Mick Ryan reports in Futura Doctrina:
Over two months, Ukraine has executed quiet, successful counteroffensives in different parts of the country. Not only does this challenge the popular narrative of a stalemate, but it means the Ukrainians have found new methods of conducting successful actions at tactical and operational levels. The Ukrainians have demonstrated combined arms tactics that exploit aerial and ground drones to dominate the tactical battle, create space for ground manoeuvre using mounted and dismount troops, while providing EW, resupply, point defence, casualty evacuation, mine emplacement and clearance. Operational security has also been a key: Ukraine kept a very tight leash on information, implemented a deception plan and achieved strategic and operational surprise. In sum, even if Russia manages to inject several hundred thousand more troops in the final months of this year, these will be inexperienced and unlikely to achieve any better results than their predecessors.
The recent news about a Ukrainian counteroffensive liberating several hundred square kilometres of territory around Lyman in eastern Ukraine has come as a pleasant surprise in the midst of the ongoing Russian missile barrages against Ukrainian cities, and the appalling spectacle of American negotiators discussing good memories with the Russian president in Moscow. The Ukrainian gains have been documented by a variety of sources, including drone videos, soldier accounts and media organisations that have held off reporting the operation. The Institute for the Study of War has stated in its latest update that “ISW’s mapping methodology is likely underestimating the extent of Ukrainian gains in the ongoing counterattacks in the Lyman direction.”
This is not, however, the first offensive action by the Ukrainians in 2026 that has captured a significant parcel of Ukrainian territory from Russian occupying forces. Back in March, then Ukrainian commander-in-chief General Syrskyi noted that “For the first time since 2024, when we conducted the Kursk offensive operation, our troops regained control over a larger area of Ukrainian land in one month than the enemy captured in the same period of time.” President Zelenskyy stated that “In the south of our country, over the past month and a half, (Ukrainian forces) have carried out a number of important actions in terms of defense and in some areas of offense”. Over several months, Ukrainian Armed Forces undertook a smaller operation in southern Ukraine that liberated over 400 square kilometres of territory.
Thus, over the space of two months, Ukraine has executed two quiet yet successful counteroffensive operations in different parts of the country. Not only does this challenge the popular (and lazy) narrative of a stalemate along the frontline, but it also means that the Ukrainians have been investing in the hard intellectual work of finding new methods of conducting successful offensive action at the tactical and operational levels.
Transitioning to New Forms of Warfare
The most important thing for the next few years…is to undertake a more active search for insights as to appropriate longer-term changes in doctrine, concepts of operation, and organizational change. To some extent this is a matter of starting a process of search for, discovery of, and experimentation with novel concepts of operation, organizational arrangements, etc.Andy Marshall, 1993
When Andy Marshall, the long-time director of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, wrote the above words in August 1993, he was thinking about how the United States military might adapt to the new technological circumstances, including precision munitions and information warfare, that his nation faced after the fall of the Soviet Union. His words, in attempting to inform strategic thinking about what was then seen as a military revolution, are a useful guide for thinking about the transformational change that is occurring, and will continue to take place, in military institutions due to the impact of autonomous systems, AI and rapid adaptation cycles.
The last few years have, in many respects, seen an interregnum between old forms of manoeuvre and new forms that exploit drone warfare and AI supported decision-making. As the Marshall memo highlights, what we are observing now is hardly the first time in history that the injection of new technologies has forced a cascading series of strategic and institutional reappraisals of tactics, training, doctrine, force structures and leadership models. As I wrote in a 2024 article that explored this phenomenon:
Fortunately, many nations and military institutions have historical experience with solving big problems in military affairs. Military institutions have always faced difficult problems, on the battlefield, during long campaigns and in the overall national efforts to fight wars. This has required formal and informal adaptation mechanisms, which sometimes produces transformative solutions to key battlefield and operational problems.
The middle years of the First World War saw all belligerents having to learn and adapt to the introduction of machine guns and the massed use of barbed wire, artillery and trench lines in depth. The 1973 Yom Kippur War and the 1991 Gulf War both forced military institutions world-wide into large-scale transformations, which necessitated re-equipping, re-structuring and most importantly, re-thinking about the character and conduct of modern war.
In each case, the most successful military organisations that emerged out of these periods of disruption built their new operating doctrines, organisations and conduct of military endeavours on honest assessments of the enemy and themselves, testing and experimentation, embedding new doctrine and training, and leaders who provided advocacy and drove transformation to fruition.
Indeed, there is a deeper provenance of intellectual development driven by new technologies and rapidly changing strategic environments during the four (so far) industrial revolutions. The table below, which I have used in many presentations on transformational change in military institutions, shows how each of the four industrial revolutions drove change in technology, societies, and how nations fought their wars.
For some time, the Ukrainians have been testing and experimenting with new ways of destroying more Russian units and liberating more Ukrainian territory. As I noted in a recent update about the Ukrainian southern counteroffensive, “the Ukrainians have demonstrated throughout this war the desire and the willingness to trial evolved forms of combined arms tactics that exploit aerial and ground drone technology to dominate the tactical reconnaissance battle, to create the space for ground manoeuvre using mounted and dismounted combat troops, and to provide an array of support functions such as EW, resupply, point defence, casualty evacuation, mine emplacement and clearance and psychological operations against the Russians - and to deceive both adversaries and those covering the progress of the war while doing so.”
So, returning to the recent Ukrainian gains around Lyman, as well as the recent southern counteroffensive, what insights might we draw from how Ukraine is conducting ground operations?
First, these were counteroffensives and not just local counterattacks. Whether they started this way might be debated, but the end result was that two Ukrainian counteroffensives were executed over the period of weeks, if not months, and both resulted in consequential gains by Ukrainian ground forces.
Second, the Lyman operation has functioned as an operational spoiler. Russia for some time has been working (albeit at a snail’s pace) on an operational double envelopment of the Ukrainian fortress belt cities in the east. In February this year I included this Russian campaign, which is their main effort in their ground war against Ukraine, as one of the four elements of Putin’s strategy for achieving a favourable outcome from his failing war effort:
The main effort on the ground is an operational double envelopment of the territory in the Donbas held by Ukraine. One arm of this envelopment is moving north from the Pokrovsk area, and one is moving west on the Lyman axis of advance. Convergence would likely be at the town of Barvinkove.
The Russian axis of advance through Lyman was a key element of the northern arm of this large-scale double envelopment. This advance has been shut down. There is no prospect of the fortress cities being enveloped, at least this year - and probably ever.
Third, this is a conclusive demonstration that the Russian narrative of “inevitable victory” is dead. Not just ‘kind of dead’, and able to be revived like a shambolic zombie. No, the narrative is dead as a dodo. Even if Russia manages to inject several hundred thousand more troops through a mobilisation effort in the final months of this year, these will be inexperienced troops and hardly likely to achieve any better results than the other couple hundred thousand Russians in Ukraine that have gained territory roughly half the size of Rhode Island.
Fourth, these Ukrainian experiments are demonstrating that the ‘transparent battlefield’ is a delusion. While there is little doubt that we now have a vastly improved view of the battlespace due to drones, Open-source Intelligence (OSINT) and digitised command and control systems, it is not transparent. The Cambridge Dictionary defines transparent as follows:
Clear and easy to understand or recognise; open and honest, without secrets.
These operations demonstrate that neither element of the definition has been met in Ukraine. Large parts of both sides now reside underground, often defying detection by drones, and weather conditions also impact performance. But more importantly, seeing a thing is not the same as understanding that thing. The current concept of battlespace transparency tells us nothing reliable about morale or intent. This is the most consequential gap of all in the idea of transparency, because intent is precisely the variable that matters most to a commander deciding how to respond to what their sensors show them. Enhanced visibility does not permit seeing into the hearts and minds of soldiers and commanders on the ground.
Even where visibility genuinely improves, friction persists in two further, distinct ways that the transparency literature rarely separates. First, friction within one’s own forces: intelligence that is collected is not always acted upon by higher commanders, whether from bureaucratic caution, cognitive bias, or simple organisational inertia, a pattern documented repeatedly in the Russian failure to anticipate Ukrainian resolve in February 2022. Second, commanders still cannot know every aspect of the battlespace even when the sensing architecture around them is functioning as designed, because, as Sir Lawrence Freedmanand Barry Watts have separately argued, war remains an adversarial, interactive process in which an intelligent opponent is continuously working to deny, degrade and deceive whatever picture is being assembled of it.
Fifth, operational security and deception are crucial to success in modern war. This is a lesson the Ukrainians learned from the 2023 counteroffensive. Months of open speculation about objectives, Ukrainian forces to be employed and likely locations meant the Russians in southern Ukraine were entirely unsurprised and had seven months to prepare for the Ukrainian assault. The counteroffensive failed. In the Kursk offensive of the following year, Ukraine kept a very tight leash on information, implemented a deception plan and achieved strategic and operational surprise. It appears to have again taken a similar approach in the south and east of Ukraine in 2026.
Sixth, these two operations might still be viewed as tests of new tactical and operational methods. This involves the evolving tactics for using drones in the reconnaissance battle and for clearing the way for offensive operations by destroying Russian drone capacity, sensors as well as logistics and reserves in greater depth. These tests of new tactics and operations in depth by the Ukrainians have been underpinned by new classes of drones, in particular drones such as Darts, RAM-2X, Hornets and the Fire Point FP-2, as well as the better integration of sensor data using Delta and its embedded AI.
In previous wars, it often took years for belligerents to develop the new doctrines and organisations they required in a different threat environment to achieve operational and strategic objectives. The transition to these new methods was painful. This is possibly what we have been observing between 2023 and late 2025 in Ukraine. Might we be seeing the initial glimmerings of new offensive manoeuvre techniques emerging in Ukraine?
Seventh, how long will it take the Russians to catch up? The Russians have been fast followers of Ukrainian innovation through the course of their full-scale invasion of Ukraine. They will have been observing these 2026 Ukrainian offensive actions and taking note of the methods employed. They will almost certainly seek to copy them for their own offensives at some point in the near future. This will degrade the current Ukrainian advantage in such operations, but I also expect the Ukrainians to continue testing and evolving their new offensive techniques to hopefully stay ahead of the Russians.
Russia’s Miasma of Destruction and Death
Image: @ZelenskyyUa The new forms of manoeuvre examined above are not simply a tactical curiosity. They are also a reflection of a deeper divergence between the Ukrainian and Russian ways of war, measured in how each side is willing to spend the lives of its own soldiers – and impose destruction on the opposing society - to achieve its objectives. Ukraine, as a smaller nation, has since the failure of the 2023 counteroffensive sought clever ways to leverage technology and smart thinking about strategy and operations to construct an outsize ratio of Russian casualties compared to Ukraine’s. Indeed, this was an explicit goal of President Zelenskyy in 2026.
This is the result of multiple imperatives. First, Ukraine needs to hurt Putin so much that he must come to the conclusion that further military operations in Ukraine are futile. Second, Ukraine seeks to preserve as much of its manpower as possible, not just for the next fight but to have a demographically prosperous nation after that war. Finally, the wholesale waste of human lives, while in some sense inevitable in all wars, is something that Ukraine wants to minimise because it values its people.
In comparison, Russia has embraced the miasma of suffering, destruction and death that it has created across Ukraine since 2022. The Russian president, and his nation more broadly, have chosen a strategy that now resembles a death cult, where any amount of killing and destruction is acceptable in order to achieve even the most limited goals on the ground in Ukraine. This involves the ongoing mass wastage of Russian soldiers in assault and infiltration operations, which now sees up to 40,000 Russian casualties each month. But it also involves the torture, rape and murder of civilians and prisoners of war, as well as the largest-scale terror bombing campaign anywhere since the Second World War. Targets include Ukrainian residential areas, shopping centres, trains and most recently, civilian fuel stations. The repulsive behaviours of Russia’s leaders and soldiers since 2022 will be a stain on their national soul for a long time to come.
A Ukrainian fuel station attacked by Russia. Image: @ZelenskyyUa Putin has now extended this terror campaign beyond the borders of Ukraine in an expanding campaign of sabotage throughout Europe. This threatens a wider war if European nations do not take decisive action to deter Russian aggression.
None of this diminishes what Ukraine has achieved on the ground this year. Ukraine’s evolving approach to offensive manoeuvre is succeeding without requiring the wholesale sacrifice of life that has characterised Russia’s war effort throughout the war. This is a central reason why it deserves close attention as a case study in the study of future warfare.
Manoeuvre is Not Dead
Ukrainian EW troops. Image: @ZelenskyyUa In conclusion, the recent Ukrainian operations demonstrate that manoeuvre is not dead.
Despite the difficulty in ground operations manoeuvre observed in eastern Ukraine over the past few years, offensive operations are still possible in modern war. But they need the intellectual effort to develop new techniques to make them viable and repeatable at scale. This includes new thinking about incorporating autonomous systems at scale and across domains, more widespread employment of electronic warfare, new thinking about deception and operational security, and the application of AI to support command decision-making as well as rapid learning and adaptation.
But developing viable methods for offensive tactical and operational manoeuvre in the 21st century also demands the inclusion of older ideas about the employment of mass, logistic support and casualty evacuation, maintenance of morale and leader’s provision of purpose to their people.
It occurs to me that in developing this new offensive model, military institutions might also need to review the principles of war. While they vary slightly between different military institutions, these principles have largely retained their applicability to modern war. But does the impact of AI and autonomous systems demand an evolution of these all-important principles, given their central role in the training and education of military personnel?
These efforts represent the really hard work of military institutions. Such hard thinking to transform and build military effectiveness for a new era of war was observed during the First World War to break the trench stalemate, during the Second World War to develop successful amphibious operations that underpinned D-Day and operations in the Pacific such as those at Okinawa, and in the 1970s and 1980s to develop evolved air-land operations to overcome Soviet mass. We may be seeing a similar form of intellectual development to provide a solution to a crucial operational problem – liberating more occupied Ukrainian territory – happening now in Ukraine.
Ukraine’s new commanders, revised ground force command and control, unified short-, mid-, and long-range strike capabilities and new ways of thinking about offensive operations have demonstrated the ability and willingness of the Ukrainians to go on the attack where conditions are favourable. Their ground operations in 2026 have ensured that Russia has definitively failed in its 2026 ground offensive operations. This has denied Putin the ability to achieve any of his wider war aims and destroyed Russian narratives that it might one day achieve a victory over Ukraine. The Ukrainian successes in 2026 have probably influenced the position of the Trump administration towards the war and its (small) increase in support for Ukraine, notwithstanding the fawning admiration that Witkoff and Kushner recently showed towards Putin.
The Ukrainian strategic momentum in this war, as it has for at least the past six months, continues to reinforce that the Russian war effort is on an accelerating negative trajectory. We need to learn from Ukrainian technical and intellectual innovation in 2026, and we need to better support them to reinforce Russia’s accelerating negative trajectory.
In another of his excellent essays about the Russian war against Ukraine, Sir Lawrence Freedman recently wrote that “Ukraine’s strategy for some time has been to try to create a hurting stalemate. The Ukrainians can already claim a form of victory in that they have survived despite the best efforts of a far greater power to crush them over the past four and a half years. They can even conjure up scenarios for a full victory, in the sense of being able to liberate all the territory Russia has occupied. But they are realistic about what is currently possible.”
This is an accurate representation of the current situation, but these Ukrainian large-scale experiments in new era tactical and operational manoeuvre offer the hope of changing this situation to further advantage Ukraine. We are not there yet, but the current trajectory of Ukraine’s gains in military effectiveness - in their unified strike campaigns and in their recent offensive operations - provides a glimmering of hope about future Ukrainian operations to free more of their territory currently occupied by Russia.
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