When Russia first tried to steal Ukraine’s Donbas region by sending soldiers and armed gangs to take over government buildings and hold gunpoint elections, there was little that the Ukrainian military could do but send a few poorly paid, ill equipped and weakly manned army units.
It was a bad time to be a Ukrainian soldier. Salaries were unpaid, theft of army supplies was rampant, and in a good year only about one in ten of the country’s combat brigades actually could take the field. In those days a Kyiv waitress earned more than a line officer.
Things were so bad in Mariupol on May 9, 2014, that one junior Ukrainian mechanized infantry officer, confronted by separatist crowds and barricades blocking his tiny column from driving to the local city hall, had zero air power, artillery, support units or even tanks or mortars behind him. No one knew about drones. His chain of command didn’t seem to want to help. As the incident played out, that young Ukrainian army major aged 31 decided he had few options but to order his driver to ram a BMP fighting vehicle into the roadblock at full speed. Russian content creators had been on hand and hoped to record government troops firing at “peaceful” civilians but there was no content.
The Mariupol mayor’s office returned to government control and remained Ukrainian until Russia invaded a second time, in 2022. When that happened, most of Ukraine’s neighbors and allies said the Kremlin would demolish the Ukrainian army in days.
Now that once obscure Ukrainian officer, Major General Mykhailo Drapaty, is the supreme commander of the biggest and by many measures most technologically advanced army in Europe: the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU).
In 1991 the AFU was a shadow and Ukraine’s territory was a textbook undefended vacuum into which the Kremlin hard and soft power could only expand.
In two decades of hybrid warfare and more than a decade of open warfare, the Kremlin has tried to destroy the AFU. But it hasn’t worked. Instead of eliminating resistance in Ukraine, Russian hybrid war and conventional war assault have created a battle-tested armed adversary whose sole purpose is destroying Russian soldiers and military equipment as efficiently as possible. They have become extremely good at it and they are improving daily.As Ukraine celebrates its 35th year of independence, the Kremlin is reckoning with a war-hardened enemy that is more agile and more ruthlessly able to find and exploit Russian weak points than any adversary faced by Russia in two centuries, at least. Unlike in peacetime NATO, Ukraine’s armed forces aren’t just hoping to be prepared to fight a modern war. They are serious about being able to fight.
More than anyone, the Ukrainian people are fully convinced that the only way to contain Russian aggression is to field an army able not just to stop Russia’s armed forces, but to make the Kremlin regret attacking in the first place. The catalogue of Ukrainian military advances driven equally by the basic instinct of self-defense and often peculiar “allied” strings on certain weapons donated to Ukraine, and even more by the US’ wholesale halt to entire arms assistance packages, is dizzying.
Ukraine has become the free world’s most prolific howitzer manufacturer with the 155mm Bohdana, its Neptune cruise missiles have sunk the Russian Black Sea Fleet’s biggest warship (and flagship), and waves of sleek missile-drones, stubby pusher-prop drones, along with proper cruise missiles and long-winged deep reconnaissance robot spy planes, all of it domestically-developed, wing their way into Russia, usually 300+ aircraft nightly.
For years the Kremlin has asserted its national air defense network was the world’s most effective. Ukraine’s drone swarms say something different.
In July 2026 alone, Ukrainian drones struck more than 200+ shadow fleet tankers and other ships and 1,000+ cargo trucks. According to Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces – a branch of service invented by the AFU – every three months Ukrainian tactical drones eliminate about 70,000-80,000 Russian soldiers and about 3,000-5,00 Russian combat vehicles, or a force bigger than the British army.
In the AFU, AI-assisted drone targeting was experimental six months ago. Now the tech is standard for strike packages beyond 30 km (19 miles) from the front.
AFU thinking is: Modern war is fought with drones.
In 2025, factories and volunteers reportedly delivered four million drones to the troops and in 2026 the figure appears on track to reach 7 million. Europe’s two most prolific drone manufacturers, Croatia and Turkey, likely together manufacture around 400-500,000 drones annually. The US output is probably half that.
Ukrainian military software engineers, in the old days many hackers and computer gamers, have revolutionized military data flows and pushed apps down to the soldier level so that any fighter with a smart phone (and the right access) can see every single spotted Russian tank and soldier on the ground. This also includes any drone or missile seen by the country’s air defense network in the sky, at the punch of a few buttons.
In 2023-24, Ukraine’s allies warned that their own armies lacked proper radars and fighter jets and interceptor missiles to counter swarms of cheap Russian Shahed drones attacking Ukraine. Creating an air defense network unlike any other on Earth, the Ukrainians mounted thousands of acoustic sensors across the country, data-linked them together, and built the software that analyzed the digital acoustic data to compute the Russian drone was and where it was flying – all in real time.
On July 30, a single Russian cruise missile either wayward or intended to test NATO air defenses flew about 60 miles into Poland, was not intercepted, and blew up in a farm field. That same night Ukrainian air defenses claimed that of 61 Russian cruise missiles violating Ukrainian air space, its forces shot down 53. Some of the Ukrainian shootdowns were by 30-year-old F-16s cast off by NATO air forces as too old for modern war.
The bottom line? Thanks to lucrative energy exports to the West, the Kremlin in the 2000s reasserted control over the Russian people and economy and poured resources into rearmament.
The US and Europe initially mostly ignored growing Russian military power, then dismissed it as too weak to worry NATO, and later NATO states seemed to conclude Russian military power was too strong to oppose. Better to sacrifice countries like Georgia and Ukraine than confront Russia seriously.
The AFU’s fighting men and women have turned those calculations upside down. Where Russia previously once faced no substantial military obstacle between itself and NATO, there now is a large, technologically adaptive and battle-hardened one million man army not just able to interfere, but actively working hard day and night to invent new ways to harm Russian military capacity, even beyond the Urals.
Worse for Russia, Ukraine’s armed forces are backed by a Ukrainian nation with very few exceptions convinced freedom must be fought for and that appeasing Russia only encourages Russian military aggression.
For Ukraine’s neighbors and allies, the metamorphosis of the AFU from an organization unable to find fuel for its tanks, into a force fully capable of fighting the armed forces of the Russian Federation to a standstill, is geopolitical earthquake.
For Russia, ironically, the rise of the AFU and Ukrainian armed forces arguably achieved one of Vladimir Putin’s 2022 war aims – sideline NATO from European security and split up the alliance if possible. Just not the way he intended.
From the point of view of a Kremlin looking to expand westwards in accordance with classic Russian geopolitical strategy, NATO has indeed, finally, more than three decades after the break-up of the Soviet Union, been at least marginalized. But even if NATO failed to deter Russia in the past and can’t decide what to about Russia now, Ukraine at 35 years old is no longer a soft target.
Instead, between Russia and Europe, stand the men and bayonets of the AFU: the most combat-capable and lethal army on the European continent.