Vitaly Sayenko17:57, 23.02.26

No country today can cope alone with the kind of invasion that Ukraine is facing, the ambassador believes.

Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine has evolved so much in four years that classic approaches to waging war are no longer relevant, Ukrainian Ambassador to the United Kingdom Valeriy Zaluzhny said during a speech at Chatham House.

The text of the speech was published on the website of the online publication “Ukrainska Pravda” .

“Today’s war between us and the Russian occupiers is as it is. And we know for sure that right now no country has sufficient military power to somehow prevent this war,” Zaluzhny is convinced.

At the same time, he spoke about the main conclusions of four years of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine.

It became impossible to carry out classic offensive and defensive actions.

According to him, the battlefield has become completely “transparent” in modern warfare.

“This led to the creation of a robotic kill zone, the depth of which today is at least 25 kilometers, and the ability to destroy logistics is constantly increasing,” Zaluzhny said.

In this regard, this situation today already leads to the impossibility of using the so-called rear zone up to 50 kilometers deep.

“The classic logistical “noose”, which was successfully invented by us during the liberation of the Kherson region, received a new impetus. All this led to the impossibility of conducting classic offensive or defensive actions. The number of people who can physically perform tasks in the combat zone is minimal. It continues to constantly decrease and actually tends to be replaced by robots,” Zaluzhny noted.

How the war changed approaches to mobilization

According to Zaluzhny, the experience of Russia and Ukraine shows that the traditional approach to mobilization in modern warfare has completely exhausted itself.

“Firstly, it was this war, long and highly intense, that showed: oddly enough, the most expensive resource in such a war is human, because it takes too much time to restore it, which will be much longer than production cycles,” Zaluzhny noted.

According to him, such a resource simply cannot be quickly replaced at the front.

“Secondly, based on the fact that the battlefield has become transparent and is automatically controlled by robots, the probability of survival of a person no longer depends on the quality of his training and leads to inevitable losses, which requires distancing a person from this kill zone,” Zaluzhny emphasized.

At the same time, he explained why Russia is not announcing mobilization.

“Thirdly, it is our experience that also confirms that the issue of mobilization is a sensitive one and one that affects the resilience of society in a war of attrition, as well as its willingness to support such a war. That is why Russia does not announce the mobilization that we are sometimes threatened with,” Zaluzhny added.

In his opinion, for Russia, fighting with mercenaries and volunteers and fighting with forcibly mobilized people are different wars, and the political consequences of such wars are different.

“So, future wars are definitely not multi-million mobilizations of the entire population,” Zaluzhny notes.

At the same time, in his opinion, it is more about technological and economic mobilization, as a guarantee of an inextricable process of ensuring and maintaining technological superiority over the enemy.

The ambassador also added that robots today not only perform auxiliary functions, but also conduct individual assault operations and even take live enemy soldiers prisoner. And the use of any technology in these kill zones, like humans, has turned into real suicide.

“So the conclusion is about demography and war. The Russian-Ukrainian war has provided countries with their demographic challenges with a critically important lesson: the model of warfare that involves exchanging human lives for tactical successes is no longer a logical and affordable option. Not for Russia, although any resource for Russia is exhausted,” Zaluzhny states.

Therefore, he is convinced that on a modern high-tech battlefield, saturated with high-precision destruction systems, such an approach is unacceptable not only from a moral point of view, but also from a tactical effectiveness point of view.

The emergence of weapons of attrition

“Weapons of attrition have replaced the extremely expensive high-precision weapons, which were a real game changer of the 20th century. These are cheap and mass-produced, but fairly high-precision weapons that wear out expensive weapons systems at high speed,” Zaluzhny said.

In particular, according to him, the entire NATO doctrine is built on such systems.

At the same time, this weapon of attrition is consistently and effectively developing.

“Undoubtedly, no country today can cope with such an invasion on its own. Especially those that are politically cautious. As a result, this calls into question the ability of even resource-rich countries to wage war against smaller ones for a long time. And vice versa – building a rational defense using old approaches, even with the availability of resources, is no longer physically possible,” Zaluzhny believes.

In this regard, he gave the example that the war in Ukraine showed that there is no particular difference in how many frigates, corvettes, submarines, and even missile cruisers are available in combat-ready condition.

“All this can be neutralized by a country that does not have a navy, since it was actually destroyed at the beginning of the war,” Zaluzhny noted.

(c)UNIAN 2026