By Noah Rothman
Wednesday, March 25, 2026
You’ve probably heard cynical observers of the
U.S.-Israeli war against the Islamic Republic of Iran insist that the only true victor in this war will be Russia. If this is what victory looks like, though,
Russia was better off mired in a stalemated quagmire.
It turns out that Ukraine isn’t bereft of any “cards”
to play in this war. In fact, it’s got a full deck at its disposal.
“The biggest thing coming out of Ukraine is the rapid
pace of innovation,” said Space Force Lieutenant General Steven
Whitney in a recent congressional testimony. Kyiv has developed the
capacity to adapt, iterating and fielding both new high-tech weapons and
low-cost defensive munitions at a rapid pace. “Their level of innovation is out
of this world,” he marveled.
That ingenuity has transformed Ukraine, in the minds of
its detractors inside the Trump administration, from a charity case and a drag
on U.S. resources into a sought-after partner in the battle against Iranian forces
and the creator of weapons systems that the U.S. and its Middle East partners only wish they had at their disposal.
Ukraine isn’t just positioning itself as a desirable
collaborator in procurement. Ukraine’s stock is rising among those who only
recently dismissed its battlefield prospects, too.
In February, Elon Musk’s SpaceX implemented a
whitelisting system that cut Russian forces off from accessing its Starlink
satellite-based internet services. All of a sudden, Russian commanders could no
longer access live footage of the battlespace and lost communications with
troops in the field. The move coincided with a Ukrainian offensive that is
still advancing eastward.
“Since then, Ukraine says it has retaken roughly 150
square miles of territory in the southern Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk
regions, where Russian forces had previously been advancing rapidly,” the Wall Street Journal reported last week. Indeed, for the
better part of a month, while the world’s eyes were locked on the Persian Gulf,
Ukrainian forces have managed to advance on several fronts, retaking contested and strategically valuable territory from
Russia’s occupiers.
With the onset of spring, Russia, too, is back on
offense. But while Moscow’s soldiers are making “some tactical gains at
significant cost,” according to the Institute
for the Study of War, its strategic objectives remain out of reach for now.
And the “cost” of this offensive is steep.
“The command of the Russian troops threw tens of
thousands of soldiers into ‘meat assaults,’ but the price of this attempted
offensive turned out to be catastrophic for the aggressor,” Ukrainian Armed
Forces chief General
Oleksandr Syrskyi revealed this week. “Over four days of intensive assault
actions, the enemy lost more than 6,090 servicemen killed and wounded.”
“For soldiers in front-line assault units, the odds of
surviving the war are approaching zero,” the exiled Russian dissident Mikhail
Khodorkovsky wrote, citing Russian-language dossiers disclosing the extent
of Moscow’s losses. “I have read the full Russian-language report linked
below,” the Volokh Conspiracy contributor, U.S. law professor, and native
Russian speaker Ilya Somin wrote, “and [I] can confirm it amply documents
these conclusions (based on original Russian military docs provided by an
officer who defected).”
Kyiv-skeptical elements inside the Trump administration
are still
trying to force Ukraine into a supplicative posture, and Ukraine is still
resisting Washington’s efforts to impose defeat on it. But those who saw
Ukraine as little more than a freeloading alms-seeker draining the West’s
resources toward no greater strategic end must increasingly rely on baseless
prejudices to justify that outlook.
Russia’s war of conquest in Ukraine won’t end anytime
soon, and there will be more twists of fortune to come in a war that’s been
full of them. But those who told themselves that Ukraine’s defeat was only a
matter of time allowed the wish to father the thought.
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