Ukraine's Pleasantly Surprising 2026

Ukraine shows it has some cards as the United States gets distracted by Iran.

Photo by Diana Vyshniakova on Unsplash

With Victory-in-Iran Day now in our collective rearview mirror — hey, readers, pay no attention to the missiles flying around in the Gulf this week — it is worth taking a beat to consider some winners and losers of the conflict so far.

Given the Trump administration’s decision to lift sanctions on some Russian oil as energy markets gyrated, back in March it seemed straightforward to think of Russia as a winner. By extension, therefore, Ukraine was projected to be a loser.

Here’s the funny thing, though: recent analyses of the Russo-Ukrainian war have concluded that Russia’s battlefield momentum has stalled out. Indeed, recent events highlight the degree to which the facts on the ground — and, in some cases, hovering right above the ground — have shifted in Kyiv’s favor.

Consider that Ukraine has inked ten-year defense export agreements with three Gulf states to share their defense technology to combat cheap Iranian drones. This certainly qualifies as a win for Ukraine. At the same time, Russia’s May Day parade this year will feature no military hardware for the first time in decades, “because of fears of a long-range attack by Ukrainian drones.” This does not sound like a country on the verge of winning.¹

Vox’s Joshua Keating provides additional evidence that Ukraine’s security situation has materially improved over the last couple of months:

The war in Ukraine, and US diplomatic efforts to negotiate a ceasefire, have both been getting far less attention in the US in recent weeks, with the focus firmly on the crisis in the Middle East. It appeared initially that Russia might end up as the unexpected beneficiary of the Iran conflict, with global oil prices spiking, the United States lifting sanctions on some Russian energy exports, and crucial US munitions, including all-important missile interceptors, diverted from Europe to the Middle East.

But if Russia is reaping a windfall, you wouldn’t know it from events on the battlefield in recent weeks. The Russians made almost no territorial gains in March, and may have even lost a small amount of territory since mid-March, despite launching a widely anticipated spring-summer offensive. The Institute for the Study of War, a US think tank, assesses that Russia is unlikely to be able to take Ukraine’s “fortress belt,” the heavily fortified Ukrainian-held portion of the eastern Donbas region that has become one of Russia’s central war aims. Ukraine estimated Russia’s casualties at a record 35,351 per month in March, 96 percent of them caused by drones.

Russia continued to bombard Ukrainian cities throughout the cold winter months, but Ukraine has gotten better at defending against these attacks, with its air defense systems taking down a record 33,000 drones in March, according to the Ukrainian government. The Ukrainians have become more effective at launching long-range strikes deep into Russia as well. Lately, their attacks have focused on preventing Russia from reaping an energy windfall from the Iran war: In late March, Reuters estimated that 40 percent of Russia’s oil export capacity had been taken offline by Ukrainian strikes on pipelines, ports, and refineries.

Though Ukraine still relies on the fickle US government for key systems — like Patriot interceptors as well as targeting intelligence — European countries are now providing most of the country’s military aid, and Ukraine’s indigenous capacities are growing as well….

Certainly after years of slow but relentless Russian advance, which gave ammunition to critics of Ukraine aid who argued the country’s defeat was inevitable, there’s some more confidence from Ukrainian leaders and their supporters these days. Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha recently argued that because of its advances in drones and air defense, Ukraine’s frontline position is now the “strongest” it’s been in a year. Mick Ryan, a retired Australian general and prominent military commentator, recently argued that “The strategic scales are beginning to tip in Ukraine’s favor.”

It’s probably too soon to say Ukraine is winning the war, but at the very least, it doesn’t appear to be losing.

The Bulwark’s Brynn Tannehill is even more upbeat about Ukraine’s chances of surviving and thriving as the war is in its fifth year — in no small part because the country is beating Russia at the drone game:

Russia has opted for producing large quantities of a few types of drones rather than investing in technical innovation, but at least for now, Ukrainian production of small drones appears to exceed Russia’s, with at least 3–4 million units produced in 2025 and a goal of up to 7 million in 2026. This is within spitting distance of the 10 million per year that Ukraine estimates it will need to completely overwhelm Russia and achieve decisive victory. It’s also a tremendous advantage. Drones are the dominant force on the lines today, causing approximately 75–80 percent of all casualties. Ukraine now has 1.3 drones at the front line for every 1 Russian drone, and they are of better quality. Additionally, Ukraine has reportedly begun operating AI powered small drone “swarms” that are semi-autonomous and coordinate their attacks….

Russia’s spring offensive seems to have stalled as soon as it began. Russian forces took only 23 square kilometers of territory in March. At that pace, Russia would finish conquering Ukraine in 1,775 years. They are at a standstill, and despite already having numerical superiority along the front lines, they have already begun to commit their strategic reserves for the spring–summer campaign.

Over the past few months, Russian casualties have been extraordinarily high. They averaged roughly 35,000 per month in 2025, and similar averages are continuing into 2026….

The recruiting shortfalls mean that Russia is slowly losing more soldiers than it’s gaining, and the quality of the new recruits is questionable at best. So great is the demand for soldiers on the front lines that a typical recruit’s total training amounts to just three weeks before they’re thrown into combat. On the other side of the ledger, Russia is facing its most severe labor shortage in decades, with a deficit of 2.4 to 3 million workers, potentially rising to 11 million by 2030. As the war drags on and the shortages get worse, its industrial and economic capacity will suffer….

Strategically, Ukraine has a theory of victory that looks increasingly plausible, while Russia’s is crumbling. There is a path to Ukraine achieving overwhelming drone dominance at all levels and inflicting the casualties required to cause a Russian collapse. Russia bet the farm on the theory that meat waves would overwhelm Ukraine while the United States and Hungary blocked Western support, and failed.

How did this come to be? No doubt, Viktor Orban losing power in Hungary has freed up more European Union support for Kyiv’s war effort. The New York Times’ Ross Douthat, however, argues that Ukraine’s success represents a policy success for the Trump administration’s crude pressure on Europe to lift itself up by its own security bootstraps:

The means of Ukrainian survival, where Europe steps up as the United States steps back, is not a sign of American failure. It’s what successful American adaptation looks like in a world where it’s conspicuously no longer the 1990s. Of all the areas of danger and crisis in the world, Europe’s eastern borderlands are the place where America should be able to rely on our allies as a first line of defense. The fact that Ukraine has held the line with more European support and less direct American aid is proof that this recalibration can succeed — and as such, it’s good news for our empire’s sustainability,² not a sign that we’re about to cede global dominance to Brussels or Ottawa or Berlin.

Now, would it have been preferable to reach this point with a less chaotic policy approach, with less moral equivalence in American rhetoric toward Kyiv and Moscow, less bullying rhetoric toward our allies? Of course! Wrestling Trump toward an optimal policy is always an ugly business and often a close-run thing….

The case for Trump as a foreign policy president has always been that his harshness toward friends and allergy to idealism sometimes ends up delivering more for the United States than the smoother habits of diplomacy. If you think that we need a rearmed Europe to help police and stabilize its own corner of the world, then Trump’s crude bullying has been a geopolitical accelerant — a non-ideal but nonetheless effective mechanism, as Andrew Sullivan suggests, to force Europe to “break with its passive past.” A maximally adroit and more idealistic president might have done better. But some presidents might have just kept us in a quagmire and let our allies stay asleep.

Douthat’s analysis has some merit — from a certain point of view. The thing is, that view requires one to willfully ignore the Trump administration’s multi-pronged assault on Europe, ranging from its desire to annex Greenland to figuring out ways to punish NATO allies for not supporting a war in Iran to enabling 27-year old State Department flunkies to cozy up to the European far right. Forcing Europe to view the United States as an actual security threat is a bit of a distraction from incentivizing Europe to help arm Ukraine. Continually offering Russia generous cease fire terms also seems like another falsifying piece of data. Indeed, Trump administration officials actively campaigning for the Hungarian leader who has been vetoing more European support of Ukraine sure seems to contradict Douthat’s claim of successful American adaptation to a new world. It seems much more like dumb luck.

The merit of Douthat’s argument, however, is acknowledging that Ukraine is innovating under constraint in ways that helps its own security situation while augmenting cooperation with Europe. And it’s doing so in a moment when many expected that Russia would benefit from material windfalls due to the war in Iran.

This outcome is intrinsically good for Ukraine and bad for countries contemplating territorial land grabs through the use of force. For the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World, however, there has been particular satisfaction watching Trump administration officials sounding put out that Ukraine is doing so well and Russia is doing so poorly.³

Last year Trump berated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, infamously declaring, “You don't have the cards right now.” In both his Iran and Ukraine policies, however, Trump is revealing that his cards are more limited than he previously thought. Neither conflict is turning out as expected.

This is bad news for Trump and for the United States, which has to pay the price of Trump’s geopolitical folly. It is good news for Ukraine, however — and given everything else going on in the world, it’s nice for there to be pleasant geopolitical surprises.

1. On the academic front, it’s telling that Ukrainian universities are actively seeking partnerships with Western universities. Meanwhile, Russia is, um, not doing that. Like, at all.

2. It sure would be great if Trump and his ideological supporters, stopped being so pro-imperialist.

3. For a contrarian take that suggests Trump is doing more for Ukraine than is commonly recognized, see this by Semafor’s Max Tani.