“Nothing Changed” on the Front Line: A View of Ukraine’s Fifth Year of War
“Nothing Changed” on the Front Line: A View of Ukraine’s Fifth Year of War
Alexandra Vacroux and Yevhenii Malik of the Kyiv School of Economics said Russia’s strikes on Kyiv are escalating while cheap drones and robots hold the front line in place, a shift in warfare that Ukraine’s rivals are studying closely.
In Brief
- Ukraine is pioneering a new kind of warfare in which cheap drones and unmanned ground vehicles hold the front line in place and replace soldiers, Malik said, though funding limits how fast Ukraine can scale them.
- Vacroux said Ukraine’s rivals, including North Korea and China, are learning from the war while the U.S. and Europe are not.
- Russia has intensified strikes on Kyiv since August to make the city unlivable, and Vacroux said Ukraine can rely only on the security guarantee it builds itself.
Amid the fifth year of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, two leaders from the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE) brought a view from the ground to Stanford on October 14. Dr. Alexandra Vacroux and Yevhenii Malik spoke in a discussion moderated by Kathryn Stoner, the Mosbacher Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Satre Family Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI).
Dr. Vacroux is KSE’s vice president for strategic engagement and a longtime scholar of Russia. Malik, a former Marine infantry sergeant, fought in the 2022 battle for Mariupol and spent nearly two and a half years as a prisoner of war in Russian captivity before being released in a prisoner exchange in 2024. He now leads undergraduate national security and defense programs at KSE.
The talk came days after the U.S. president announced plans to buy Russian diesel. The speakers also reworked their presentation following that morning’s news, which Vacroux described as a cutoff of Starlink and Starshield service for Ukrainian forces.
Running through the conversation was a larger point: Ukraine is fighting a different kind of war, one in which inexpensive drones and robots do work that once took soldiers and costly weapons, and the lessons reach well beyond Ukraine.
A Campaign to Make Kyiv Unlivable
Vacroux said Russia has spent the months since August trying to make Kyiv unlivable, hoping residents will leave and Ukraine will surrender. Drones struck the city’s northern and southern bridges within four days of each other earlier this month. The day before the event, 39 ballistic missiles and 120 drones hit the capital, and most of the missiles were aimed at power stations and substations. Since August, she said, air alerts have been almost constant, to the degree that Ukrainians ignore them, and many KSE classes now meet in the basement. Vacroux pointed to the London Blitz and said research on how wars end gives little reason to expect this approach to work.
A Front Line Frozen by Drones
Malik said the front line has barely moved in nearly five years. Drones have extended the “kill zone” to as much as 50 miles, and Ukraine is turning to unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) that commanders believe could replace up to 60% of frontline infantry. By his estimate, Ukraine needs about 500,000 a year and currently produces roughly 20,000. Each of Ukraine’s more than 100 combat brigades now has an unmanned battalion, he said, and those units account for about 80% of Russian casualties.
Cheaper Weapons, Changing Math
Cost is central to that shift. Malik said a Shahed-type attack drone costs between $50,000 and $150,000, while a fighter jet starts around $15 million and a Patriot missile can cost up to $4 million, which makes conventional air defense unsustainable against mass drone attacks. Ukraine answered with its own interceptor drones, he said, and builds a drone-missile hybrid called Flamingo at an unofficial cost of about $600,000, compared with $1.5 million or more for a Tomahawk. A high-intensity war, he argued, is won with cheap systems that can be made in large numbers, not with a few hundred advanced aircraft, and Ukraine’s private defense firms are finding new battlefield uses for the technology nearly every month.
The constraint, both speakers said, is money more than ingenuity. Ukraine spends about 40% of its GDP on defense, compared with roughly 10% in Russia, and 3.5% in the U.S. Vacroux urged Europe to disburse a promised €90 billion loan faster and to resolve the impasse over frozen Russian assets.
A War the World Is Watching
The speakers noted that Ukraine’s rivals are studying the war more closely than its partners. Malik said North Korea has supplied ballistic missiles and soldiers to Russia, and Vacroux said the country is bringing that experience home for a possible fight with South Korea. China, she said, is doing the same as it thinks about Taiwan. The Americans and Europeans, by contrast, are mostly not gaining firsthand experience, and cutting off Ukrainian partnerships cuts off the chance to learn without sending their own troops into that kind of war. Malik predicted that U.S. forces will soon face jet-powered Shaheds in the Middle East, and said neither the United States nor Europe has an affordable way to stop them at scale.
Pressure on Russia, and on Europe
Vacroux said sanctions and Ukrainian strikes on refineries are straining Russia’s economy, though economic pressure alone is “necessary but not sufficient” to end the war. She also described a rise in Russian sub-threshold attacks on Europe, including cyberattacks, arson and drone incursions, which she said test the credibility of NATO’s Article 5.
Peace Talks, Nuclear Threats, and the Will to Keep Fighting
When asked about negotiations, Malik was blunt. “Negotiations are one very big myth,” he said. Vacroux noted that some channels still produce prisoner exchanges. Both viewed Russian nuclear threats as deterrence more than intent. Vacroux said about three-quarters of Ukrainians want elections to wait until the war ends, and 62% say they will keep fighting “as long as it takes.” Malik expected another wave of residents to leave Kyiv this winter.
Vacroux closed by sharing her belief that Ukraine’s only dependable security guarantee is the one it builds itself. “It cannot rely on the United States. It cannot rely on companies like Starlink. It cannot rely on the Europeans.”
View a full recording of the conversation:
*This article was supported by research using Claude. All outputs were reviewed by humans, and the final expression was produced by the author.
