me that they were testing larger UGVs to extract injured men from the front. Surely they would be visible and liable to be targeted? I asked. True, she replied, but if someone would quickly bleed to death without being rapidly extracted, it was a gamble worth taking.

In Kyiv there is a sense of extreme excitement about all of these “miltech” developments. I met SkyLab’s people at a conference organized by Brave1, a government platform that connects start-ups and developers with the military. A few days later an event organized by an NGO called Invest in Bravery was packed with investors, inventors, and entrepreneurs. In speeches they emphasized that Ukraine, with more than a million men under arms, now had the largest, most experienced army in Europe (apart from Russia, of course), and people clapped when it was pointed out that Western countries needed Ukraine more than Ukraine needed them. On the face of it this is somewhat bizarre, since the country does not produce enough equipment itself to survive, but the point is this: the war has shown that much expensive hardware in Western armories is becoming obsolete. What matters now, apart from tech, is experience. Since the full-scale invasion began, Western armies have trained tens of thousands of Ukrainian troops abroad. But, say Ukrainians, much of their instructors’ experience has been, as Olena put it pointedly, “fighting men in mountains with Kalashnikovs.” Lessons learned in Afghanistan or Iraq don’t help much here. That message may be starting to get through. In late April it was reported that British troops were now being trained in drone warfare by Ukrainian soldiers.

Let’s not get too carried away by tech, though. It is vital, it has changed warfare, and it has helped the Ukrainians hold back the Russians. But the issue is not whether you should forgo a $4 million Patriot missile and buy 10,000 FPV drones instead, but about finding the right mix of weaponry. It is also important not to lose sight of the human cost of the war. I was at the military hospital in Kyiv because I was waiting for Anastasiia Savova, a twenty-six-year-old who runs Always Faithful, an organization campaigning for naval POWs held by the Russians. Her father had been captured in May 2022 when Azovstal, the sprawling steel plant that served as the last Ukrainian redoubt in Mariupol, was taken. For two years she had had no news of him and did not know if he was even alive. On March 19 he had been included in a prisoner exchange, and she was bringing me to meet him.

Before we met, she sent me pictures of him on WhatsApp. Oleksandr Savov, forty-six, had come home gaunt and sick with tuberculosis. When I first saw him in person I did not recognize him, because in the six weeks since he had been released he had put on so much weight. As a prisoner, he said, he had thought about only two things: food and sleep. The POWs had been constantly beaten, and as a result he was always in pain. Physically he was recovering, but psychologically it was going to take a lot longer. The morning we met he said he had dreamed that he was sitting in the prison barracks wearing a military uniform and medals and a colleague said to him, “Take them off! If the Russians see you, they will beat all of us!” Rape had been frequent. The Russians assaulted the prisoners with soldering irons and caulking guns, the type used to squeeze silicone around the edge of a shower to seal it. “They will be our enemies forever,” he said. Was he in favor of a cease-fire? I asked. If Russia did not hand back the territory it had occupied, he said, “I think we should fight. There is no way back.”

Many, and maybe most, don’t agree with him. Russification of the occupied regions and the exodus of pro-Ukrainian residents from them means that they are “a different country already,” said a businessman who did not want to be identified. It was “best to be honest” and “forget about them.” In that case the rest of Ukraine would have a better chance of recovering and integrating with the rest of Europe. “Otherwise I don’t even see a chance.” He too, however, rejected legal recognition of Russian annexation, which would be politically unacceptable to Ukraine. A leaked draft of a US cease-fire plan suggested that the US would recognize Putin’s annexation of Crimea, which would be regarded as a stab in the back by most Europeans and a kind of 1938 Sudetenland 2.0. In 1940 the Soviet Union annexed the Baltic states, and the US never officially recognized this.

Soldiers told me that the lack of manpower meant they were not rotated for rest and recreation as they should be, and while Putin still wanted to crush Ukraine, a truce would save lives. Olena, who runs the evacuation units, thinks that too many people have already tuned out of the war and that a cease-fire would lead to demobilization and make the country complacent and vulnerable to attack again. A cease-fire would mean a return to the kind of frozen conflict that existed between 2015 and 2022, and the Russians would only wait for the day when they were ready to try to take more of the country.

Things may change, but no Ukrainians I met believed Putin even wanted a cease-fire. “It is not going to happen,” said Hlibovytsky, the head of the Frontier Institute.

They think they have the upper hand. They might try some tactical moves like a three-day cease-fire or whatever just to get some sanctions lifted, but otherwise there is no change of heart. There is no disillusionment in Russian imperial thinking.

According to the political analyst Andrii Buzarov, if there is a cease-fire and normal political life returns to Ukraine, the conflict will not be over. Disinformation and propaganda would be used to divide society, he says. Today, unlike in the past, there is no viable “pro-Russian” option, but Russian soft power in the country is not only about language and issues of religion that divide the Orthodox faithful. “It is also about history and heroes,” he says. The Russians will work on destabilizing a traumatized society in which people will rapidly be blamed for what they did or didn’t do during the war. They will also use issues such as gay rights to paint the West as degenerate. If Trump is seen to have definitively betrayed Ukraine, which is already the widespread view, and Europe can’t or won’t do enough to take up the slack, then the question will be, “So, what did the West give you, what do you have?”

In the taxi on my way to the station to catch the night train leaving Kyiv for Poland I chatted with Andrii, my driver. He said that he was sixty years old, that “the war will last for the rest of my life,” and that just as, in his view, Arabs had wanted to destroy Israel for eighty years, although conflict had ebbed and flowed, Russia wanted to destroy Ukraine. Then he told me that his day job was as an astrologer and that business was very good because people want to know what the future holds.

—May 15, 2025