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How Ukraine is changing the rules of modern warfare
Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine has transformed the country into a testing ground for the concept of multi-domain deterrence. This concept has existed only in military theory for years, but now it is being tested in real time. The key questions are whether the West can adapt as quickly as the Russian threat grows, and whether Europe is ready to develop its own defense system independently of the US.
In a column for Novyny.LIVE, diplomat, researcher, and multidomain defense expert Otto Gustav writes about this.
What changed after 2022
The expert explains that after the end of the Cold War, Western democracies became accustomed to learning from "managed" conflicts: the Balkans, operations against terrorist groups, peacekeeping missions in fragile states. The risks were real, but they did not appear as a threat to the very existence of the Euro-Atlantic community.
According to Otto, Ukraine broke this pattern. He noted that Russia’s second invasion in 2022 was the moment when European capitals suddenly saw not "another peripheral crisis," but the brazen, demonstrative aggression of a nuclear power in the middle of the continent.
The response was unprecedented — NATO countries and partners activated their military-industrial complexes at full capacity, began transferring weapons on a massive scale, and just as massively learned from their own mistakes.
"Multidomain operations stopped being an academic term. Ukraine's air defense, assembled from Patriot, NASAMS, IRIS-T, SAMP/T, and modernized Soviet systems, demonstrated this very concretely when, in the spring of 2023, it intercepted a Kinzhal missile that the Kremlin had advertised for years as an "uninterceptable" hypersonic weapon," the expert noted.
He added that after waves of combined missile-and-drone strikes, it became clear: only integrated aerospace defense, relying on satellite data, sensor networks, and flexible command, can withstand such attacks.
The researcher stresses that analysts now describe Ukraine as the first war where the front is effectively "transparent": commercial satellite imagery, Starlink, open sources, and thousands of reconnaissance drones are stitched together into a single picture of the battlefield almost in real time.
For allies, he said, this is not an abstraction but a daily experience that forces a new perspective on the role of space, cyberspace, and the tactical level in deterring a nuclear power.
Why the West falls behind — from concepts to real production
Gustav Otto notes that the paradox is that at the conceptual level, NATO and the EU think very modernly. The weak point does not begin in doctrines, but in warehouses, production lines, and procurement offices.
The clearest example is Europe's promise to deliver one million 155 mm shells to Ukraine by March 2024. The political decision was made quickly, but by the deadline only a little more than half of the promised volume had been shipped. As is known, the million mark was reached only at the end of the year.
Against this backdrop, the Czechia launched its own "workaround" initiative: it coordinated contributions from more than a dozen states, found hundreds of thousands of artillery shells on the global market, and created a channel that began to close the deficit for Ukraine's Armed Forces faster than the cumbersome mechanisms of collective EU procurement.
A medium-sized country demonstrated that flexible policy and bold bureaucracy can sometimes be more effective than a formally larger but inert defense complex.
Countries that invested in tank fleets for decades are now forced to honestly ask themselves what role armored vehicles play on a battlefield saturated with drones. Many armies are already investing in anti-tank systems and electronic warfare, but where strong tank lobbies and traditions exist, change is slow.
Defense industry giants prefer expensive platforms with long maintenance cycles and service contracts lasting decades, rather than small producers of drones, sensors, or software that deliver effects on the battlefield "now" but do not guarantee long-term profits.
"Finally, the instability of the American political course — from isolationist reflexes to prolonged disputes in Congress — raises questions about trust in the long-term commitments of the United States. This may seem far from the trenches, but it directly affects the pace of launching production lines, signing contracts, and planning investments in new technologies," the expert explains.
Long-range weapons and air defense — what breaks Russia's strategy
Gustav Otto notes that Ukraine has already shown that each new capability instantly changes the configuration of the battlefield. The arrival of HIMARS in 2022 enabled the destruction of dozens of Russian ammunition depots far behind enemy lines and forced the Russian army to reorganize its logistics by moving depots farther away from the front lines.
Next came Storm Shadow/SCALP cruise missiles and other long-range systems. The strike on the Black Sea Fleet headquarters in Sevastopol, along with a series of attacks on ships and bases in Crimea, demonstrated that the enemy’s deep rear was no longer "sacred territory."
Under pressure from combined missile and drone strikes, Russia was forced to withdraw a significant part of its fleet from Sevastopol to Novorossiysk and other ports, and public assessments increasingly describe the Black Sea Fleet as "functionally inactive."
The same logic applies in the air. When integrated air defense learned to shoot down Kinzhals and combined packages of drones and missiles, Russian planners suddenly realized that even their newest systems did not guarantee superiority.
Each Western decision — from transferring long-range missiles to deploying new air defense systems — reduces the space for blackmail, shrinks the imagined "zone of impunity," and pushes Moscow into a defensive posture.
According to the expert, the problem is that these decisions are made slowly and cautiously, while Russia and China are unafraid to quickly test and scale new systems.
"The West was satisfied for too long with "modest" support for Ukraine, limiting the range and pace of delivering the most valuable systems. This delays the moment when Moscow will finally lose the ability to dictate terms by relying on the threat of force," Otto concluded.
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