Ukraine's former top commander has a warning for anyone betting that new gadgets will win the war, he wrote in a column for Ukrainska Pravda. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the country's Commander-in-Chief until 2024 and now its ambassador to the UK, argues 2026 is a war of technologies and, no less, of the strategies and doctrines that must keep pace with them. Bolting modern tech onto an old Soviet playbook, he says, drove mobilization into a dead end.

A year ago, Zaluzhnyi warned that Ukraine would need thousands of counter-drone systems and mass drone production to cope with the growing role of UAVs in war. A year later, those capabilities still aren't there at the scale he called for, mobilization has hit the dead end he now describes, and the four measures he proposed have not kept pace with how quickly drones are spreading.

Drones are already cheap, widespread, and shaping the war, and the front has gone static, Zaluzhnyi writes, while Russian strikes keep reaching railways and fuel stations far behind it.

This is no longer a drone war

The drones filling headlines no longer exist on their own, Zaluzhnyi writes. They have evolved into more familiar weapon types, cheaper and more effective—anyone still treating drones as a stand-alone class is about three years behind. Fixating on individual gadgets, he argues, misses the real contest: strategy and doctrine.

He reaches back to World War I for the danger he sees, running the line from Verdun and the Somme to Robotyne and Bakhmut. Before that war, soldiers in one army marched in bright red trousers that were supposed to help against repeating rifles, machine guns, and long-range artillery, and later against tanks and aircraft.

Today's faith in old security guarantees, he warns, is that same proud symbol worn onto a modern battlefield.

"The red trousers taught them nothing," he writes of those still moving tanks and artillery toward the fight by yesterday's logic.

New weapons, old strategy

The war has surrendered itself to marketers and wheeler-dealers, Zaluzhnyi writes—people who, without understanding or strategy, stoke it for quick profit while flaunting the pace of technological progress. Trying to retake land with Soviet methods and new weapons drove mobilization into a dead end, and fewer and fewer people were willing to take the one chance it offered.

"Damn marketing that kills," he adds.

The way out, he argues, is to treat technology as a new weapon, build tactics around it, and only then reshape the force.

That is what he calls doctrine, built through resource and technological alliances into a strategy for victory. Ukraine and Russia, he writes, have become real-time testing grounds.

What he warned a year ago

In September 2025, Zaluzhnyi named the four fights Ukraine had to win to survive mass drone warfare: counter-drone systems at scale, state-level drone production, integrated battlefield networks, and channeling tech talent into defense industries.

The counter-drone systems he put first are still short of the scale he warned Ukraine would need. Mobilization, he writes, has hit a dead end, and marketers—not the doctrine he calls for—are setting the pace.

Russian losses reached one of the highest of the entire full-scale war in August, Ukraine's Defense Ministry says, citing General Staff data. Last month, Ukraine killed or wounded 42,020 invaders.

As its frontline losses climb, Russia is escalating its terror against Ukraine's civilians. Moscow uses large numbers of ballistic missiles and new jet-powered drones to do it. Russia opened its latest drone assault on 27 August, two days after CIA director John Ratcliffe arrived in Moscow, and has kept it up since.

For comparison, Russia lost 42,860 soldiers in July, 33,760 in May, and 39,290 in June, the ministry says.

Ukraine takes another step toward its goal

Ukraine's Defense Ministry states that effectively destroying Russian manpower and logistics is among its priorities, so that Russia's losses reach a level that forces it to abandon its plans of conquest.

"August's losses for the Russian army were another step toward reaching that goal," the Defense Ministry says.

Ukraine began its logistics lockdown late this May. It is a coordinated campaign to scale up medium-range drone strikes against Russian supply convoys, depots, command nodes, and air-defense systems 20 to 200 kilometers behind the front.

Russia loses more than men

Ukraine's Defense Forces also struck 13,835 vehicles and fuel tankers in August.

Over the month they hit an estimated:

• 89 tanks;
• 197 armored combat vehicles.
• On top of that, 1,827 Russian artillery systems were destroyed or disabled.

"Inflicting such losses systematically raises the cost of continuing the war for Russia and forces it to spend ever more resources replacing manpower, equipment, and weapons," the ministry says.

How does Russia answer the losses?

Ukraine's Office of the President has said Russia is preparing an additional mobilization wave in 2026–2027, aiming to draft 300,000 people this year and 300,000 next. Those figures are a response to the steady rise in frontline losses, the office adds.

Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin called that information "nonsense" after the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Bishkek.

At the same time, legal-aid organizations report a covert mobilization across Russia's regions and occupied territories. Over the past month and a half, residents of at least 17 Russian regions have complained of forcible detention, beatings, and coercion into signing contracts with the Russian Defense Ministry.