Several weeks ago, I met a young woman named Nastya at a playground in Kharkiv, Ukraine. She was playing with her little brother Hlib, tending to their aging Labrador, and enjoying a peaceful morning near the ruins of Specialized School No. 134.

A little more than four years ago, Nastya and Hlib’s playground was anything but peaceful. On Feb. 27, 2022, the school became a battlefield where Ukrainian soldiers, police, and civilian volunteers fought a detachment of Russian Spetsnaz, special forces that had entered Ukraine a few days earlier along with Moscow’s invasion force. By the end of the fierce, 13-hour battle, most of the Russian troops inside the school were dead, the building was in ruins, and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attempt to quickly seize Ukraine’s second-largest city had been repulsed.

Nastya, who was 16 years old and living around the corner at the time, described the shock of hearing explosions and seeing smoke. She ran outside to see what was happening before her frightened parents pulled her back inside. Since that day, Nastya’s family has stoically endured the constant Russian bombardment that has claimed the lives of several thousand civilians in Kharkiv and its surrounding region since 2022. As have so many others—such as the families living in another Kharkiv neighborhood I visited, where a Russian cruise missile slammed into an apartment building and killed 11 people in March.

I was thinking of Nastya and Hlib last month, when Ukrainians suffered one of the deadliest waves of missile and drone attacks on civilians during Russia’s entire war on their country. What I saw not just in Kharkiv, but also in Kyiv and elsewhere in Ukraine as part of a delegation with chess master Garry Kasparov’s Renew Democracy Initiative, made plain the senseless brutality of Putin’s war.

But my visit also convinced me of two things: First, Putin’s war is failing. And second, what Ukraine is fighting for should deeply resonate with every American.

Putin’s savagery is exceeded only by its futility. Slowly but surely, he is losing his war: At minimum, Russia cannot defeat Ukraine and may bleed to death trying. Despite constant attacks that inflict nonstop hardship on Ukrainians, Putin has failed to break their will. People in Kharkiv go to school, shop, gather in cafés, and carry on doing the everyday things that feel like subtle acts of defiance. Like so many others who have fought their former imperial or colonial masters, the Ukrainians will never surrender, no matter what Putin throws at them.

Several young children sit at school desks in a brightly decorated classroom. A few of the children are holding up colorful plastic building blocks, while books and notebooks rest on their green and white desks. The background wall is decorated with a large illustration of a rocket ship shaped like a giant crayon, surrounded by the words "Welcome to School" styled with textured green moss-like lettering.

Students attend class in an underground school in Kharkiv, Ukraine, on Feb. 23.Chris McGrath/Getty Images

Ukrainians’ resilience is a key reason why Putin’s war is failing. Another is the country ’s growing ability to defend itself. Ukrainian officials state that their air defenses now regularly intercept 80 percent to 90 percent of the drones and missiles targeting cities, a fact not lost to the Persian Gulf Arab states that are now seeking help from Kyiv.

Even during the large-scale attacks that I experienced in Kyiv during my trip—long nights marked by air-raid sirens and distant explosions—most of the incoming drones and missiles were neutralized. Some still get through, with tragic results. According to the United Nations, at least 238 civilians were killed and 1,404 injured in Ukraine in April alone, the highest monthly total since July 2025. Still, as horrific as this has been, the numbers could be so much worse.

Putin is also failing miserably on the battlefield. The Russian army continues to endure staggering losses while gaining little or no ground. In April, Ukrainian forces reported that they killed or seriously wounded more than 35,000 Russian troops, the highest monthly casualty toll of the war. In May, Russia’s losses have continued at the same pace, with the Russian army losses exceeding 1,000 soldiers on many days. Ukrainian officials state that more than 1.3 million Russian soldiers have been killed or seriously wounded since the invasion.

Russia’s long-planned spring offensive—aimed at breaking through Ukraine’s “Fortress Belt” of defenses in Donetsk by this summer—has gone nowhere, with Russian troops continuing to be slaughtered. And this only tells part of the story. Since the start of the full-scale invasion, Russia has also lost a half a trillion dollars’ worth of equipment, including more than 10,000 tanks, 25,000 armored vehicles, and 30,000 artillery systems.

Most of the Russian casualties are now inflicted by “first-person view” (FPV) drones flown remotely by Ukrainian pilots sitting in secure locations, often far from the front. Some of the FPV drones are small quadcopters that explode on impact. Others serve as bombers, flying over enemy positions to drop explosives before returning for future use.

A man sits at a small wooden table in a dimly lit basement with exposed brick walls. He is looking toward a laptop screen, with multiple tablets, a smartphone mounted on a flexible stand, and a plastic bottle also on the table. Exposed wires and cables hang down the brick wall behind him, where several framed landscape paintings are displayed.

A man sits at a small wooden table in a dimly lit basement with exposed brick walls. He is looking toward a laptop screen, with multiple tablets, a smartphone mounted on a flexible stand, and a plastic bottle also on the table. Exposed wires and cables hang down the brick wall behind him, where several framed landscape paintings are displayed.

A drone pilot for Ukraine’s 13th Khartiia Brigade flies a Vampire drone from a basement in Kharkiv on March 7, 2025.Diego Fedele/Getty Images

These cheap, mass-produced drones have effectively turned the Russia-Ukraine war into a 21st century version of World War I’s Western Front. But instead of a few hundred meters of no man’s land between Allied and German trenches, the kill zones of this war stretch 10 miles or more in both directions, where any soldier or vehicle is likely to be spotted, attacked, and destroyed by a killer drone. Terrified Russian troops have named some of these Ukrainian drones after Baba Yaga, a supernatural witch who, in Slavic folklore, feasts on unsuspecting children and lives in a house adorned by the bones and skulls of her victims.

With the help of Baba Yaga drones and other innovative, domestically produced weapons, Ukraine is holding its own, despite battling a country with five times more people and a GDP that is nominally 10 times bigger. Like David against Goliath, Ukraine is now beating the Russian army and gaining back ground, reporting that it has recaptured more than 480 square kilometers (185 square miles) of territory since the end of January. The changing tide of the war is a useful reminder that small countries can indeed defeat large ones, as the United States learned in Vietnam, the Soviet Union learned in Afghanistan, and Russia may one day soon learn in Ukraine.

A key reason is morale. As Napoleon Bonaparte said, “in war, the moral is to the physical as three is to one.” Russia’s army is made up of prisoners, soldiers from Russia’s non-Russian regions, and mercenaries from as far away as Africa, often lured to the front by life-changing sign-up payments or downright lies. But as front-line conditions and massive Russian losses became better known, the Kremlin is finding it harder to recruit soldiers. Ukraine is currently inflicting far more casualties than Russian recruitment can replace.

According to multiple reports, the Kremlin is now contemplating a full-scale forced mobilization, which Putin has so far avoided for fear of sparking a revolutionary backlash.

By contrast, Ukrainians are fighting for their homeland, their families, and their freedom to not live under Russian rule. The life-and-death consequences of the latter have been made plain by the grisly crimes committed by Russian soldiers against civilians in Bucha, Mariupol, and other Ukrainian cities and towns; Russia’s forced abductions of as many as 20,000 Ukrainian children; and the brutal Russification campaigns in the occupied territories. Facing such prospects, Ukrainian troops are naturally fighting tooth and nail.

Ukraine has also drawn on the brainpower of a highly entrepreneurial population to reinvent warfare, primarily through the development, mass production, and innovative use of drones—and increasingly, low-cost missiles. While our delegation was in Kyiv, we met two such innovators who should figure prominently in any history of this era—Oleksandr Kamyshin and Pavlo Yelizarov.

Before the war, Yelizarov produced a political talk show. But after the Russians invaded, he enlisted in the military and contributed thousands of dollars of his own money to establish what became known as Lasar’s Group, which perfected the use of the long-range bomb-dropping drones that have killed thousands of Russian troops and obliterated their tanks and other vehicles.

The Vampire drone, developed and produced by Ukrainian defense tech company SkyFall, is the best-known of these so-called Baba Yagas. Another is the Kazhan, made by another Ukrainian company, Reactive Drone, which is capable of serving as a mothership to several smaller, independently piloted exploding drones. In January, President Volodymyr Zelensky appointed Yelizarov to be the deputy commander of the Ukrainian Air Force, where he is now in charge of developing Ukraine’s version of Israel’s Iron Dome air defense system, including a Star Wars-style laser cannon that is already being tested against Russian drones.

In 2022, Kamyshin was the CEO of Ukrainian Railways. After successfully coordinating the flow of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees by rail out of the country, Kamyshin was enlisted by Zelensky to oversee Ukraine’s nascent drone manufacturing capability. With his Mohawk haircut, black goatee, and black T-shirt, Kamyshin does not look like a typical defense official. But looks are deceiving. Under his watch, Ukraine has increased its annual drone production from just 2,000 drones the year before Russia invaded to more than 4 million in 2025, sourced from hundreds of domestic drone manufacturers that did not exist before the war. Kamyshin aims to increase that number to 7 million drones in 2026, allowing Ukraine to not only flood the front with drones to fight the Russians but also export them to allies and partners around the world.

It’s no wonder that Russian losses have risen to such extreme levels. With so many drones in the air, few soldiers or vehicles survive in the so-called kill zone. Russia’s ground offensives have become suicide missions. Both sides are also starting to experiment with autonomous artificial intelligence-controlled drones—with Ukraine reportedly now deploying advanced drones (called Martians by Russian troops but known to the Ukrainians as Hornets) that fly at high speed for long distances and do not need to communicate with human pilots back in Ukraine. This autonomy allows the so-called Martian drones to fly nearly undetectably for long distances and evade electronic jamming without having to be tethered to the thin fiber-optic threads that are currently used by both sides.

A small FPV (first-person view) quadcopter drone hovers in mid-air inside a large, brightly lit industrial building. The drone features a central camera lens, a rectangular component wrapped in grey tape on top, a vertical antenna with a white mushroom-shaped cap, and four spinning propellers showing motion blur. The industrial background is softly blurred out of focus.

A small FPV (first-person view) quadcopter drone hovers in mid-air inside a large, brightly lit industrial building. The drone features a central camera lens, a rectangular component wrapped in grey tape on top, a vertical antenna with a white mushroom-shaped cap, and four spinning propellers showing motion blur. The industrial background is softly blurred out of focus.

A first-person-view drone flies on an obstacle course at the Killhouse Academy drone training center in Kyiv on March 4.Chris McGrath/Getty Images

Both sides are also testing deployment of aerial drone swarms controlled autonomously by AI systems in order to surround and hit multiple targets on the battlefield. Humans still select the targets, but AI systems take control of the drone swarms from there. As these and other capabilities get faster and more complex, it will become ever more impossible to keep humans truly in the loop, thereby making drones progressively and necessarily more autonomous. In short, the future of warfare is arriving quickly.

In the view of MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence service, Ukraine is in the strongest battlefield position in nearly a year. Ukraine’s recent success in retaking territory can be credited, in part, to its use of an innovative approach that teams infantry soldiers with aerial drones and ground robots in integrated assault units.

Zelensky recently noted that, likely for the first time in history, an enemy position was captured exclusively by unmanned robots, without the participation of any human soldiers. These technological advances may eventually enable Ukraine to break the stalemate on the ground while minimizing its casualties. In the words of Mykola Zinkevych, the commander of the Ukrainian unit that carried out the mission, “human life is priceless, whereas robots do not bleed.”

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s maritime drones have effectively taken the Russian navy’s Black Sea fleet out of the war. Now, they are hunting Russia’s shadow fleet—the oil and gas tankers evading Western sanctions—attacking these ships as far away as the Mediterranean. Deep within Russia, every day seems to bring new Ukrainian long-range attacks on energy infrastructure, logistics nodes, and military production, inflicting serious damage on Russia’s economy and ability to supply the front.

These attacks are being delivered by long-range exploding drones and cruise missiles that Ukraine has developed and manufactured mostly by itself on the cheap. The attacks are dramatically increasing the economic cost to Russia of Putin’s war and draining much of the estimated $10 billion windfall that Russia has enjoyed as a result of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, the resulting spike in energy prices, and U.S. President Donald Trump’s waiver of U.S. sanctions related to Russian oil.

Ukraine’s partners in Europe and Asia continue to provide substantial assistance, including new shipments of the Patriot air defense interceptors that have been made scarce by the U.S. war on Iran, as well as interceptor drones from Germany. Several Gulf states have inked 10-year defense pacts, trading Ukrainian assistance in defending them against Iranian Shahed drones in exchange for investments in Ukrainian defense. Ukraine has also concluded drone manufacturing partnerships with Germany and the Netherlands. And the defeat of former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban in April finally enabled the European Union to move forward on approving a $105 billion loan to Ukraine.

A group of people walk down a cobblestone street while holding a massive, horizontally divided yellow and blue flag over their heads like a canopy. Several women in the front row are dressed in embroidered white blouses paired with long skirts or jeans. The mood is communal and public, with onlookers and trees visible in the background under a clear sky.

A group of people walk down a cobblestone street while holding a massive, horizontally divided yellow and blue flag over their heads like a canopy. Several women in the front row are dressed in embroidered white blouses paired with long skirts or jeans. The mood is communal and public, with onlookers and trees visible in the background under a clear sky.

A crowd carries a large Ukrainian flag during Vyshyvanka Day celebrations in Odesa, Ukraine, on May 15, 2025. Oleksandr Gimanov/AFP via Getty Images

Against this backdrop of European solidarity, the United States has been conspicuously absent. Under Trump, the United States has effectively switched sides, refraining from any new assistance to Ukraine while supporting Russia with attempts to bully Zelensky into accepting Putin’s surrender terms. Vice President J.D. Vance has called leaving Ukraine out to dry one of the administration’s “proudest achievements.” One of the more poignant moments during our visit to Kyiv was when we asked a prominent Ukrainian business figure how Ukrainians feel about Americans these days. The person thought carefully about how best to respond before simply saying: “Betrayal.”

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio says this is “not America’s war.” But in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, Washington strong-armed Ukraine into giving up its Soviet-era nuclear weapons in return for the United States’ assurance of Ukraine’s security if Russia ever attacked. Apparently, a U.S. promise is no longer any good.

This is unfortunate, because the United States has real stakes in this war. The conflict is about so much more than where Russia’s borders should lie—or even the security of Europe. It’s also about the enduring values that rest at the heart of what it means to be an American.

Like the United States, Ukraine is a polyglot nation made up of people from various ethnic backgrounds—Ukrainian, Crimean, Russian, Belarusian, Jewish, Moldovan, Hungarian, and others. While the war is surely deepening Ukraine’s national identity, it is also accelerating the transformation of Ukraine into more of a creed-based nation like the United States—one based less on where your ancestors were from and more on what you believe. Fighters from Russia, Belarus, and around the world—including the United States—are choosing to be Ukrainians and fight for a free nation integrated into Europe and the democratic West.

This is the same unifying big idea that motivated protesters to stand up to sniper fire in the 2014 Maidan Revolution that overthrew Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, a pro-Putin kleptocrat and it is an idea that terrifies Putin and his corrupt cabal of oligarchs. If Ukrainians can live in a free and democratic nation that is fully integrated into Europe, why not the next-door Russians?

Ukrainians and their many helpers are fighting for transcendent, universal ideas: democratic freedom, the rule of law, human rights, and the ability of young people like Nastya and Hlib to pursue happiness and live normal lives. This should resonate with most Americans, and it is clearly why—despite the Trump administration’s tilt away from Ukraine and toward Russia—a wide majority of Americans still support standing with NATO and helping Ukraine defeat Russia’s war of aggression. Most Americans know that the Ukrainians are on the front lines of a shared battle against authoritarian tyranny.

Ukraine is not a charity case. It has hard-fought experience in the realities of modern warfare, a demonstrated capacity for innovation, and a strong manufacturing base. Ukrainians have become formidable, and the West should be grateful to have them on its side. All of us who love freedom should stand with Ukraine and recognize that it’s our fight, too.

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