By Anne Applebaum
Sunday, June 07, 2026
In a field outside of Kyiv last weekend, a van was parked
discreetly behind some trees. Inside the van there were no passenger seats,
just a long desk, two office chairs, two laptops, extra screens. Outside
appearances to the contrary, this was a mobile drone-interceptor base, one of
hundreds of similar vehicles now scattered around Ukraine. It’s also part of
something much bigger: a set of technological advances that have changed the
war with Russia, and maybe all wars, forever.
On one of the laptops, a soldier showed me a bird’s-eye
view of a part of the Ukrainian countryside more than 100 miles away. His job
is to identify the objects flying above it, to distinguish birds and bats from
lethal Russian drones. When he sees the latter, the soldier on the laptop
beside him can then direct an interceptor—a small drone that looks like a
miniature rocket ship—to track and destroy the incoming Russian aerial vehicles
before they hit their targets.
At first glance, the images on the screens look simple,
like a video game. But this is not a low-tech operation. The AI-powered drone
interceptors are made possible by a complicated network of radar systems,
acoustic sensors, and other tools that hundreds of large and small Ukrainian
tech companies are creating and updating every day, using data they get
directly from soldiers like the ones I met. Almost none of these companies
existed four years ago. They have emerged from a tech-literate civil society
whose members changed their professions or their focus to help defend their
country. I have met Ukrainian defense-company CEOs who come from financial
services, architecture, politics. I met another one last weekend who had
returned just that day from the front line. He told me he finds it useful to
learn how soldiers are using his products, and how they might be improved.
Other kinds of teams across the country are connected to
this constantly improving information system too, and not just in vans. Last
year I was in an underground room in Ukraine where dozens of people were
monitoring hundreds of miles of the front line on a series of screens. The
Ukrainian defense analyst Andriy Zagorodnyuk calls
this system of drones, monitors, AI-powered navigation, battle-tested robots,
and interconnected soldiers “networked situational awareness,” and it explains
why perceptions of this war have suddenly changed.
Ukrainian military technology has been evolving rapidly
since the first years of the war. But only now are outsiders—in Europe, the
United States, the Persian Gulf, and of course Russia—beginning to understand
what that evolution means. Since 2022, many public arguments about the war,
even in Europe and the U.S., have adopted the narrative put out by Russian
propaganda, tacitly assuming that Ukraine, outmanned and outgunned, would
eventually lose. Helping Ukraine was a way to stave off disaster, nothing more.
When the Trump administration stopped sending military and financial aid to
Kyiv in 2025, some in Washington expected (and maybe wanted) the end to come
quickly.
Instead, Europeans have provided money. Ukrainian society
produced networked situational awareness. And when Ukrainian President
Volodymyr Zelensky toured
the Gulf states in late March and signed a series of security agreements,
something changed in the international narrative. The leaders of Qatar, the
United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia were talking to Ukraine, not because
they felt sorry for a war victim, but because they wanted to acquire drone
interceptors like the ones I saw in action last weekend. Iranians use the same
drone technology as the Russians, and the Ukrainians know better than anyone
how to fight it.
The Gulf leaders are not alone: Suddenly, many people
have understood that the Russian narrative is wrong: The Ukrainians are not
losing. The Russians are not winning, and more important, they don’t know how
to win. Ukrainians and outside analysts have described this dynamic in three
main theaters of the war.
The ground war. If the story of the past two years
was one of slow, grinding forward progress for Russia,the story of this year is
very different. Since early spring, at the start of its annual offensive,
Russia has lost
more territory in Ukraine than it has gained. Right now, it is hard to see how
the Russian army can move forward, because the front line is not a line at all,
but rather a broad no-go zone, some 20 miles wide. Everything inside this zone
is visible to drones, which means that any Russian truck, tank, or infantryman
seeking to attack new territory is instantly identified and can easily be hit.
Because the Russian commanders keep attacking anyway, the Ukrainians are
killing and wounding thousands of enemy soldiers, perhaps as many as 30,000, every month. They say
their goal is to remove more Russians from the battlefield than can be
recruited to replace them, and they may be close to succeeding.
The long-range war. Although they are unable to
move the front line, Russians can still use drones and missiles to kill
civilians and destroy civilian infrastructure in Ukrainian cities, as they did
once again this week. Indeed, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s appetite for
this kind of attack is escalating, as he has no other practical way to damage
Ukraine. He also knows that the Ukrainians don’t have enough air defense to
stop ballistic missiles, even if they can now stop the majority of drones.
Ukraine still relies heavily on air-defense equipment from the United States,
especially ammunition for Patriot batteries. A European fund was set up to
purchase these interceptor missiles, although some observers fear that there
are simply not enough to buy. According to Zelensky, more Patriots were
used during the first three days of the U.S.-Iran conflict than have been
used during the entire Russia-Ukraine war.
What Putin doesn’t acknowledge is that his side is
running out of air defense, too. That has helped Ukraine’s long-range drones
more reliably target Russian oil and gas infrastructure, producing spectacular
explosions and reducing Russian refining capacity by at least 20 percent.
Almost all major
oil refineries in central Russia have halted or scaled back production,
and some have been hit more
than once.
With equal regularity, a new crop of Ukrainian drones
with a range of 100 miles can target
arms depots, logistical centers, and supply chains far behind the front line in
Russian-occupied territories. These strikes are less spectacular than ones deep
inside Russia, but they have already created crucial fuel shortages on the
Crimean peninsula, and they are making it difficult for the Russians to supply
their troops fighting in the East and the South.
The psychological war. For the past four years,
the Kremlin has repeatedly told the Russian public that the war is going well,
that Ukraine isn’t a real country, that victory is certain. But that’s hard to
square with the panic that took hold of Moscow last month, when an annual
military parade was shortened for fear it would be interrupted by Ukrainian
drones. Nor does it square with the spectacular columns of black smoke that
were billowing into the air on Wednesday morning, after Ukrainian drones hit a
local refinery on the opening day of the Kremlin’s annual St. Petersburg
economic forum. Kyrill Budanov, the former defense-intelligence chief who is
now head of the Ukrainian president’s office, told me there is a lot of
evidence that Russians are now finally facing the up to the falsehood of state
propaganda: “They cannot understand why they have to keep fighting and why they
are getting hit now, because they were told they were going to win and Ukraine
is nothing.”
***
Not everybody thinks this means the war will end soon.
One young woman, a Ukrainian civil servant, told me last weekend that she and
her friends have already given up on the idea that they will ever live in a
“normal” country again, because the war will last forever. She reminisced about
a flight she and some friends took to Barcelona, before the war: “That
beautiful life will never return.”
But there are signs that some in Moscow, at least, are
preparing for the war to end. Recently, a set of slides leaked
from the office of Sergei Kiryienko, a former Russian prime minister and now a
senior official in Putin’s administration. They describe a plan to sell the end
of the war to the country: declare victory, describe the Russian army as “the
most combat-ready in the world,” portray small territorial gains as a huge
success, claim that Europe suffered a huge economic blow, from which it will
not recover, and that Ukraine will soon fall apart. Budanov believes that the
Kremlin’s decision to cut off Telegram, the social-media platform most widely
used in Russia, was a preemptive move, designed to prepare for this kind of
narrative change, “so that when the time comes, they have only one official
position and nothing else but that.”
Budanov also continues to believe that the negotiations
started by the Trump administration could produce a cease-fire, along the
current front line, as early as this year. “And then we will start resolving
the other issues we have.” On Thursday, Zelensky wrote a letter directly
to Putin proposing exactly that: an immediate cease-fire, accompanied by
face-to-face negotiations between the two leaders. Putin publicly
dismissed the idea, saying he sees “no point” in a meeting.
Russia still has other options. The Russian president,
who has never acknowledged that Ukraine is a legitimate country, or that
Zelensky is its legitimate president, could continue to bomb Ukrainian cities,
hoping to destroy the electrical grid and make the country unlivable. He could
call for mass mobilization, and continue trying to overwhelm Ukraine’s
defenses, sacrificing thousands of lives. Some fear he could use this moment to
widen the conflict and to attack a NATO country, possibly to test American willingness
to defend allies. A Latvian general this week said that even if Russian drones
can’t win in Ukraine, they have an advantage over NATO defenses that have yet
to catch up with the fast-evolving technology.
Even without negotiations, Russia and Ukraine may be
heading toward a new status quo. The transparent frontline zone may now be 20
miles wide, but as drone technology improves, it could soon be 30 or even 40
miles wide. At some point the front line will become not just a no-man’s-land
but a de facto demilitarized zone, similar to the one that separates North and
South Korea, regularly patrolled and maintained by drones.
After that, it could become a border—a temporary border,
one that will not be recognized by either side—but a border nevertheless: no
different from a river or mountain range, impossible to move, difficult to
cross. This would not be a clear victory for Ukraine, but it would be a major
defeat for Putin, whose central goal—the destruction of all of Ukraine, the
removal of Ukraine from the map—would never be realized.
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