Ukraine has made itself indispensable to the West

A country that used to plead for aid is now one of the West’s most valuable security assets. 

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An FP-5 "Flamingo" cruise missile at an undisclosed location in Ukraine on Nov. 16, 2025. (Efrem Lukatsky/AP)

By Oleksii Reznikov [see also] and Dalibor Rohac [see also]; see also

Oleksii Reznikov, who served as Ukraine’s deputy prime minister from 2020-21 and minister of defense from 2021-23, is a distinguished fellow at GLOBSEC. Dalibor Rohac is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Four years into the full-scale war, the world’s most capable militaries are coming to Ukraine to buy weapons. Ukraine and the Pentagon are moving to finalize a deal that would send Ukrainian-made drones to the United States for testing on American soil. Meanwhile, last week in Kyiv, Germany’s defense minister signed an agreement to launch “Brave Germany,” a joint program to codevelop innovative armaments with Ukrainian firms.

It’s a remarkable reversal. Until recently, Kyiv was seen as the supplicant in Western capitals. Today, Ukraine is more sovereign, more capable and more independent than at any point since it declared statehood in 1991. It has made itself both unconquerable by Moscow and indispensable to Washington, Berlin and others. 

Ukraine’s exploits on the battlefield are reshaping 21st-century warfare. For centuries, military doctrine rested on a simple principle: Bigger nations win wars. More precisely, the nation with the wealth, population and will to field the larger army would inevitably dominate its adversary. Ukraine has buried that principle.

Russia’s military budget has grown several times since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, reaching 10 percent of gross domestic product in 2025, or half of Russia’s public expenditure. And it will likely expand further as Russia’s public finances receive a boost from high oil prices. The size of its active-duty personnel has also increased, from around 1 million to 1.5 million.

Yet the pace of Russian advances has been in steady decline this year. In April, Russia even recorded a net loss of territory it controls in Ukraine — in part the result of replacing its wounded and fallen with hastily trained recruits. Since the beginning of this year, Russia has been losing around 35,000 troops per month, outpacing its declining capacity for recruitment. Increased signing bonuses and a range of other benefits such as loan forgiveness, free tuition and even free land have not changed the grim calculus.

Ukraine’s regular armed forces numbered around 260,000 in 2022, at the start of the full-scale invasion. Today, approximately 1 million Ukrainians are at arms. But the 750,000-plus civilians who put on the uniform aren’t conscripts in a Russian sense. They are engineers, coders and entrepreneurs running drone workshops out of garages and writing targeting software between artillery shifts. Necessity is the mother of invention, and war conjures up all sorts of necessities. Ukraine has its own problems with mobilization. But all told, it has successfully met the moment by leveraging its capacity to innovate.

The contact line with Russia is some 745 miles long, and the so-called kill zone is 15 to 30 miles deep, controlled on both sides by unmanned ground vehicles, aerial drones and maritime platforms. The mathematics of this kind of war are unforgiving. A $500 first-person-view drone can destroy a multimillion-dollar Russian tank. A $1,000 3D-printed interceptor can knock down a $35,000 Shahed. Whoever can manufacture cheaper, faster and at scale wins. Currently, Ukraine is winning that race.

The massed breakthrough that defined 20th-century land war is today all but impossible. The Iran war has already taught some of these hard lessons to the United States. U.S. allies manning Patriot missile batteries spent millions of dollars per shot to swat down Iranian drones that cost tens of thousands apiece. Their interceptor stocks started running low long before Tehran’s did. But the math alone is just a signal that the old way of doing things will no longer suffice. True adaptation will mean learning to fight in a different way. And Ukraine has much to teach its partners.  

As a recent GLOBSEC report argues, the solution lies in “joint production, industrial integration, and long-term knowledge transfer.” Under “Brave Germany,” Berlin and Kyiv will jointly produce AI-enabled medium-range drones, with an initial 5,000 of them earmarked for Ukrainian forces. But German forces, too, could benefit. They currently lack any deep-strike capacity. Analysts are speculating that the collaboration could lead to further refinement of Ukraine’s own FP-5 “Flamingo” ground-launched missile.

As for the Pentagon’s draft agreement, testing drones on U.S. soil is likely only the first step. In the document’s preamble, the two sides reportedly evince a “common interest in future co-operative production, development, or purchase of Ukrainian technology.”

Ukraine is no longer merely a recipient of Western aid but a co-creator of Western defense capability. That fact reframes the entire debate about support. Make no mistake, the war remains grueling. Ukraine’s recent successes at inflicting pain on Russia do not mean that victory is at hand. Indeed, the situation remains precarious. So the West needs to ask itself whether it’s better off with a sovereign, technologically advanced Ukraine, or with a defeated and occupied one.

Investing in Ukraine is an investment in European security. It buys time and helps prepare Europe, and the West more broadly, for all the wars to come. It turns out that Ukraine is not the West’s problem. It is, in fact, a solution.

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What readers are saying

This summary is AI-generated. AI can make mistakes and this summary is not a replacement for reading the comments.

The conversation explores various perspectives on Ukraine's resilience and innovation in its conflict with Russia, drawing parallels to historical struggles for independence. Participants highlight Ukraine's strategic use of drone technology and its ability to challenge larger military forces, contrasting this with perceived shortcomings in the U.S. military-industrial complex. There is criticism of former President Trump's policies towards Ukraine, with some commenters expressing admiration for Ukraine's tenacity and suggesting it could be a valuable NATO partner. The discussion also touches on geopolitical dynamics, including the U.S.'s role in supporting Ukraine and the broader implications for global military strategies.