By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

What the Kremlin Is Learning From the War in Ukraine

The story of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been one of upset expectations and wild swings in performance. At the start of the war, most of NATO saw Russia as an unstoppable behemoth, poised to quickly defeat Ukraine. Instead, Russia’s forces were halted in their tracks and pushed back. Then, outside observers decided the Russian military was rotten, perhaps one counterattack away from collapse. That also proved incorrect—Ukrainian offensives failed, and Moscow resumed its slow advance. Now, plenty of people look beyond Russia to understand the state of the battlefield, blaming Kyiv’s troubles on insufficient external backing instead.

What many policymakers and strategists have missed is the extent to which Moscow has learned from its failures and adapted its strategy and approach to war, in Ukraine and beyond. Beginning in 2022, Russia launched a systematic effort to examine its combat experience, draw lessons from it, and share those lessons across its armed forces. By early 2023, Moscow had quietly constructed a complex ecosystem of learning that includes the defense manufacturing base, universities, and soldiers up and down the chain of command. Today, the military is institutionalizing its knowledge, realigning its defense manufacturers and research organizations to support wartime needs, and pairing tech startups with state resources.

The result has been new tactics on the battlefield—codified in training programs and combat manuals—and better weapons. Moscow has developed fresh ways of using drones to find and kill Ukrainian soldiers and to destroy Ukrainian assets, turning what was once an area of weakness into an area of strength. It has built better missiles and created more rugged and capable armored systems. It is giving junior commanders more freedom to plan. It has become a military that is capable of both evolving during this war and readying itself for future, high-tech conflicts.

Because of these changes, Ukraine is likely to face even greater destruction in the months ahead. It will have to contend with faster and more numerous Russian drone attacks, resulting in more harm to cities, civilians, and critical infrastructure. Larger numbers of missiles will get through Ukraine’s defenses. The ten miles leading up to the frontlines, already very hazardous, will become even more dangerous and difficult to cross. These changes may not produce any dramatic breakthroughs for Russia, thanks to Ukraine’s defenses and extensive drone and artillery attacks. But they do mean Moscow can keep trading its soldiers’ lives for slow gains in the Donbas while hoping that NATO tires of the conflict.

Some American and European officials are, indeed, losing interest in Ukraine. But the same Russian adaptations that threaten Ukraine should be of concern to policymakers elsewhere. The Russian military will emerge from its invasion with extensive experience and a distinct vision of the future of combat, and it is sharing its experience with China, Iran, and North Korea. It has laid the groundwork for a more intense period of learning and reconstitution after the war ends. Russia will remain constrained by bad discipline and will struggle to produce the most sophisticated equipment. But it will be as ready for the new way of war as any other state, constraints on its resources notwithstanding. If they do not want to fall behind, Washington and European capitals must therefore start learning from the war in Ukraine, not turning away. Rather than dismiss it, they need to study Russia’s study—and then start making their own changes.

 

The Learning-Industrial Complex

The Russian military has been forced to adapt to its circumstances since the early days of its invasion. To survive fierce Ukrainian counterattacks, Russian units grafted protective armor onto vehicles, learned new styles of camouflage, and adopted small-unit assault tactics, among many other adaptations. Russian soldiers also shared advice informally through social networks, closed social media channels, and self-published advice manuals. This type of informal, person-to-person or unit-to-unit learning is an important first stage of wartime adaptation. But unless the larger military organization captures these lessons, they are often lost over time, not passed to those who need them, and not spread across the force.

The second stage of learning includes institutionalizing those changes, such as by revising training programs, procurement plans, and operational concepts. After that, militaries must engage in predictive learning about the future of warfare and recognize the need for reforms or transformational change. The militaries that learn best follow five steps: acquire combat experience, analyze it, propose recommendations, disseminate the recommendations and lessons throughout the force, and, finally, implement them.

As it became clear that the war would drag on, Russia started fulfilling most of these criteria. What began as ad hoc battlefield adaptation evolved into a systematic effort to take its battlefield experience, study it, and share it across the military to improve performance. In 2022, for example, the military ordered dedicated staff officers and researchers to frontline military command posts so they could observe the war as closely as possible and seek to understand troop performance. The researchers then reviewed the results of battles, combed through commander logs, and interviewed personnel to generate analytic reports. After additional evaluation, these “lessons learned” reports (as military experts call them) were shared with the wartime headquarters in Rostov, the general staff in Moscow, service branch headquarters, military academies, defense firms, and the military research community.

The armed forces then adjusted in accordance. Aided by Moscow’s September 2022 mobilization order and a surging defense budget, the Russian military reorganized its command structure and modified its tactics and force posture in Ukraine. Moscow changed its logistics system to make it more survivable. It introduced new technologies or new ways of using old technology to improve both its precision targeting and its electronic warfare capabilities. These interim adaptations helped Russia stabilize its frontlines and withstand Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive. 

Since then, Russia’s learning ecosystem has become even more extensive. In Moscow, the Russian military has over 20 commissions devoted to implementing recommendations based on information it receives from the frontlines and from Russian researchers. The military has been busy disseminating lessons learned to the force by summarizing them in bulletins, holding themed workshops, and hosting conferences to troubleshoot problems and share knowledge. Russia’s Southern Military District repeatedly gathers soldiers and commanders from the air force, ground forces, electronic warfare forces, and the defense industry to teach them how to better detect, suppress, and destroy the enemy’s uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs), which were essential to Ukraine’s early military success. At a 2023 conference hosted by Russia’s artillery academy, soldiers and experts came together to revise artillery tactics and integrate drones into artillery strikes. In just three years, Russia has made over 450 interim modifications to combat manuals. Military leaders emphasize that these handbooks are likely to be completely overhauled after the war ends.

 

Gearing Up

During the invasion’s first year, Ukraine received some help from an unexpected source: Russia’s own military equipment. For seemingly months on end, Russia’s gear repeatedly malfunctioned because of sloppy maintenance, manufacturing defects, and design flaws. Consider Moscow’s electronic warfare equipment: a snap inspection of hundreds of Russian electronic warfare systems found defects in 30 percent of them. The most common flaw was the poor quality of electronic subcomponents, specifically circuits. According to the Russian military’s flagship publication, Military Thought, a whopping 60 to 70 percent of Russia’s electronic warfare failures from 2022 to 2024 were caused by equipment malfunctions of various types. Only 30 to 40 percent of failures were caused by Ukrainian military fire.

At times, Russia has struggled to fix its equipment problems. During the first year of the war, the defense industry’s slow responsiveness, disconnection from soldiers, and outdated regulations impeded innovation efforts. But eventually, the country’s defense manufacturers were instructed to improve production, increase the repair rate, and generally speed innovation. And thanks to government support, they did. The Ministry of Defense relaxed regulations to shorten research and development timelines. It held meetings with the defense manufacturing base to ensure it received and digested feedback from frontline units and made changes. Defense companies, meanwhile, sent industry specialists into occupied Ukraine to fix equipment, study its performance, and report back, just as they did in Syria when Russia was defending Bashar al-Assad’s regime. And starting in early 2023, the Kremlin created programs to integrate civilian universities and research centers into national defense efforts. It improved military and civilian engineer collaboration at test sites and training ranges to test prototypes before sending them into combat.

The Russian government also launched initiatives to help the country’s defense startups in the hope of promoting innovation. Russian Defense Minister Andrey Belousov, for instance, worked to connect startups with the state-owned companies that dominate the sector and are resistant to newcomers. It worked: now, startups have taken their place alongside Russia’s largest defense contractors in arms shows and sell their products to the military. These changes have allowed Russia to start closing the technological edge that Kyiv enjoyed in the war’s early years. Russian manufacturers are producing new and modified systems better suited for conditions in Ukraine. The Russian military, in turn, has learned how to use them. Perhaps most famously, the Ministry of Defense set up Rubikon, the country’s elite drone research and operations unit, which experiments with different types of tactics that now inform how other UAV units are instructed.

Moscow has made less flashy but equally essential improvements, as well. Defense companies have upgraded armor and other defenses on many classes of vehicles and equipped others with stronger engines, better vision scopes, and improved jamming systems. The country has increased the lethality of its glide bombs and increased production of modified Shahed drones and a variety of other types of UAVs. And the defense sector is addressing manufacturing defects and improving maintenance protocols for Russian electronic warfare systems.

These upgrades help explain why Ukrainians have encountered more trouble in the last year and a half. In 2022 and 2023, Kyiv could target Russian command centers, stockpiles, and supply lines with relative ease; today, Russia’s electronic countermeasures and adjusted missile defenses make such attacks more difficult. Russian drone and missile strikes are also becoming larger and more complex. At a minimum, this means Ukraine’s partners will need to supply it with more air defenses and invest more in the country’s electronic warfare systems. Ukraine is also developing a long-range missile, as it looks to destroy Russian weapons at their source.

 

Written in Blood

Russian learning extends to another important domain: training. The country’s military instructors are thoroughly reviewing combat experiences and integrating the lessons they learned into training programs. To make sure these programs are both relevant and realistic, Russia rotates troops between the battlefield and training ranges, much as it has sent defense manufacturers to the front. When in-person visits are not possible, the military sets up secure videoconferences between frontline units, academies, and training centers. Some disabled veterans have become full-time instructors.

Russia has made several teaching changes as a result of its combat experience in Ukraine. It has made its simulators more realistic and has modified its instruction of tactical first aid. It has started teaching troops how to drive military vehicles through a complicated drone battlefield, as well as how to carry out a small assault within a larger drone and armored assault—both critical tasks in a war where the frontlines are under constant surveillance by Kyiv. (Given that Ukraine can see most of what Russia is doing on the battlefield, small, discrete assault teams are needed to overwhelm Kyiv’s defensive positions.) For the first time, Russian instructors are using drones to monitor soldiers’ training so they can better evaluate and discuss the units’ successes and failures afterward.

Russia has also made several changes to its training course for junior officers to better prepare them for operational tasks. These changes do not constitute a total overhaul; Moscow’s main wartime adjustment is adding a two-month supplemental training session to help lieutenants improve their skills in marksmanship and artillery, reconnaissance, topography, navigation, drone use, and tactical medicine. Instructors are also focusing on teaching junior officers how to command small units, given the importance of small infantry assaults on the battlefield. Some junior officers are even being taught what NATO states call mission planning, in which they are given an objective that they and their staffs must figure out how to achieve on their own rather than following centralized commands. This is a major shift for the traditionally top-down Russian military, one inspired by the successes some Russian units have scored against Kyiv.

Yet despite the attention senior leaders have given to fixing them, Russia’s training programs remain uneven. Instruction for Ukrainian-bound volunteers is now rightfully focused on teaching soldiers to fight in small assault teams on drone-saturated battlefields. But the training remains too short, so troops are still arriving ill-suited for their combat tasks. Although the instructional program for fresh conscripts has also been modified since 2022 to reflect combat experience, it has yet to be fully overhauled. Some district training centers are still teaching outdated information or otherwise not keeping pace with rapid battlefield adaptation, Russian officials report. The military has resorted to snap inspections to ensure that new training directives are being adopted.

A Russian soldier learning to fly a drone, Rostov region, Russia.

Although they have not prevented combat forces from conducting most of their assigned tasks, these problems are certainly part of the reason Russia continues to underperform relative to its material and manpower advantages. Russian military psychologists have sounded the alarm, arguing that their country’s current efforts to assess soldiers’ psychological states and identify triggers of so-called deviant behavior (desertion, surrender, violence, or loss of combat effectiveness) are outdated. But the military apparatus itself has not internalized this message, choosing instead to focus on endurance and the execution of orders by any means necessary.

At least for now, challenges related to the nature of the war itself are also exceedingly difficult to resolve, even after they have been identified. The Russian command, for instance, is well aware that the Ukrainian battlefield is extensively monitored by drones and that it is thus nearly impossible to mass large numbers of forces for an armored assault without coming under attack. In military journals, strategists bluntly admit that Russia’s traditional formations have ceased “to serve as the main condition for achieving success.” The military has adapted by moving away from using large armored formations, increasingly embracing the small assault teams that are now central to military training. Russian officials have also added new drone units, assault detachments, and reconnaissance detachments to help overcome prepared Ukrainian defenses. Although these changes complicate Ukrainian countermeasures and occasionally lead to tactical Russian breakthroughs, they come with extremely high casualties, and these small units and detachments cannot seize and hold territory in the way that a large, massed force can. Nonetheless, the Kremlin demands that the war grind on in this manner.

Finally, Moscow’s track record on postwar learning is not particularly inspiring. After the Soviet war in Afghanistan and the Russian war to help the Assad regime, the country’s military failed to learn or forgot its combat experience because acquired knowledge was not disseminated beyond the small groups that fought. The Russian armed forces also failed to implement critical lessons in the 1990s and early 2000s, when financial and leadership support for postwar reforms collapsed.

Yet none of these factors are present in the Russia of today. In fact, many of the learning processes now underway resemble those Moscow underwent after World War II. Given its current architecture, finances, and leadership, the Russian military appears poised for a comprehensive and intense learning period after the war in Ukraine ends. Officials are already discussing an extensive review of Russian operational concepts, military theory and strategy, combat regulations, and long-term procurement choices from now until the mid-2030s. Russian officials have stated that overcoming threats to large-scale armored assaults is a top research priority and that they are planning to alter the military’s force design and operational concepts to account for this challenge. From now on, the Russian military will likely create more UAVs and other uncrewed systems, which will supplement Moscow’s military power relative to NATO.

Russian leaders will further integrate UAVs, robots, and other autonomous systems across the force. In the military’s view, these technologies are the future of combat: Russian military experts have written that uncrewed systems will become the most important weapons of the twenty-first century. The world they envision will soon have swarms of autonomous drones that can overwhelm adversaries’ defenses, microdrones that are difficult to identify or stop, and drones that mimic birds, bugs, or other wildlife. The Russian military has been observing the Ukrainian military’s use of combat robots and is preparing to invest more in this area to help with tasks such as sentry duty, logistics, mining and demining, and undersea surveillance.

Russian military theorists and leaders also see artificial intelligence as essential to modern combat. The speed at which the technology can process growing amounts of digital information will allow commanders to make faster decisions. Moscow’s strategists fear that if Russian commanders do not have top-notch AI tools, they will be overwhelmed by adversaries that possess them. As a result, Russian experts are considering how to field AI decision-making systems and AI-enabled weapons by the early 2030s. The military is exploring how to use artificial intelligence in hypersonic missiles, air defense systems, and drones to improve performance. It is also thinking through how AI could speed the execution of analytic tasks and automate commands. Although this area is a national priority, investment in AI remains relatively modest, limiting Russia’s capabilities in the near term.

 

Adapt or Perish

At the start of the invasion in 2022, the Russian military misjudged Ukraine’s capabilities and will to fight. Moscow’s equipment was not always up to the task, and some systems failed outright. Its soldiers were not trained for their assigned missions (or even told that they would be going to war, for that matter). Its command chain struggled to function.

But observers of the Russian military can no longer anchor its views to that period. In the years since, it has become a learning organization, and ongoing adaptations on the frontlines are only a piece of its educational activity. Moscow is acquiring and analyzing combat experience and disseminating the lessons it has learned throughout its force and defense ecosystem. It is systemically trying to capture and institutionalize its wartime experience and prepare for a postwar reform period. It realizes that the future character of warfare is changing, so the military must change, as well.

Russian leaders will face obstacles to their ambitions even after this conflict ends. International sanctions, for instance, will be a major impediment to their progress (provided those sanctions last). The Russian military’s ability to improve, after all, will depend on sustained financing, access to critical minerals, and the ability to produce top-of-the-line equipment—all things that sanctions make difficult. The Russian military will also require leadership support and the input of enough experienced veterans for planned reforms to take effect. And no matter what happens, Russia will be constrained by its traditional personnel weaknesses—poor discipline, for example—and an expensive procurement program that will sap its resources.

Moscow also worries that the United States and Europe will study its war and develop countermeasures to Russia’s newest capabilities and tactics. NATO must prove these fears to be justified. To match Russian capabilities and catch up in key areas like drone warfare, the United States and Europe must accelerate their analysis of the invasion of Ukraine and then adapt, including through the procurement of more UAVs and by adopting other innovations. Although several organizations in NATO countries are devoted to gathering lessons from the war, progress is uneven and siloed. These bodies’ efforts have not yet comprehensively altered their countries’ procurement plans, training regimens, or operational concepts.

To avoid falling behind, the United States and Europe need to start paying better attention—especially since Moscow is passing its knowledge along to its autocratic partners. But that means they must see the Russian military for what it is: flawed, but resilient in its own way. Its structural problems are very real and would be particularly acute in the event of a conflict with NATO. Yet its learning process is relentless. The Russian armed forces will further modify tactics, introduce new weapons, and expand as they begin a decade-long reconstitution effort. Experts are fond of saying that armies shape war. But war shapes armies, as well.

 

 

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