Ukraine, once hugely reliant on Western support and expected to lose quickly to Russia’s invasion, is now pioneering new types of weaponry and building expertise in new ways of warfare that have its partners’ interest.
From the start of the war to now, Ukraine has shifted from the underdog to a center of expertise that partner nations are increasingly eager to work with for their own defensive needs.
The irony, warfare experts say, is that Ukraine might never have been in this position if it had received the weaponry it wanted from its Western partners. It was that lack of critical capability that drove it to innovate and create new weaponry on a shoestring budget.
“The coalition backing Ukraine has triggered this process by being hesitant in how much support they were providing to Ukraine,” Keir Giles, a senior consulting fellow at Chatham House’s Russia and Eurasia Program, told Business Insider.
Ukraine has requested many Western weapons throughout Russia’s war, including long-range missiles, tanks, and fighter jets. Many of these requests were denied, delayed after lengthy debates, approved in too-small numbers, or restricted in how they could be used. Partners sent billions of dollars in aid, but deliveries were often slow, and support — especially from the US — has fluctuated.
Although it continued making its requests, Ukraine also looked inward and sought to domestically produce as much of the weaponry it needed as possible, from drones to air defense, to reduce reliance on partner nations whose support could be affected by strained stockpiles or political shifts.
“If they’d got more equipment of what they wanted, they wouldn’t have been driven to develop their own stuff quite so urgently,” Michael Clarke, a former UK security advisor and current defense analyst, told Business Insider.
Ukraine was pushed to make new weapons
Chief among Ukraine’s necessity-driven innovations is its uncrewed systems technology.
Ukraine has used drones at a scale and intensity unmatched by its Western partners, helping drive a surge of investment in the technology across NATO. Some Western officials now see drones, from loitering munitions to small first-person-view drones, as central to future warfare and as a technology that has fundamentally reshaped combat.
Ukraine’s initial turn to inexpensive attack drones as a front-line combat tool was sparked by shortages of artillery and other necessary firepower, and the country leaned into long-range drones for deep strikes into Russia, strikes against airbases, oil facilities, and military stores, as partners withheld missiles or put restrictions on their use.
Ukraine developed interceptor drones to stop one-way attack drones for a fraction of what traditional air defense missiles cost. The country, which has been constantly struggling with air defense shortages, developed these capabilities to fill the gap without blowing its limited budget.
“Because air defense munitions were in such critical short supply throughout the whole of the war,” Giles said, “Ukraine had to develop its own techniques for dealing with this new aspect of warfare.”
The Ukrainian military also has a growing fleet of ground robots that can attack positions and evacuate wounded soldiers, technology that was developed in part to offset shortages of armored vehicles. Ukraine received tanks and other armored systems from partners, but often not in large enough numbers to deploy effectively. Western militaries are now increasingly interested in the technology.
The robots are not as capable as tanks and armored personnel carriers, but they are significantly cheaper and easier to quickly turn out in large volumes.
There’s a similar dynamic with naval drones, which Ukraine has developed and used to destroy Russian warships, and other nations are now eyeing them as asymmetric combat options.
Ukraine has lessons for the West
Some of Ukraine’s innovations aren’t direct replacements for Western systems but products of a battlefield where Ukraine lacked the weapons to fight the way NATO militaries do.
Its heavy reliance on drones stemmed from shortages of traditional firepower. Western allies aren’t looking to fully replicate Ukraine’s model, but they are studying the tactics and technologies it developed out of necessity and incorporating some of those lessons into their own training and planning.
Ukraine still wants and needs Western combat equipment, particularly fighter jets and large air defense systems, but Kyiv is no longer solely a recipient of security assistance, having built experience and systems with value beyond its war.
Looking back, Ukrainian forces likely still “would’ve wanted all the equipment they asked for to start with,” which would have put it in a stronger position earlier in the war, Clarke said.
Challenges with partner nation support hamstrung Ukrainian operations and came at a cost of land and lives, but they also built the defense industrial powerhouse Ukraine manages today. The choice was in many ways existential: adapt or fall.
Former Australian Army Maj. Gen. Mick Ryan, now a warfare strategist, told Business Insider that while Ukraine might have done its own defense development even if it had gotten the weapons it wanted, “a lot of these innovations may not have happened” otherwise.
And now the West wants to learn from how Ukraine, not just weapons and tactics, but also how it’s making new weapons, often much faster and much cheaper than Western countries. Iterative innovation moves much faster, and the update and upgrade processes are notably swifter.
NATO officials have highlighted how quickly Ukrainian companies can innovate and bring updates to soldiers and said the alliance needs to learn from Ukraine.
Some countries are working directly with Ukraine on this, with some even partnering with Ukrainian companies to have them manufacture on their soil, so that their own manufacturers can learn from how Ukrainian companies operate.
Partner nations are also using Ukrainian soldiers to inform their training and defense preparations.
Ukraine still needs Western support, but it’s increasingly after funding, rather than weapons.
“They know they’ll always be dependent on the West,” Clarke said, “but they’re hoping that they can be dependent on the West for cash and loans rather than for military technology.”
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