Is Russia Finally Losing Its War of Choice in Ukraine?

The raw numbers don’t lie, and they carry a stern lesson for the U.S.

Image courtesy of Al Jazeera

Lately, we’ve been a tad preoccupied with our own debacle of a war in Iran to pay much attention to another major war nearby. But we really should, because it sure seems like Russia is starting to lose that war to Ukraine.

Putin ordered an all-out attack on Ukraine in February 2022. Against all odds, that initial assault failed, as I explained in 50 days of reporting on the first part of that war. Four years later, Russia’s quest to defeat its far smaller and poorer neighbor is failing in ways that the numbers make impossible to ignore.

With so many terrible headlines to digest these days, it’s encouraging to see real evidence that a small, tenacious and adaptable country, through its valiant people and leaders, can stand up to a brutal dictator and prevail.

Losing the war they couldn’t lose, by the numbers

Russian casualties. According to Ukraine’s General Staff, Russian forces have sustained roughly 1.34 million casualties—killed or wounded—since February 2022. That’s a staggering figure, but the recent numbers are even worse. President Zelenskyy reported in March that Russia had lost nearly 100,000 soldiers in just the first three months of 2026—roughly 33,000 per month—with 90 percent of those casualties attributed to Ukrainian drones. Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, General Oleksandr Syrskyi, put the ratio at roughly six Russian losses for every Ukrainian one. As Euromaidan Press reported in early May, Russia is now losing soldiers faster than it can replace them for the fifth consecutive month.

The Russian economy. The Moscow Times reports that Russian GDP growth has slowed to around one percent, down from above four percent just two years ago, a figure initially fueled by war spending. Recession is now a realistic possibility. The Bank of Finland’s economic bulletin found that Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, the financial cushion built up over decades of oil revenues, has lost more than half its value since the invasion began. Taxes are increasing, social spending is falling, and Russia’s central bank is warning of a severe labor shortage. Putin himself publicly admitted that Russia’s GDP shrank in the first two months of 2026.

Russia’s oil woes. Russia Matters publishes a war report card, and last week it documented that Ukrainian drone strikes have forced roughly 40 percent of Russia’s oil export capacity offline. According to Bloomberg, in early 2026 Ukrainian forces hit the Baltic export terminals at Ust-Luga and Primorsk five times in ten days, cutting oil flows to just a third of normal and costing Russia more than a billion dollars in a single week. The New York Times assessed that the campaign has damaged or destroyed approximately 20 percent of Russia’s total refining capacity since 2024.

This isn’t 20th century warfare

How could all this be happening at once? There are several contributing factors, but one overarching theme emerges from military analysts covering the war. Russia has been fighting a 20th-century war, but Ukraine is waging a 21st-century one.

Michael Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and expert on the Russian military, has argued that the conventional metrics of battlefield success obscure what’s really happening. Kofman wrote that “territory changing hands is a lagging indicator for what’s happening” inside the two forces—and that “gradually then suddenly” transitions are possible as a result. And what is happening inside Russia’s forces is apparently a slow-motion collapse.

When Putin first ordered the invasion, Russian military doctrine rested on a familiar model: mass, hierarchy and firepower. He sent in columns of tanks. The command structure was centralized. Industrial-scale logistics flowed through a controlled supply chain.

Putin and his generals might be forgiven for thinking this was the way to go. After all, it was the doctrine that won World War II and that crushed Chechnya. The assumption was that Ukraine—outgunned, outnumbered and facing the second-largest military in the world—would fold in days.

Ukraine’s response, as the Center for European Policy Analysis documented in a recent report, was something Russia’s top-down system did not anticipate: a wartime “innovation culture” comprising small Ukrainian companies, front-line engineers, small military units and private developers. Together, following that initial shock, they began collaborating to produce a wartime loop of design, battlefield test and rapid iteration. Through this system, Ukraine weaponized commercial technology into military systems faster than traditional defense procurement cycles could.

The numbers are extraordinary. CEPA reports that Ukraine is now producing roughly eight million first-person view (FPV) drones per year. These are small, unmanned, cheap and agile single-use aircraft that have effectively replaced artillery as the dominant tool of the battlefield. Zelenskyy’s data showed Ukrainian drones hitting 33,000 Russian troops in December 2025 alone, up from 16,000 in July. Importantly, and to the consternation of Russia’s military planners, that monthly toll rose every single month through the second half of 2025.

I had the same question you may have at this point. How did Ukraine succeed in beating mighty Russia in the “drone wars”? Weren’t Russian drones the ones wreaking havoc on Ukrainian cities and military positions? When I looked into it, I learned something rather astonishing: Ukraine’s edge in drone warfare is based on something so simple it’s nearly absurd: a fishing reel made of glass.

How to defeat a military superpower’s jammers

Standard FPV combat drones communicate by radio. The remote operator sends control signals through the air, and the drone responds in real time. That sounds great, but there’s a problem. Radio signals can be jammed. When Ukraine began to deploy drones at scale, Russia responded with electronic warfare, and for a period it effectively countered Ukraine’s drone threat.

Ukraine’s answer, as documented by GIS Reports journalists who visited front-line drone workshops in January 2026, was to eliminate the radio entirely. It did so using fiber optic cable.

The idea sounds too crazy to work, but fiber-optic drones actually carry a spool of ultra-thin cable as they fly. As a drone moves toward its target, the cable unspools behind it, like a kite on a very long string, maintaining a hardwired connection to the operator. The signal travels as pulses of light through glass, not as radio waves through air. It’s as if the operators are playing a deadly game of “telephone” with a bomb-packed drone on the other end.

Because of this direct connection, there is no frequency to jam, no signal to intercept. As one Ukrainian combat veteran told GIS Reports: “A fiber-optic drone is not designed to conduct 30 to 40 sorties per day. It is intended for a single sortie and a precise strike. Countering it is extremely difficult—so far, only physically shooting it down works.”

This work-around solution emerged out of necessity, through trial and error. As a Carnegie Endowment analysis noted, front-line operators and engineers in workshops near the fighting identified the issue and iterated until they solved it, building “an entirely new category of unmanned weapon.”

To be sure, Russia has copied the technology. But what it cannot copy, as GIS Reports’ analysis put it, is the strategic culture gap. “Russia capitalizes on its scale, whereas Ukraine harnesses innovation through continuous improvement.” Once Russia validates a concept, it can mass-produce it. But the next concept will already have come from Ukraine.

The fleet that “constantly hides”

The same dynamic produced a dramatic result at sea for Ukraine, which had no meaningful navy. Russia had the formidable Black Sea Fleet, one of its most powerful and symbolically important forces, anchored in occupied Crimea.

So Ukraine built naval drones instead.

The Magura V5, a surface drone costing roughly $250,000 per unit, began striking Russian warships costing hundreds of millions of dollars in 2023. By early 2024, as the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings documented in September 2025, Magura drone boats, armed with AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles, had sunk multiple warships, destroyed a Russian helicopter and badly damaged another, and even shot down two Su-30 fighter jets. The Russian Black Sea Fleet has lost an estimated $500 million in assets and now barely operates, venturing at most 25 miles from port to fire missiles before retreating.

As the commander of Ukraine’s naval drone operations told the Washington Times: “They constantly hide.”

Russia tried to build its own naval drone counteroffensive for 2026. But as Euromaidan Press reported just days ago, SpaceX, at Ukraine’s request, blocked Russian access to Starlink satellite communications, and its new drone program collapsed entirely. (Perhaps Elon Musk finally realizes which side he needs to be on.) It turns out, Russia’s naval drones were wholly dependent on commercial Western infrastructure that could simply be switched off. Ukraine’s systems, built from the ground up, exhibit no such dependency.

Two caveats, and a lifeline

Ukraine knows that Russia is not standing still. Ukraine’s own commanders, including the head of the 3rd Assault Brigade, acknowledged last fall that Russia had actually outpaced Ukraine in raw FPV drone numbers by 2025. In short, Russia copies what Ukraine invents and scales it massively. The advantage Ukraine holds is in the speed of the next iteration. This is a real edge, but it’s one Russia is actively working to close.

Importantly, Ukraine’s innovation culture doesn’t run entirely on its own ingenuity. Chatham House’s analysts noted that Ukraine’s adaptability is partly a function of being plugged into a global technology ecosystem that Russia has been progressively cut off from by sanctions.

And then there is the lifeline the United States inadvertently extended. Chatham House assessed that by early 2026, Western sanctions were finally working: Russian oil export revenues had fallen, the economy was contracting and Putin appeared to face genuinely painful choices about sustaining the war. Then the U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Iran sent oil prices soaring as Tehran closed the Strait of Hormuz. Russia, as a major energy exporter, got a massive windfall it did nothing to earn. The Trump administration also temporarily eased sanctions on Russian oil, handing Moscow further relief at exactly the wrong moment. Russia Matters reported that Russia’s budget revenues from oil extraction nearly doubled in March 2026 relative to the month before.

Whether that reprieve holds may prove the pivot point on which the next chapter of this war turns.

A lesson we should take to heart

There is a lesson in all of this that America might wish to apply. We are currently in the thick of our own war, bringing the most expensive, technologically sophisticated military in human history to bear against a far weaker, less sophisticated adversary. Iran cannot match our firepower.

But it may not need to.

Asymmetric warfare follows consistent rules. The weaker side survives by being nimble, cheap and tapped into systems that don’t depend on the infrastructure the stronger side can target. The stronger side struggles because its overwhelming capabilities were built for a different kind of war.

Russia learned this the hard way. It sent its best conventional forces to fight an adversary that had given up on fighting conventionally. The mismatch didn’t show up immediately, as Russia made early gains, held conquered territory and sustained its war narrative for months. But the structural disadvantages for Russia have compounded. Four years later, the tanks are gone from parades in Moscow and its sovereign wealth fund is half empty.

The U.S. of course is not Russia. Our military is more capable, more adaptive, and more technologically sophisticated. But the core lesson of Ukraine is not about any specific weapon or tactic. It’s about what happens when a massive, top-down military machine meets an adversary fighting a fundamentally different war—and whether the big war machine can adapt fast enough to matter.

Russia is failing that test. And as the Strait of Hormuz remains effectively closed, with gas and fertilizer prices soaring and no easy way out of the war Trump started, we may be failing it, too.