JP Lindsley

🎙️ UFN — Under Fire News | The only American reporting from Ukraine every day of the full-scale resistance to Russia’s invasion.

University of Notre Dame  

Under Fire News

Ukraine

Nov 14, 2025

“Europe speaks the language of progress but thinks in the language of comfort”

LVIV—”Europe is playing at war, not preparing for it.”

A veteran Ukrainian Azov officer just delivered the most brutal assessment of European defense I’ve read.

Western elites think saying “drone” makes them innovative. Bohdan Krotevych explains why they’re catastrophically wrong.

At a recent Kyiv drone event, people were asking, Can Russia shift Europe’s drone wall?

You can’t shift what doesn’t exist, replied Lieutenant Colonel Krotevych, a Ukrainian veteran and a survivor of Russian captivity.

Europeans are clueless, wrongly assuming enough drones will save them.

“Europe speaks the language of progress but thinks in the language of comfort,” Krotevych writes. Every buzzword—”game-changer,” “AI,” “drone revolution”—creates an “opiate sense of control,” replacing actual preparation for war.

The truth: Equipment doesn’t fight on its own. A drone, rifle, tank, fighter jet—these are just tools. But an army is a SYSTEM: C4ISR, logistics, infantry, artillery, intelligence, medicine, communications—all moving together.

Europe pours billions into startups founded by “veterans” of peacekeeping missions—not of modern high-intensity warfare. Money is replacing experience:

⦿ Stark Defence: $100M+ raised, ZERO successful tests
⦿ Watchkeeper: £1B from UK taxpayers, still doesn’t work

“Money creates the illusion of understanding war”: It cannot substitute for those who have seen it up close.

“When technology is born without frontline experience, it becomes a fine concept that dies on first contact with reality,” Krotevych writes—reflecting what we as we saw with the very public failure of the Stark drones, in which Peter Thiel and others had invested mega-millions (Failure is part of the process, but consider the massive cost vs Ukraine’s more rapid, economical, and successful iteration).

Among EU/Nato nations, Finland uniquely gets it, Krotevych says:

⦿ 900,000 reservists
⦿ 64 F-35As purchased
⦿ 2,000+ exercises annually
⦿ Ammunition/fuel stocks ready
⦿ Fortifications updated

They don’t build “drone walls” for the news. They build real territorial defense—calculated by the hour.

Here’s the paradox: European governments + Western defense firms turn to Ukrainian generals and advisors—those with high ranks who spend the war in offices, not on the front.

Meanwhile, the officers who actually FIGHT this modern, chaotic, dynamic war go ignored.

“Concepts like a ‘drone wall’ won’t save you if they’re not backed by a system that can see, think, and act,” Krotevych says. Any innovation without war experience is just noise. Any wall without protection and countermeasures is just feel-good decoration and headlines.

Victory will go not to those with the best devices but those who turn chaos into order:

“Whoever first stops playing at war—and starts preparing for it—will win.”

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