OPINION — Two weeks ago, my colleagues and I stood in Dnipro while warning sirens cut across the city and Shahed drones screamed overhead. We had come as a medical-humanitarian delegation to inspect trauma centers that receive the worst of the front’s casualties; instead, we found ourselves in a strike zone, sifting through a debris field that included drone fragments and watching medics pull the wounded from an improvised triage line. A United Nations car park across from the drone strike had been shattered; buildings for two city blocks were heavily damaged; more than thirty civilian casualties were reported.
We traveled with a security team of veteran U.S. special operations personnel made up of Green Berets, former SEALs, and allied SOF veterans who have been fighting and advising in Ukraine since 2019 and earlier. Their presence allowed us safe, rapid access to hospitals, strike sites, and frontline briefings, and their frontline experience provided critical context to what we observed. I mention them not to publicize operations but to make a point: American veterans who have been embedded here for years see the same patterns we do — a war accelerating in tempo and technological reach, but one that could still be won both for Ukraine and the free world.
What we saw that day in Dnipro was not a local catastrophe. It was a live demonstration of how modern, networked war is metastasizing beyond the battlefield and how quickly it could remap the global order unless the West acts now.
The tactical picture in Donbas is of immediate strategic urgency. Russian forces are mounting coordinated pincer operations, advancing from Pokrovsk through Kramatorsk to Slovyansk, designed to encircle and absorb the Donbas region, then push west to take Zaporizhzhia and threaten Dnipro. The fall or isolation of Dnipro would sever east–west logistical and medical corridors, producing a catastrophic collapse in Ukrainian operational tempo and resilience. That outcome would not merely alter front lines; it would force a recalibration of Europe’s entire defense posture. Moreover, Moscow’s likely playbook is predictable: secure territorial gains, press for an immediate ceasefire on favorable terms, and use the pause to move seasoned forces into Belarus to stage further aggression against NATO’s vulnerable Suwałki corridor and the Baltic states.
Holding the frontline in Donbas against those pincer movements requires urgent, concrete material and logistics support. The immediate tactical needs are specific and time-sensitive: Lancet-equivalent loitering munitions in quantities sufficient to strike armor and artillery beyond FPV range; thousands of FPV frames and spares for tactical units; higher-payload fixed-wing drones with enhanced electronic-warfare modules; long-range fiber-optic drones for secure, EW-resistant target acquisition; ISR quadcopters such as DJI Mavic models; heavy-bomber quadcopter drones and Shark and RAM-X systems; additional M119 105 mm howitzers and tens of thousands of rounds (including laser-designated munitions); tons of C4 or Cemtex explosives and initiators; smoke grenades; Starlink terminals and hardened communications kits to keep command-and-control functioning under jamming; unmanned ground vehicles for casualty evacuation under fire; thermal winter clothing for tens of thousands of soldiers; and precision munitions and laser target designators to convert targeting into effect. Rapid delivery of these items before winter is not an optional improvement. It is the single most important determinant of whether Ukrainian units can blunt the pincers and maintain cohesive defense lines.
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The operational challenge is only part of the problem. The more profound danger is industrial and doctrinal: the battlefield is being remade by a global axis of authoritarian actors and by grassroots innovation that together change the tempo of war.
On the state side, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela and shadow networks tied to Wagner, the GRU, the FSB, proxy forces and criminal cartels are not acting independently; they are converging. China supplies much of the critical electronics powering the drone systems we see on the front. Iran provided the Shahed design architecture. North Korea supplies ammunition and manpower. Venezuela and other nodes proliferate systems and tactics across regions. Wagner remnants, clandestine elements and proxy contractors conduct psychological operations, sabotage, and hybrid warfare to stoke fear, hesitation, and distraction to destabilize the West and blunt coordinated timely response. The result is a horizontally linked industrial and doctrinal ecosystem that accelerates lethal innovation on a timeline far faster than Western procurement cycles can match.
Compounding the danger, Ukraine’s defenders have taught us something brutal and clear: the frontline is now a maker space. Volunteer workshops and unit-level innovation labs crank out field-adapted FPV and fixed-wing drones assembled from 3-D-printed parts. Fighters become engineers, iterating designs in days rather than years. Low-cost airframes, priced in the hundreds to low thousands of dollars, are proving operationally decisive. Within two years many of those platforms will be semi- or fully autonomous and capable of swarm behaviors. That combination of authoritarian mass production on one side and decentralized battlefield innovation on the other yields a force-multiplying effect that threatens to swamp Western advantage in both kinetic and non-kinetic domains.
There is also a human reality behind the hardware. While much popular discussion focuses on Ukrainian mobilization shortfalls, the manpower problem may, in fact, be deeper and more structurally damaging for Russia. Moscow’s mobilization has produced a manpower pool that is larger on paper but qualitatively hollow: many conscripts recruited under debt and inducements, reports of chronically ill or terminally ill soldiers sent to the front, widespread morale collapse, and systematic reclassification of killed personnel as missing to avoid payouts. Russia may be hemorrhaging men while failing to sustain unit cohesion and effective rotations. That weakness creates opportunities for Ukraine, if the West supplies the means to exploit it.
Casualty numbers for the Russians are sobering. From January through August 2025 battlefield data indicate more than a quarter million personnel losses and a cumulative toll since 2022 that exceeds one million killed, wounded or missing. Reported kill ratios in some sectors range from three-to-one to fifteen-to-one in favor of Ukrainian forces. Those ratios, while indicative of tactical success, mask the strain: Ukraine’s advantage is sustained only by speed of thinking, of logistics and of resupply. Medical systems are stretched, evacuation chains fray, and field hospitals operate at or beyond capacity. Yet Ukrainian medical practice preserves far more wounded who can return to the fight or to wartime industry than the Russians, whose KIA:WIA ratio is reported abysmally as 1:1.3. Ukrainians value life. Russians do not.
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All of this yields a stark policy imperative: there is a two- to three-month window this winter in which Western action, or inaction, will disproportionately shape outcomes. If the West moves decisively now, Ukraine can stabilize the Donbas, increase pressure on Kremlin command and possibly force fissures within the Moscow-Beijing axis. If the West hesitates, Russia could consolidate gains, demand a favorable ceasefire and use the lull to redeploy and reconstitute forces for broader escalation.
What should America and its allies do?
First, address the immediate tactical needs to hold Donbas through the winter and spring. Prioritize delivery of the specific items listed above and ensure Dnipro’s bridges and trauma centers remain operational. These are the lifelines that keep supplies, casualties, and command flowing to and from the front.
Second, treat this tactical issue in Donbas, Zaporizhzhia and Dnipro as a strategic emergency for Europe and allied forces. Otherwise, Russia will push its advantage to secure a bad faith ceasefire and shift its aggression towards Europe and beyond.
Third, institutionalize the agility we see on the ground. Create micro-procurement authorities, rapid-fielding channels, vetted modular kits and secure surge logistics so that front-line innovation can be turned into operational capability within days, not months.
Fourth, mount a coordinated counter-industrial campaign to choke the supply chains and machine tools that fuel authoritarian drone production. That means targeted sanctions, export controls on critical components and GNSS substitutes, and diplomatic pressure on transshipment nodes. It means using financial and law enforcement tools to disrupt proxy financing and criminal exploitation of battlefield lessons.
Fifth, broaden our conception of the battlefield. Hybrid operations are global — from psychological operations in Europe to proxy sabotage across the globe and the potential adaptation of FPV tactics by criminal/extremist networks in the West. Defense planning must be whole-of-government and whole-of-hemisphere, integrating intelligence, law enforcement, financial mechanisms and coalition logistics.
Finally, make the moral case plainly: this fight is not simply about Ukrainian territory. It is a contest over whether the global commons — maritime lanes, satellite-enabled logistics and cyberspace — will be sustainably weaponized by authoritarian states and their proxies. If we cede initiative in the technology of war, we will forfeit the strategic initiative in peace. Stated plainly: this is a war for the preservation of the free world.
From a shattered car park in Dnipro to a makeshift techlab where a combat drone takes shape, two realities are obvious: the war is changing, and it is changing fast. We cannot afford to be outpaced. The choice this winter is stark: enable Ukraine to hold the frontline against the pincer offensives in Donbas, support Ukrainian strategic efforts against the Russian war machine on its home soil, and stymie the global strategic battle against the axis of authoritarians. Or watch the battlefield’s innovations be converted into instruments of wider, harder-to-control global conflict.
This is not easy. It is, however, solvable, if we treat it with the urgency, specificity and imagination it requires. The future of war is now. The time to prepare was yesterday. The clock is running fast."
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