May 31, 2026:
In late March the NATO commander, with a team of analysts and experts, visited the Ukrainian capital. The first meeting provided a nasty surprise, when the NATO team was told that currently Europe is not prepared to defend itself against Russian forces armed with drones.
The Ukraine War confirmed that Europe cannot sustain a near-peer war between industrialized nations. Ammunition is being spent faster than it can be produced, and European stockpiles, production, and preparations were assembled for limited operations, not sustained medium-intensity war. Ukraine is expected to produce nearly 10 million drones this year. NATO must similarly shift to mass drone production on a scale, where affordability and the capability to upgrade production matter as much as the technological development of systems. Experts believe there is a crucial need for NATO members to increase their air defenses since large-scale modern warfare, as seen in the Ukraine and Iran wars, includes strikes on oil storage and refining, internet facilities, and logistics facilities in addition to conventional military targets.
Another aspect of the demonstration was Ukraine’s exceptional military experience and expertise, plus its emphasis on training. These activities lead to success in combat and make possible a growing number of drone attacks on petroleum and electronic manufacturing targets deep inside Russia.
In May 2025 Ukraine and NATO participated in the Hedgehog-25 exercise in Estonia. Four Ukrainian combat veterans demonstrated to representatives from thirteen NATO armed forces the realities of drone warfare. NATO operated as they customarily did and were quickly surprised as Ukrainian drones mined the roads NATO forces used. Another type of Ukrainian drones was sent to put NATO forces under continuous surveillance. Over the next three days the Ukrainian drones destroyed, on paper, most of the NATO military vehicles present as well as NATO tactical headquarters and logistics.
During the years of war in Ukraine, NATO moved from training the Ukrainian military to receiving training from Ukrainian forces. NATO members who led sessions for Ukrainian troops primarily have experience with counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. NATO member countries have not fought a full-scale war against a major industrial military since World War II, Korea and Vietnam.
Two years ago, the Ukrainian Foreign Minister declared that Europe did not know how to fight wars. A year later the commander of the Officer Training Institute at Austria’s Theresian Military Academy, declared that the European defense industry has produced nothing comparable to Ukraine’s FP-5 Flamingo cruise missile. A former Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief claimed that only three countries are prepared for large-scale modern warfare—pro-Western Ukraine and anti-Western Russia and Iran.
Western military instructors lack experience in full-scale 21st-century combat against a major military power. Latvia adopted Ukrainian military experience into its training at its annual joint multinational exercises in early 2026, where for the first time in the history of these exercises, the program was entirely based on presentations by a Ukrainian Special operations unit.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy noted that Poland, NATO’s highest military spender as a share of its gross domestic product, could only shoot down four out of 19 drones during Russia’s September 2025 incursion. In the first few days of the current Iran conflict, the United States and its Gulf allies used nearly 1,000 Patriot interceptor missiles, which cost approximately $3–4 million each, against Iranian Shahed drones, which cost $20,000–$50,000 each. In four years of war, Ukraine has received only 600 Patriot interceptor missiles. Ukraine has signed defense contracts with three Gulf states and Jordan to supply Ukrainian anti-drone interceptors, which cost $1,000–3,000 each.
With a shortage of Patriot missiles, Ukraine’s producer of Flamingo missiles and drones, is cooperating with European countries to produce a low-cost air defense system against missiles to rival the U.S. Patriot system by 2027. It has been noted that the Ukrainians are even better at using the Patriot than the Americans. Few expected that Ukrainians would be able to master the Patriot quickly. Now NATO air defense forces are learning from the Ukrainians.
Some analysts have argued that Ukraine has gained the upper hand in the attritional war with Russia since late 2025. Ukraine’s success on the battlefield is becoming recognized by NATO and the Gulf states. As of late March, Ukraine has been killing Russian soldiers at a faster rate than Russia can recruit replacements, not to mention wounded and operational losses. Russian President Vladimir Putin is fearful that moving from voluntary recruitment to full mobilization would be politically destabilizing. Ukraine has increased the volume of its drone attacks and changed to targeting soldiers rather than military equipment. Ukraine’s top drone commander claims that one Ukrainian can kill 400 Russians using unmanned systems for just $878 per kill in materials. Throughout the war, Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded at more than twice the rate of Ukrainian soldiers. Earlier this year, Ukraine killed or wounded over 6,000 Russian troops in only four days.
Ukraine’s recent battlefield gains have been assisted by the denial of Starlink access to Russia and Putin’s decision to ban the Telegram social media app in Russia. Both steps have empowered Ukraine’s military and security forces and undermined Russian military communications. In August 2024, during Ukraine’s military intervention into Russia’s Kursk oblast, Kyiv pioneered the combination of electronic warfare to disable Russian drones and the deployment of swarms of drones to target Russian forces, followed by ground forces moving in and securing territory. In the past three months, Ukrainian forces have recaptured most of Dnipropetrovsk province from Russia and retaken lost territory in Zaporizhzhia province. In Kharkiv province, fighting continues without significant Russian gains. Ukrainian forces are preventing Russian advances in Donetsk oblast. Russia’s 2026 offensive has been slowed along the long front line—this year’s Ukrainian counteroffensive has yielded Kyiv its largest territorial gains since 2023.
Since late 2025, Ukraine has greatly expanded its medium and long-range drone and cruise missile attacks against Russian forces. Ukraine is targeting Russian staging areas and military bases, repair facilities, military factories and warehouses, air defense, Black Sea Fleet vessels, aircraft, helicopters, and energy facilities. Ukraine is destroying Russian air defenses faster than Russia can replace them, and this destruction opens the path to subsequent attacks against other military targets. Ukraine is using domestically produced drones BULAVA and RAM-2X , CDET, Ukrainian Armor, UDI, and SpetsTechnoEksport that have smaller payloads and are decimating Russian air defense systems, including Buk, Tor, Strela, and ZU-23. Ukraine’s longer-range RUBALKA and FP-2 have larger payloads. These strikes have long been conducted by HRU/Ukrainian military intelligence as well as SBU/Ukrainian Security Service, Special Operation Forces, and Unmanned Systems Forces.
Ukrainian attacks on Russian energy infrastructure are having a greater impact than Western sanctions, particularly after the Americans reduced sanctions on Russia following its conflict with Iran. Ukraine is attacking energy facilities thousands of kilometers inside Russia, along with Russian shadow fleet tankers in the Mediterranean Sea from covert Ukrainian bases in Libya. Russian oil exports through Baltic Sea ports have been completely halted after daily waves of Ukrainian drone strikes in Leningrad province closed the Russian Baltic ports of Primorsk and Ust-Luga. Russia has been unable to profit from the increased price of oil due to closure of the Straits of Hormuz because Ukrainian attacks have reduced the capacity of Russian oil export infrastructure.
Ukrainian military technology is welcome in Western stock markets and urgently in demand by the Gulf states in the American conflict with Iran. Swarmer, the first Ukrainian defense company to be listed on Wall Street, had an IPO value of $67 million and had a market cap of $670 million after trading was opened, with initially priced shares of $5 closing at $31. A partner of Green Flag VC, a venture fund focused on Ukrainian defense companies, said the listing broke a barrier for the American investor, recognizing and understanding and having access to the talent of Ukrainian defense tech. Ukrainian defense startups have the capability to take their tech globally now that there is interest in them, and this sets a path for others in the market to emulate.
Ukraine has sent 201 military experts to the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait to assist in countering Iranian attacks, with another 34 experts available for deployment. Ukraine produces 2,000 drone interceptors per day and only requires half of them to counter Russia’s daily drone attacks. Ukraine’s production could be increased if funding is made available.
Ukrainian drone interceptors cost between $1,000 and $3,000 apiece and are more cost-effective than Patriot surface-to-air missiles which cost $3–4 million each. Ten Ukrainian companies produce drone interceptors which include the STRILA, STING, OCTOPUS, P1-SUN and BAYONET. The new JEDI interceptor is also AI-guided to targets but carries a heavier 4-kilogram payload and flies at a speed of 320 kilometers an hour.
[Editor – the first European computer was the British “Bombe” used to decode German Enigma traffic.]
Ukraine has reached this stage because of the legacy of its Soviet military-industrial complex, a large number of technology specialists, and its development in a fundamentally different way from Russia since its independence in 1991. For example, the first computer in Eastern Europe was invented in Kyiv in 1951. The Institute of Cybernetics within the Soviet Ukrainian Academy of Sciences was launched in 1957. The first Encyclopedia of Cybernetics in the world was published in Kyiv in 1973. The Ukrainian information technology sector is valued at over $7.8 billion.
Ukraine’s democratic society is constructed horizontally, allowing for the flourishing of a competitive private defense sector, volunteer groups, and amicable society–business–government relations. Russia’s governments and society are built vertically and where the defense sector remains, as in the Soviet Union, state controlled. Putin is fearful of losing control, as seen in his banning of social media. The Telegram ban has negatively affected the already low level of volunteer recruitment for the Russian army.
Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukraine has mobilized within the country and abroad an army of hundreds of thousands of software developers and engineers who assist the development of military technology and undertake cyber warfare. Competing ideas developed by programmers are sent to tech labs, incorporated into prototypes for the Ministry of Defense, and then tested on the battlefield in a rapid turnaround, which NATO planners are closely studying.
Ukraine’s Delta communication system has been praised by NATO. Western militaries have no equivalent and are plagued by secrecy between branches of the armed forces and between member states’ commands. As seen in the Hedgehog-25 exercise in Estonia, Delta provides Ukrainian armed forces with a real-time display of air, land, and sea conditions on digital maps. Ukrainian forces can communicate with one another securely through Delta’s messenger, which allows for the sharing of intelligence within and outside brigades.
Zelenskyy’s goal is for Ukraine to become a hub for the development of military technology in the West. The goal is to make Ukraine the arsenal of the free world. The investments of many European countries in Ukraine’s defense sector and the proliferation of joint military ventures are assisting this goal.
Ukraine’s new defense sector no longer resembles the Soviet military-industrial complex. It is dominated by the private sector with small defense start-ups brought together in the Brave 1 platform, which Kyiv founded in April 2023 to promote competition and innovation. In March, NATO and Brave 1 launched the first joint innovation program between Ukraine and NATO to bring together defense companies to build solutions tested in war, such as countering drones, strengthening SIGINT and electronic warfare, and autonomous targeting systems. Joint ventures that bring together Western and Ukrainian defense companies are proliferating. In contrast, Russia retains its Soviet era state-controlled military industrial complex, with joint ventures only established with authoritarian Iran, the People’s Republic of China, and North Korea.
Russia’s war against Ukraine has yielded key lessons for NATO to prepare for future wars with Russia. Ukraine’s message about the long-term role it could play in European security, however, is only partly getting through. The United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Poland are presented as Europe’s new defense core. Only Poland, however, spends the NATO-recommended percent of its GDP on defense. Despite these countries making steps to improve their militaries, they still have a long way to go, and Ukraine’s experience can serve as a model for these developments.
Militaries are notoriously slow to change, especially when their business model has been based on decades of large-value purchases of military equipment. Germany’s largest military producer, Rheinmetall, relies on the sale of tanks that are still produced without anti-drone protection, armored personnel carriers, infantry fighting vehicles, and other expensive military equipment.
NATO militaries often rely on expensive equipment that is unable to adapt quickly. Software on Ukraine’s battlefield equipment is updated roughly every two weeks. NATO member-state militaries have typically taken years to update software. In November 2025, the Swedish and Ukrainian defense ministers signed a letter of intent to combine Sweden’s industrial and technological strengths with Ukraine’s battlefield experience and, based on Ukraine having the world’s greatest experience of quickly developing new military technology, reduce the length of Sweden’s innovation cycle.
Before its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia claimed it had the second-best army in the world and would defeat Ukraine in three days Russia failed to secure any of its 2022 objectives in Ukraine. Russia continues to have a Soviet-style, state-controlled military industrial sector, unlike Ukraine, where the defense sector is dominated by private companies. More innovative companies will likely replace large, older military-industrial companies in the near future, as evidenced by Ukraine’s booming defense industry over the past four years.
Russia’s war against Ukraine and the ongoing conflict in Iran demonstrate the importance of cheap drones and drone interceptors costing between $1,000 and $3,000 each. America and its partners fired 1,802 Patriot missiles costing $3 million each in 16 days, twice as many as Ukraine received in four years of war. The expensive U.S.-manufactured Switchblade 300 was sent to Ukraine in 2022, where it produced limited damage in strikes and was brought down by Russian electronic warfare. Similarly costly U.S. Skydio drones failed in combat and were glitchy, hard to repair, brought down by Russian EW, and sometimes could not take off or complete missions.
America has not responded to Ukrainian offers to assist in unblocking the Strait of Hormuz. Ukraine had already carried out a similar mission when Russia tried to blockade the Black Sea. Ukraine has experience with escorting commercial vessels, demining, protection from air attacks, and overall coordination of such operations.
Ukraine’s defense sector is valued at nearly $70 billion and is rapidly growing in high-tech areas such as air, ground, and sea drones, EW, radars, and software. Ukraine produces 2,000 drone interceptors a day, 1,000 of which can be exported. Ukraine has signed defense contracts with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, and is negotiating with Bahrain, Kuwait, and Oman. On March 17, it was confirmed that Ukrainian interceptors had downed Iranian drones during the ongoing Iran conflict. Ukraine will produce air defense systems, drone interceptors, and anti-ballistic missiles domestically, without foreign components, by 2027.
Ukraine has one million mobilized in its armed forces, national guard, and intelligence services. This number would be reduced to between 300,000 and 350,000 during peacetime. The militaries of NATO members will need to be expanded during both peace and war. Some NATO members are considering the unpopular step of reinstating conscription. In preparation for a potential future war in Europe, NATO countries have much to consider based on what Ukraine has learned in the past four years.