How Ukraine Is Winning The Drone War And Beating Their Combat Exhaustion
Technology, battle psychology, and the new American green light for action
The Trump administration is no longer involved in ceasefire negotiations or peace talks between Russia and Ukraine. “We were the only ones both Russians and Ukrainians were willing to talk to”, Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Marco Rubio has explained. “So we got involved. Unfortunately, it didn’t yield results. That’s the point.” Pointless peace talks are pointless. Rubio stood before a NATO backdrop at the Foreign Ministers Summit when he said this. The optics are intentional.
The new Trump policy is the boldest American stance on Ukraine yet: they are allowed to win. World War III is canceled. Nobody is afraid of Oreshnik missiles and rattling nuclear sabers. Russia will not exert leverage on Kyiv through Washington or Europe. Volodymyr Zelenskyy is free to unleash his weapons on Russia wherever and however he wants. Ukrainians are allowed to win as much as they want. This is a very new attitude from the Americans.
Ukraine has in fact started winning. In the south of Zaporizhzhia Oblast, where the Ukrainian ‘middle strike’ campaign has made a total wreck of Russian logistics, the ‘land corridor’ to Crimea is increasingly threatened by Ukrainian advances. The pace is not fast, at least not yet, but the local counterattacks in this sector seem to be growing in intensity.
‘Middle strike’, the doctrinal shift that brought on this new state of the battlefield, is a package of tactics and technological solutions, primarily Starlink. This package has extended the campaign against Russian logistics from 12 miles (20km), the so-called ‘drone wall’, out to more than 60 miles (100 km) from the zone of contact. Every military Telegram channel is warning readers about the growing effectiveness of this campaign, especially in the southern direction. Their alarms get more substantial every week as the effects of the ‘middle strike’ campaign tell at the front.
Ukraine has made or bought millions of drones. European and American manufacturing has allowed Ukraine to scale up this ‘middle strike’ capability faster than Russia. Production increases all the time in a competitive environment where cycles of failure and redesign are fast, and have to be cheap. Now the Ukrainian drones are forming up at operational levels, in depth, replacing close air support and artillery and missiles in that attritional role at a tiny fraction of the unit cost. But at what human cost?
