Ukraine Is Not Losing. Russia Is Not Winning. - The Atlantic

Listen−1.0x+<br>Seek<br>0:0012:06

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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>Phillips Payson O’Brien: Putin can no longer hide his catastrophe<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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...