There was an early phase of the invasion of Ukraine in 2014 when Crimea was seized by the so‑called green men, unmarked Russian soldiers, a stark example of hybrid warfare. The stream of news grew faster and more relentless from there, and today it feels almost overwhelming with scope and pace.
The current stage of Russia’s annexation campaign has now stretched into its second year, breaking traditional tactical and strategic norms. New evidence points to the vulnerabilities of armored warfare, the irreplaceable need for reliable ammunition and spare parts logistics, the power of air defense, and the stark ratios of casualties in defensive versus offensive actions. It also highlights the importance of cognitive dominance, the renewed nuclear threat, the impact of special forces assaults, and the difficulty of bringing naval infantry and marines close to a coastline for landings.
In Europe, war has ushered in a new era. It has brought forward innovations for a digital, robotized battlefield, even as the death toll climbs, with hundreds of thousands believed killed or presumed lost in mined fields, rubble, and trenches that echo the past. General Francisco Dacoba Cerviño, director of the Spanish Institute for Strategic Studies, summed it up in a recent conference at the Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales: Ukraine represents “the war of the 1920s in the 2020s.”
Three key innovations stand out.
1. The Drone War
Drones had already proven their value in Syria and Nagorno-Karabakh as weapons and intelligence platforms, but their rapid spread on the Ukrainian front has analysts like Mikola Bielieskov of the Atlantic Council wondering if this era marks the first drone war in history. Drones are no longer a novelty; in the opening of the third year of conflict, Ukraine continues to hold off Russian offensives thanks to Western aid and, crucially, to a domestic ability to manufacture and replicate thousands of drones.
A Ukrainian coordinator in Valencia, Antonina Rohalska, notes, “We ship diapers, medicines, school materials so children underground can learn and stay entertained, but we also send drones. It is vital not to stop delivering drones.” The broader picture is clear: six million Ukrainians have dispersed across the globe seeking safety, and that diaspora now networks to fund and supply unmanned aircraft to Ukraine’s armed forces.
From Alicante in 2023, Antonina’s association managed to dispatch 13 drones. In Madrid, Roman Tsaisev, a leader of Unidos con Ucrania, says the Ukrainian diaspora in Spain has raised more than a thousand drones for the war effort since it began.
Ukraine has effectively built a new airborne industry that has slowed many armored, infantry, and naval movements by Russia. The drone has brought parity to the conflict: a cheap, potentially suicidal tool that nonetheless offers abundant reach. Turkish Bayraktar drones have followed the initial wave, alongside a broader diversification of unmanned systems.
There is more than air power at stake. Ukrainians still consider destroying the Kerch Strait bridge as a viable plan, the critical supply link to Crimea, and they anticipate naval drone models like Sea Baby to strike from the water and threaten its pillars.
2. The “Transparent Battlefield”
General Dacoba has observed that commanders once faced the problem of what lay beyond the hill; modern commanders face an excess of information and the challenge of making sense of it all. Ukraine has launched a new version of the battlefield built around sensor fusion, connecting every tank, every ship, every squad, every vehicle, every command post, surveillance drones, attack drones, helicopters, and fighters into a cloud for intelligence collection, target localization, and coordinated strikes.
Dacoba calls this the “transparent battlefield.” Attacks on Russian command posts and the Donbas New Year’s Eve shelling, when hundreds of soldiers were signaling the year using their phones, exposed positions and numbers. The shift means that in modern warfare the key actors are not only the defense minister and generals but also the minister of digital transformation.
The Ukrainian minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, proudly announced at the start of the year that drones, combined with artillery, destroyed 73 Russian targets in a single day, including tanks and major ammunition depots. His news underscores how a fatigued army can still push forward with smart tech and steady support from allies.
Ukraine’s resilience is reinforced by the spread of the citizen app ePPO. Civilian smartphones in Ukraine relay sightings of enemy aircraft, missiles, drones, and other vehicles to the armed forces. The service has added 400,000 new eyes to the Ukrainian intelligence picture. Public messaging encourages people in remote areas to download the app, since information from outlying regions can be decisive for defense—perhaps even saving lives by alerting distant relatives in danger.
3. Artificial Intelligence, Better with Satellites
The discussion does not revolve around fictional systems but real, practical AI tools provided by the United States and the United Kingdom to help Ukraine digest the flood of data. Enhanced battlefield connectivity has made a strong case that by the third year of fighting, the tired Ukrainian forces will take a breath while waiting for ammunition and will begin to test swarm drone tactics, deploying coordinated, machine-led assaults to overwhelm Russian defenses—potentially even pressing toward Moscow.
Early in the conflict, Western tech giants such as Microsoft proved pivotal in supporting Ukraine’s data processing and analysis. Yet there were setbacks, including a year ago when Elon Musk cut Starlink access to Kyiv. Still, the country pressed on, refining an AI-assisted program to target the Russian fleet in the Black Sea, though it had to pause those plans when the access was interrupted.
From the Ukraine crisis emerges a future where drones, citizen-sourced information apps, and AI are inseparably linked on the battlefield. But this innovation also raises political and moral questions. Colonel José Luis Calvo of the Ministry of Defense notes that autonomous weapons pose ethical challenges: a decision path that could produce harm to humans should involve human oversight, though technology continues to push toward greater autonomy. Calvo adds that solving this ethical dilemma and the rise of AI-guided weapons will shape future military operations, and there is hope that international efforts might eventually restrain a trend toward increasingly ungovernable battlefields.