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Radio Free Europe
- August 15, 2026 09:15
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When President Vladimir Putin sent his forces into Ukraine, the Kremlin seemed to be relying on a familiar axiom of European security: the sheer number of Russian troops, backed by vast Soviet-era reserves and nuclear power, would crush resistance.
More than four years after Moscow's full-scale invasion, that assumption has been almost completely disproven. Ukraine survived, denied Russia the quick victory it had hoped for, and transformed the conflict into a grueling, high-tech war.
It has developed a cycle of innovation that, according to Joshua Huminski, senior vice president for national security and intelligence at the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress, is moving faster than anything the US or other NATO countries are doing.
However, experts say that Moscow's growing reliance on North Korea for ammunition, missiles and troops should be taken neither as evidence that Russia is collapsing nor, conversely, that its military will emerge from the war stronger than before.
The picture they present is more complicated.
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Ukraine has inflicted heavy losses on Russian conventional forces and exposed deep failures in its planning and doctrine. At the same time, Moscow continues to adapt to the battlefield, expand weapons production, and learn from a war of a kind it has never faced before.
"Russia's conventional ground forces in Ukraine are steadily weakening," Huminski told Radio Free Europe (RFE/RL). But he warned that it would be a "mistake" to assess Russian military power solely from this perspective.
Russia's Northern and Pacific fleets have significant capabilities, he said, while its strategic nuclear forces have remained largely intact and Moscow still possesses capabilities that are capable in cyberspace and space.
The question, therefore, may no longer simply be whether Russia remains the second-most powerful military in the world. The issue is what Ukraine has exposed about the limits of Russian power and whether adaptation can prevent these weaknesses from becoming decisive.
Failed fast offensive and the race to adapt
Russia's problems began with its own assumptions. Putin's intelligence services, Huminski said, had portrayed Ukraine as a state that was expected to collapse quickly.
Instead, Ukrainian resistance, Russian operational failures, Western aid, and rapid adaptation produced a very different war. The defense of Hostemel, near Kiev, where Ukrainian forces repelled elite Russian airborne troops, became a prime example of how Moscow’s plans could be thwarted. Small-unit tactics and Western anti-tank weapons also exploited weaknesses in the advancing Russian armor.
Since then, the war has become a relentless race to adapt. Drones, electronic warfare, and long-range strikes have transformed the battlefield, making movement increasingly dangerous and helping to create a closely monitored “kill zone” along the front.
Maria Snegovaya, senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, told REL that Ukraine has created a significant technological leap and is increasingly using drones to compensate, at least partially, for the lack of manpower.
This advantage is real, but she did not describe it as permanent. The technological landscape has changed several times during the war, Snegovaya said. Ukraine currently has the upper hand in key drone technologies, but Russia is steadily catching up, dismantling and copying successful innovations and developing countermeasures.
The cycle is accelerating: what once took much longer now happens in a matter of months. Therefore, neither Huminski nor Snegovaya sees the war as a simple story of Ukrainian technological brilliance defeating an outdated Russian army.
Both describe a much more dynamic confrontation: Ukraine has gained a significant technological boost and exposed serious Russian vulnerabilities, while Russia continues to adapt and absorb lessons learned from the battlefield, even as its conventional ground forces are suffering heavy damage and extraordinary losses.
North Korea is filling the gaps
Moscow’s partnership with Pyongyang is perhaps the clearest illustration of the extraordinary demands of this war. North Korea has supplied munitions and missiles and sent troops, some of which were deployed to the Russian Kursk region to help repel a surprise Ukrainian incursion in 2024.
But Snegovaya said Russia's reliance on foreign aid must be understood in the context of its extraordinary efforts at domestic production.
Moscow is waging a grueling war, in which losses go beyond manpower, including ammunition and weapons systems. “Russia has actually been able to produce a lot,” she said, noting that Moscow has “significantly increased production” of systems, including drones, electronic warfare equipment, air defense, tanks and missiles.
But Russian industry has not solved its problem. The demands of war are so great, Snegovaya said, that even drastically expanded production cannot fully meet battlefield needs or enable Russia to build up significant reserves. This helps explain North Korea's role.
Huminski also said that the North Korean troops help Moscow manage a politically sensitive manpower problem. Their use could hold positions and free up Russian soldiers for other tasks, without forcing Putin to order a full, politically risky mobilization.
Therefore, this is neither a simple military collapse nor evidence of a smooth Russian resurgence. Russia is using foreign partners to fill specific gaps while trying to maintain and expand its military-industrial base.
According to Snegovaya, the Kremlin continues to expand production facilities and prepare for a long war. But this effort is accompanied by increasing costs. Russia's military-industrial sector is largely financed by the state, while the economic pressure of the ongoing war continues to grow.
Ukraine changed its calculation, but drones haven't won the war
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Ukraine entered the war with a huge conventional disadvantage. It could not face Russia tank for tank, shell for shell, or soldier for soldier. Its response has been to change its cost calculation.
Cheap drones and other rapidly developed systems can threaten much more expensive equipment, and, Snegovaya said, Ukraine has been able to use drones to compensate for a significant shortage of soldiers.
But she also highlighted the limits of this advantage. Drones have not made soldiers irrelevant, and Ukraine's problems with soldiers remain serious. The defensive "kill zone" may help hold the front line, but it has not won the war.
Meanwhile, Russia is adapting its methods. Snegovaya described a force that combines Soviet-style approaches and legacy production capacity with drones, electronic warfare, and rapidly evolving battlefield practices.
Russia is suffering enormous losses and facing increasing pressure on its economy. But it retains several asymmetric advantages, including the capacity to use drones in very large numbers, experience in their use, and a vast amount of battlefield data collected by combat units and operators.
Western countries “need to not only look at what Ukraine is doing, but also pay attention to what Russia is doing,” what lessons it is learning and how it is adapting, Huminski said. “If we don’t do that and just see it as a conventionally weakened Russian force, it could backfire on us in the future.”
Novorossiysk shows how the war is expanding
Ukraine's technological adaptation is also changing the geography of war.
In the Black Sea, Ukraine has repeatedly threatened Russian naval forces and infrastructure, despite entering the conflict with nothing approaching a conventional navy capable of confronting the Russian fleet. As Russian assets have moved away from Crimea, Ukraine’s ability to strike Novorossiysk, its easternmost naval hub, has shown that moving away from the front does not guarantee security.
"The Russian fleet, at this point, is obviously very vulnerable everywhere in the Black Sea," Snegovaya said.
The broader importance is strategic.
Ukraine is increasingly combining its defensive effort at the front with attacks in depth against military and other targets inside Russia, aiming to inflict costs beyond the battlefield.
Snegovaya said the attacks have helped to increase anxiety within Russia and calls for an end to the war. But she warned that public opinion plays only a limited role in the Kremlin's decision-making. Putin, not public opinion, remains the decider.
Ukraine may currently have the technological edge, she said, but Russia is continuing to respond, including with faster jet-powered drones and efforts to overcome other technological limitations.
Weakened, but deadly
Old measures of military power have been seriously challenged by the war. Pre-war tank and troop numbers did not predict Russia's failures in 2022. But even Russia's staggering losses do not prove it has ceased to be a formidable military power, experts warn.
Ukraine has shattered the myth that sheer numbers of Russian forces alone guarantee victory. It has shown how resilience, rapid innovation, and relatively cheap technology can enable a smaller army to inflict tremendous costs on a much larger one.
However, Russia still has significantly greater resources than Ukraine, a vast military-industrial base, nuclear forces untouched by war, and military capabilities that extend far beyond the hard-hit ground formations fighting in Ukraine.
This does not mean that Russia is winning the adaptation process. Snegovaya emphasized that Ukraine is currently experiencing a technological upswing, while Russia’s economy and military-industrial complex are facing increasing pressure. Nor, she said, is there an analytical consensus on whether Russia can still meaningfully be called the second most powerful military in the world.
The sustainability of Western support for Ukraine may ultimately be one of the most important factors. Ukraine has consistently punched above its weight, Snegovaya said, but its ability to continue the fight remains crucially linked to external financial, technological, intelligence and military support.
Huminski's broader conclusion is that Russia and Ukraine will emerge from this war as two of the most proven and battle-hardened armies in the world.
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Ukraine has dealt a heavy blow to the Russian military, destroying vast amounts of its equipment and exposing weaknesses that Moscow had hoped to hide behind its reputation for overwhelming power. Russia is paying a high price for adapting and is far from solving the fundamental problems that the war has revealed.
Nëse mësimet që Rusia po nxjerr janë të mjaftueshme për të kompensuar humbjet e saj - dhe nëse Ukraina mund ta ruajë ritmin e saj të jashtëzakonshëm të inovacionit - mund të ndikojë shumë në përcaktimin e rezultatit përfundimtar të luftës.
