The Illusion Of Hard Power: Reflection On How Democratized Technology And Strategic Geography Broke The Superpower Monopoly On War

October 5, 2026

By Dawit W. Giorgis

Key Takeaways:

A former infantry officer argues that Vietnam, Iraq, and African interventions show firepower does not buy compliance when a population treats the fight as existential, and that external backing or neglect left long instability from Congo and Somalia to Libya and the Sahel.

The 2026 Iran war and Ukraine are presented as a cost inversion: cheap mass drones and missiles force million-dollar interceptors, and Hormuz pressure moved the contest into shipping, insurance, and energy; Ukraine’s sea drones against the Black Sea Fleet are cited as the same pattern.

The conclusion is that total destruction is politically and strategically unavailable, so China’s caution on Taiwan and future stability depend on defensive sustainability and compromise rather than regime change—an argument, not a demonstrated law.

Written from the unique perspective of a former infantry officer of the late sixties, this paper examines the paradigm shift in 21st-century geopolitics, in which conventional military dominance no longer guarantees political control. Tracing an evolutionary line from the ideological endurance of Vietnam to the urban insurgencies of Iraq, the paper argues that contemporary conflicts involving Iran and Ukraine mark a watershed in modern warfare. By pairing fierce nationalist resolve with cheap, mass-produced asymmetric technology, weaker states have triggered a severe industrial-economic inversion, bankrupting expensive Western defensive systems through supply-chain attrition. Crucially, the paper highlights how Iran successfully weaponized its strategic geography—specifically the Strait of Hormuz—shifting the center of military gravity into global shipping, insurance, and energy networks and holding global markets hostage. Confronted with the reality that victory against an existential defense would require total destruction, superpowers such as the United States, Russia, and an island-facing China are hitting a structural wall. The paper concludes that absolute military coercion is obsolete; future global stability depends on balancing defensive sustainability with soft power, diplomatic tolerance, and mutual compromise.

The Illusion of Hard Power

In 1967, I was a young officer training at the Advanced Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia, alongside American officers. The ghost of the Vietnam War hung heavy over every field exercise, tactical briefing, and grueling march we endured. We were trained by men who had just returned from those jungles, and the lesson they drilled into us had nothing to do with a lack of American firepower. Instead, they forced us to confront the limits of willpower. We learned the hard way that you cannot militarily break an indigenous population when they are fighting for their own dirt. Fifty years have passed since my time in uniform, and as I get older, I watch the news and realize that our strategic leaders are still trapped in the same fallacy. We continue to assume that an overwhelming accumulation of military might can force a weaker nation to surrender its independence and existence. History has shattered that illusion across my lifetime, from Southeast Asia to the deserts of Iraq, and now to the tech-driven battlefields of Ukraine, the proxy conflicts of Africa, and the waters of the Persian Gulf. The basic reality of modern conflict is that military dominance no longer equals political control. When a nation views a conflict as existential, hard power can only achieve two things: death and destruction. It cannot buy compliance. Today, because the means of resistance have been cheapened and widely democratized, the pursuit of absolute control is a path toward mutual ruin. True strength for the future lies not in our capacity to destroy, but in our willingness to tolerate, compromise, and engage the world through mutual respect.

To understand why US military dominance is broken, we must look closely at how resistance has changed since my time. In the 1960s and 70s, US conventional doctrine was pushed to its limits. The United States dropped millions of tons of ordnance on Vietnam yet failed to achieve its political objectives. The failure was not a lack of tactical skill on the ground; it was a fundamental strategic failure to recognize that a population defending its homeland measures victory purely by its willingness to keep dying. Against deeply rooted nationalism, conventional bombing campaigns could not break the enemy’s resolve. As my generation learned through immense trauma, a democracy simply cannot sustain a war of indefinite casualties for non-existential goals. Decades later, I watched the next generation of American soldiers march into Iraq. While the initial conventional phase of that war was won in a matter of weeks through “Shock and Awe,” the secondary phase of controlling and governing the country was completely lost. Our political leaders were blindsided by the raw willpower of a population that flatly rejected a foreign occupation. The battlefield quickly evolved into a decentralized, borderless insurgency fueled by improvised explosive devices and urban terror. Iraq demonstrated what any seasoned infantryman fears in his bones: demolishing a state’s conventional armor and infantry is the easy part. Holding and controlling a hostile nation is politically, morally, and economically unsustainable. The sheer friction of trying to enforce compliance against an unwilling population eventually drains a superpower’s resources and erodes its domestic political capital.


Yet this failure to understand the limits of hard power is not confined to the Middle East or Southeast Asia. When evaluated against my twenty-eight years as a UN peacemaking consultant across Africa’s most volatile war zones, the limits of conventional military coercion become even more starkly apparent. In all the wars I have witnessed on the African continent, there was always a degree of heavy-handed, unbalanced, or indifferent Western and global involvement that excluded local populations and created a legacy of perpetual instability. Cold War logic led to American support for the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko in the Democratic Republic of Congo. For Washington, this was a low-cost transactional alignment; for the DRC, it left behind a legacy of systemic fracture and a perpetual war that refuses to heal. Similarly, American indifference during the Rwandan genocide left a scar on America’s declared role as an advocate for genocide and crimes against humanity, and its unwise, heavy-handed intervention followed by a disgraceful exit in Somalia fundamentally altered the regional landscape, leaving Somalia trapped in a cycle of warlordism from which it cannot recover. In Libya, a relatively low-cost NATO aerial intervention to overthrow Gaddafi resulted in a fractured state that became a breeding ground for human trafficking, weapon proliferation, and militia warfare that spilled across the Sahel. Historical alignments like the American-supported Charles Taylor created havoc and civil war across both Liberia and Sierra Leone, proving that short-sighted external backing yields catastrophic regional consequences on the back end.


Today, this cycle continues as global superpowers and regional actors treat the continent as a theater for cheap geopolitical disruption. In Central and West Africa, Russia uses its mercenary arm, formerly Wagner and now Africa Corps, as a low-cost tool to loot mineral resources and displace Western influence. Meanwhile, in the Horn of Africa, the absence of a clear, balanced US policy has allowed its allies, the UAE and Saudi Arabia, to wage destructive proxy wars to secure their strategic and mineral interests. This echoes the historic “Françafrique” policies of control in West and Central Africa, where foreign dictation systematically excludes local people from the economic value chain. When war is supported, sponsored, or neglected by global powers, it becomes a negative-sum game where everyone loses. Because of these heavy-handed or neglectful policies, Africa’s true potential is suppressed, making it impossible to establish equitable, win-win trade or security architectures. Instead of being a robust global partner, these destabilized regions are forced into a state where they become involuntary exporters of instability through migration crises, piracy, and transnational terrorism. The West is then forced to spend trillions on reactive border security and counter-terrorism operations—a massive, unsustainable defense expenditure triggered by the long-tail consequences of original policy failures. Africa is left unable to heal itself, the West remains trapped in a cycle of reactive containment, and the global rules-based order faces an asymmetric threat to peace that cannot be solved by expensive weapons alone.


This structural failure of global foreign policy mirrors the tactical crisis we see on the modern battlefield, driven by the brutal mathematics of the Cost-Imbalance Doctrine. Modern warfare is no longer dictated by platform sophistication but by logistics, replacement speed, and lopsided economic exchange ratios. The collapse in the cost of commercial electronics, additive manufacturing, and open-source autonomous systems has shattered the traditional cost curve, tilting the strategic advantage sharply toward mass-produced, low-cost offense. The 2026 war involving Iran represents the ultimate, terrifying evolution of this trajectory, presenting a style of warfare that my peers in the seventies could scarcely have imagined. If Vietnam required dense jungles and Iraq required complex urban networks, modern asymmetric warfare requires only three things: basic, a determined population, universally manufacturable technology, and the strategic weaponization of geography. Iran effectively rewrote the global rules of engagement by manufacturing mass-produced, low-cost weapons—primarily twenty-thousand-dollar kamikaze drones and standard ballistic missiles. This has created a catastrophic economic and industrial imbalance for Western forces. Today, advanced militaries are forced to defend multi-billion-dollar assets like aircraft carriers by firing two-million-dollar air-defense interceptors at targets that cost less than a used car. When a five-hundred-dollar FPV drone or a thirty-thousand-dollar Shahed loitering munition forces a defender to fire a multi-million-dollar Patriot, THAAD, or SM-3 interceptor, the exchange ratio becomes unsustainable. This is no longer a war of tactical maneuver; it is a war of supply chain attrition, and the mathematics favor the cheap.


Furthermore, Iran’s true stroke of strategic genius was recognizing that its geographic position is a more powerful weapon than any nuclear arsenal. By sitting directly astride the Strait of Hormuz—the narrow maritime bottleneck through which twenty percent of the world’s petroleum flows—Iran shifted the center of military gravity entirely out of the mud and into global financial markets. By deploying its low-cost sea-denial arsenal to menace commercial shipping, it effectively nationalized a global commons. This strategy weaponized marine insurance networks, sent global energy prices soaring, and proved that controlling a geographic bottleneck allows a weaker state to hold the entire global economic system hostage. This is why Iran marks a watershed moment: it demonstrated that geography, activated by cheap tech, can completely bypass a superpower’s military superiority to strike directly at its domestic and economic vulnerabilities. We see proof that this shift is a universal law, not an American exception, in the stagnation of the Russian war machine in Ukraine. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion, conventional military wisdom predicted a rapid collapse of the Ukrainian state within days. Instead, the world witnessed the brutal stagnation of a traditional military giant. Ukraine countered massive armored columns and superior air power by leveraging the same formula: boundless national will paired with asymmetric technology. Armed with relatively inexpensive, mass-produced anti-tank missiles, first-person-view kamikaze drones, and decentralized digital command networks, Ukraine transformed the battlefield into a meat grinder for conventional assets. Ukraine’s ability to completely neutralize Russia’s Black Sea Fleet—not with a rival navy, but with low-cost, domestically manufactured explosive sea drones—perfectly mirrors how the vulnerability of multi-billion-dollar warships has been exposed globally.


This new reality explains the profound caution we see in East Asia regarding the Taiwan Strait. Objectively, China possesses the overwhelming conventional means—the world’s largest navy, advanced missile arsenals, and proximity—to launch an invasion of Taiwan. Yet Beijing hesitates. This caution stems from a clear-eyed analysis of these new rules of engagement. The Chinese leadership understands that invading Taiwan would mean wading directly into an asymmetric trap. Taiwan has spent decades preparing a “porcupine strategy” centered on cost-imbalance warfare. Crossing a hundred miles of open sea leaves Chinese transport ships highly vulnerable to swarms of low-cost, domestically produced anti-ship missiles and autonomous sea drones. Even if Chinese forces landed successfully, controlling a highly urbanized island of twenty-three million people against a deeply nationalist insurgency would mirror our catastrophic occupation failures in Iraq, multiplied tenfold, while inflicting an estimated two-and-a-half-trillion-dollar hit on the global economy. China’s hesitation proves the thesis: they recognize that while they have the hard power to cause immense death and destruction, they cannot guarantee surrender or control.

When a superpower faces a determined populace armed with universally manufacturable denial weapons and backed by strategic geography, it hits a wall. Because economic sanctions and localized strikes fail to break a deeply nationalist population, a superpower is left with only one military option to force an unconditional win: total destruction. Forcing a sovereign nation to abandon its existential interest today would require sustained, uninhibited bombardment or the use of nuclear weapons. However, as any strategist knows, this is a dead end. If the resisting nation or its allies possess even primitive nuclear or chemical deterrents, any escalation toward total destruction guarantees mutually assured destruction(MAD). Furthermore, neither the domestic population of a democracy nor the international community will tolerate the absolute annihilation of a country. Because total destruction is morally, politically, and strategically impossible, unconditional surrender is a relic of the past. Hard power has reached its absolute limit. If the accumulation of military might can no longer buy security or compliance, the global architecture must undergo a pragmatic revolution. This is not an appeal to utopian idealism; it is hardheaded realism from someone who has spent a lifetime reflecting on the cost of war. When conflict becomes too expensive for the strong and resistance too cheap for the weak, coexistence is the only affordable strategy left on the table.

Conclusion

True national security must be built on a balanced matrix of defensive sustainability and soft power. Superpowers must pivot away from a doctrine of regime change, containment, and forced compliance and toward policies of tolerance, compromise, and mutual respect. If a powerful nation needs resources, stable trade routes, or geopolitical cooperation, it can no longer acquire them bythe barrel of a gun or the threat of a carrier strike group. It must acquire them through diplomatic reciprocity. By recognizing the sovereignty and existential interests of smaller nations, superpowers can foster partnerships built on mutual benefit rather than perpetual, exhausting hostility. The lessons of my lifetime are clear. The world will never know peace, and superpowers will never achieve stability, until they accept that hard power is a blunt instrument capable only of wreckage. True strength lies in the capacity to compromise, to tolerate difference, and to engage the world through the sustainable lens of mutual respect.

Bibliography

Angell, Norman. The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power to National Advantage.London: William Heinemann, 1910.

Batmanghelidj, Esfandyar. “Drones Like Bicycles: The Real Economics of the Shahed Fleet.” Phenomenal World, March 11, 2026. Phenomenal World.

Boyle, Michael J., and Anthony H. Cordesman. Regime Change Revisited: The Intersecting Failures of Post-Conflict Governance and Hard Power. Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2016.

Brown, Seyom. The Illusion of Control: Force and Foreign Policy in the Twenty-First Century. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2003.

Brookings Institution.
Center for Strategic and International Studies. Assessing the Air Campaign After Three Weeks: Iran War By the Numbers. CSIS Missile Defense Project Report, March 25, 2026.

CSIS Analysis

Cordesman, Anthony H. The Lessons of Ukraine and the Changing Nature of Asymmetric Attrition.Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2024.

Fard, Erfan. “Iran Didn’t Need to Win the War. It Needed to Outlast It: AI Targeting and Strategic Geography in the 2026 Conflict.” Small Wars Journal, July 8, 2026. Small Wars Journal.

Malahila, Letsema. “The Contradictory Logics of International Intervention in Africa: Structural Fragility from Mobutu to Françafrique.” GIGA Focus Africa, no. 4 (2022): 1–9. GIGA Hamburg.

O’Hanlon, Michael E. The Porcupine Strategy: Asymmetric Sea Denial and Taiwan’s Defense Dilemma.Brookings Institution Policy Brief, 2025.

United Nations Department of Peace Operations. The Intervention Dilemma: 28 Years of Multilateral Peacekeeping and Political Vacuums in War-Torn States. New York: United Nations Blue Book Series, 2024.

Zenodo Research Repository. Iran’s New Grand Strategy, the Strait of Hormuz, and the Search for a Regional Security Order. Open-Access Strategy Paper, Archive ID 21707611, July 2026. Zenodo Records.



About Dawit W. Giorgis
Dawit W. Giorgis is originally from Ethiopia, US citizen, permanent resident of Namibia; served as P.S of Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Governor of Eritrea (prior to independence) and Relief and Rehabilitation Commissioner during one of the most publicised famine relief operations. He later served as UN consultant in 11 African conflict and post conflict countries; was a visiting fellow at Princeton University, University of Cape Town and Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Wash, D.C. at different times.
View all posts by Dawit W. Giorgis →

 

Ukraine pushes Russia back from the Donbas Fortress Belt consolidating Operation Vivaldi gains

Russia looked set to take the last big Donbas cities this winter. Operation Vivaldi has pushed its troops back towards the rivers and made that look remote. / bne IntelliNewsFacebook

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By Ben Aris in Berlin September 26, 2026

Ukraine's Operation Vivaldi has pushed Russian troops back from the Donbas Fortress Belt towards the Zherebets and Siverskyi Donets rivers, consolidating gains made earlier this month in a stunning stategic reversal that now makes Russia's chances of capturing the rest of Donbas by winter look remote.

The Third Army Corps of Brigadier General Andrii Biletskyi announced the counteroffensive north of Lyman on September 15 and says it has since recovered about 125 sq km, retaking Shandryholove and Derylove and taking full control of Drobysheve, Kyiv Post reported on September 23. "As promised, I am reporting good news," Biletskyi said on September 20 as he announced the second phase of gains, Kyiv Independent reported.

Russia had been closing in on the belt, the chain of fortified cities of Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, Druzhkivka and Kostiantynivka that has anchored Ukraine's defence of Donetsk region for years, and in July looked to be in a good position to take it over the winter. Losing that line could have decided the war. Vivaldi has disrupted that advance: the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) said on September 16 that Ukraine's gains north of Lyman had made Russia's plan to swing around the belt from the north "unfeasible", Euromaidan Press reported. For a Kremlin that needs a win soon, with its budget deficit and a stalling economy, that is a serious setback.

False Russian Ministry of Defense claims of encirclement of Dobropillia as of September 24, 2026. Source: Institute for the Study of War

Encircled on paper

Russia's Defence Ministry said on September 24 that units of its Centre Grouping were destroying encircled Ukrainian forces in the Dobropillia area while advancing towards Oleksandrivka, and published a map showing the city surrounded. The ISW's own map, in its assessment the same day, puts the nearest Russian forces 10.2 km from the city's southeastern outskirts, Euromaidan Press reported on September 25. The Ukrainian military says the city remains under its control.

The ISW said it had seen no evidence to support the encirclement claim, which it described as partly intended to divert attention from Ukraine's elimination of the Russian salient north of Lyman. It did observe small groups of Russian infiltrators operating east and northeast of Dobropillia on September 19 and 20, but did not assess that they had consolidated positions. One Russian milblogger suggested the "encirclement" might mean no more than fire control over Ukrainian supply roads west of the city.

The think tank blamed what Russian milbloggers themselves call "beautiful reports", a culture of inflated claims that it said has degraded the Defence Ministry's own picture of the battlefield. The ministry's statement described Dobropillia as a "strongly fortified settlement" whose capture would threaten Ukrainian supply lines running from Dnipropetrovsk region to the Fortress Belt. Biletskyi has said Russia's aim was to bypass the fortified cities through Dobropillia and link up with troops advancing from north of Lyman, rather than storm them head-on.

How close Russia came

Pokrovsk, the key logistics hub southwest of the belt, went first. Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov told President Vladimir Putin on November 30 that it had been taken, and the city fell to Russia at the end of last year after months of street fighting.

By the summer Russian forces were advancing on Kostiantynivka, the southern anchor of the belt, with small groups infiltrating its outskirts and Putin saying the city was close to falling. "The city's fall seems to be more of a question of time," Emil Kastehelmi of Finland's Black Bird Group said in early July. Russian troops also took high ground between the Bakhmut-Siversk line and the belt that would bring Sloviansk and Kramatorsk into artillery range.

Kostiantynivka held. At the end of July, Ukrainian forces were still present across almost the whole city, according to open-source trackers, but the pincers were in place. A southern thrust through Dobropillia and a northern one from the Lyman salient would have closed a ring behind the four cities without Russia having to storm any of them.

Back to the river

Vivaldi cut off the northern pincer. Ukrainian assault groups are now moving down several routes from Lyman towards the Zherebets River, trying to secure its western bank and finish clearing the village of Zarichne, according to open-source mapper AMK Mapping. Troops coming from Ozerne are clearing the remaining Russian positions in Yampil and attacking the last Russian bridgehead over the Zherebets from the south, while others advance east along the railway line from Lyman.

Ukrainian assault routes from Lyman towards the Zherebets River, Zarichne, Yampil and Torske. Source: AMK Mapping

The gains have reopened the route for Ukraine to send reinforcements south across the Siverskyi Donets into the area east of Mykolaivka and Sloviansk, flanking Russian positions from the north, the mapper said. Its caveat is two large stretches of forest where Ukraine has very few positions, which remain open to Russian infiltration that could disrupt the movement of assault groups and reinforcements, especially if the Russian bridgehead survives.

Russian forces are carrying out emergency counterattacks south of the Siverskyi Donets, east of Mykolaivka, and have likely re-entered Starodubivka, according to Hudson War Mapping, which called the situation "extremely confusing and complex".

The Lyman-Sloviansk front around Yampil, Kryva Luka, Kalenyky and the Siverskyi Donets. Source: Hudson War Mapping

French open-source analyst Clement Molin puts the front of Ukrainian gains at nearly 90 km, from Borova to Sloviansk. "The Ukrainians are on the verge of securing Sloviansk - one of the two key cities in the Donbass - by pushing back the front line," he wrote on September 25, adding that Russia's Zapad grouping had suffered "a major defeat" and that much of the ground retaken has yet to be announced. Military analyst Delwin compared Vivaldi to Ukraine's Kursk incursion of 2024, launched at a similar point in the year, and said fierce infantry skirmishing continues across the Lyman-Sloviansk front, mostly in the grey zone.

None of the mappers' claims can be independently confirmed, and official figures are broader. Across the whole front, Russia has taken about 890 sq km this year and Ukraine has retaken about 800 sq km, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy told The Wall Street Journal in an interview published on September 22, against 3,000-4,000 sq km a year of Russian gains in earlier years.

In ones, twos and threes

Since December Russia has largely dropped the costly frontal assaults by massed infantry that drove up its casualty figures, and instead sends soldiers forward alone or in groups of two or three to slip through the Ukrainian line, take up positions between or behind the defenders and attack them from there. Small groups are also harder for Ukraine's drones to find and kill than a column of armour. In July Russian assault groups were already using summer vegetation to infiltrate Ukrainian positions before bringing up heavier weapons.

The tactic feeds on Ukraine's manpower crisis. With too few infantry to hold a continuous line, there are gaps of up to a kilometre between Ukrainian positions, covered by drones rather than soldiers. Infiltration has become a standard Russian tactic, a creeping "ink-blot" approach in which Ukrainian control is eroded by handfuls of Russians settling in behind the lines, researcher Chris Owen said on September 25. It can work because Ukrainian forces are thin on the ground, he said, but constant aerial surveillance and fast drone strikes have made it very costly.

Nikolai Gavrilov, a Russian military volunteer and milblogger, admitted that Lyman, which the Russian government had described as the scene of "house to house clearing" before Vivaldi, is firmly in Ukrainian hands and that infiltrators sent there are usually killed, captured or desert, in a post translated by Owen.

"The city was supposedly captured, but the reality is different. There is still an administration, police, and volunteer organisations of Ukraine present in the city," Gavrilov wrote. "Every day, units of the Ukrainian Armed Forces conduct patrols, using drones to monitor all the abandoned buildings, searching for our soldiers who may be trying to escape."

"Day after day, these soldiers, who have managed to establish contact, are killed. I know one fighter who managed to stay in contact for a week - the civilians betrayed them to the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and he was killed," he wrote. "Many fighters, after receiving orders to go to Lyman, simply turn off their radios and desert."

Desertion was already a growing problem for Moscow, with more than 28,000 Russian servicemen convicted of going absent without leave by May 2025, Meduza reported in July. Russian infiltrators are now also trying to get behind Ukrainian lines east of Lyman that they believe are poorly consolidated, Hudson War Mapping said.

A war Moscow needs to win soon

Losing the prospect of the belt this winter hurts a Kremlin running short of time and money. Russia's federal budget deficit reached RUB5.8 trillion ($68bn), or 2.5% of GDP, in the first eight months of the year, and Finance Minister Anton Siluanov has conceded that the full-year gap will overshoot the planned RUB3.786 trillion ($45bn) and could be at least double the original target. Industrial output grew just 0.1% in the first seven months, oil export revenues fell to $13.8bn in July from $15.8bn in June, and the Central Bank of Russia paused its rate cuts at 14% on September 11 with inflation still above 6%.

Zelenskiy estimated Russia's irrecoverable losses this year at about 270,000 troops, a figure that could not be independently verified. "He is neither winning nor losing, but his society is losing people and money for the sake of some 100 kilometers," he said.

Ukraine Hits Russian Fuel And Air Defenses As Kyiv Fields High-Speed Drones To Counter Jet Shaheds – Analysis


A Wild Hornets’ STING S drone (UAV) designed to destroy Russian kamikaze UAVs such as Shahed, Geran, Lancet, as well as reconnaissance drones. Photo Credit: wildhornets.com


September 26, 2026
Hudson Institute
By Can Kasapoğlu

Key Takeaways:

Ukraine’s General Staff said Sept. 19–20 strikes hit Moscow’s Kapotnya refinery (including an AVT-6 unit tied to military fuel) plus air-defense, radar, and drone-plant targets in occupied areas, while Russia kept attacking along Pokrovsk, Huliaipole, and the eastern fortress belt; post-Duma elections raise the chance of a Kremlin mobilization.

Zelenskyy and footage showed new high-speed interceptors—including Wild Hornets’ STING S and Vluchnyk’s ~$2,000 Zorelit v5 (~260 mph, SkyMap cueing)—downing jet-powered Geran/Shahed types that once often needed F-16s.

Watch Alabuga’s growing underground drone plants and whether August’s jump to ~57–62% jet-powered Shaheds holds in September.

1. Battlefield Assessment

Last week Ukraine continued to target the infrastructure that supports Russia’s military. According to the Ukrainian General Staff, on the night of September 19–20, Kyiv struck the Moscow Oil Refinery in Kapotnya, causing a major fire. The conflagration damaged several critical refinery components, including an AVT-6 crude-distillation unit, an integrated oil-processing unit, and an isomerization plant.

These facilities are key components of Russia’s war machine. The refinery’s AVT-6 distillation unit can process roughly 53 percent of its total crude throughput. The refinery can process as much as 12 million tons of oil annually and, according to the Ukrainian General Staff, supplies fuel to the Russian military.

Ukrainian forces also hit targets in occupied Ukraine. Kyiv reportedly struck a Buk-M3 air-defense system near Ukrainka in Zaporizhzhia Oblast, a Nebo-U radar near Balka in Donetsk Oblast, and a Russian drone-production facility near Siverskodonetsk in Luhansk Oblast. These attacks targeted Russia’s fuel infrastructure, air-defense assets, and drone-production capacity.

Meanwhile, legislative elections held in Russia from September 18–20 to elect all 450 seats of the State Duma marked an important political threshold. The electoral calendar no longer gives the Kremlin reason to delay potentially disruptive force-generation measures. It is possible, therefore, that Moscow may order a partial mobilization that could further shift the force-on-force balance against Ukraine.

Finally, Russia and Ukraine continued to contest the battlespace at a high operational tempo. Pokrovsk, Huliaipole, Kostiantynivka, Sloviansk, the Kramatorsk axis, and Ukraine’s eastern fortress belt defenses all saw heavy combat. Despite mounting casualties and limited territorial gains, Russian forces maintained an offensive posture on the ground.

2. Ukraine Introduces High-Speed Interceptors into the Counter-Shahed Battle

Static platforms once dominated drone warfare, but Russia and Ukraine now engage in a rapid cycle of offensive adaptation and defensive counteradaptation. Russia has expanded its use of faster, jet-powered Shahed derivatives. Ukraine is responding by accelerating the development of its own low-cost interceptor drones.

On September 19, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced that the Security Service of Ukraine had successfully employed a new interceptor against Russia’s jet-powered Shahed/Geran-type drones, releasing footage of the system in action. On the same day, additional footage emerged depicting Ukrainian forces using jet-powered unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to intercept Russian jet-powered Geran-5 attack drones. Officials documented three separate Russian Geran-5 platform interceptions on September 19. They attributed two to unidentified jet-powered interceptors, and a third to Ukraine’s new STING S interceptor, a drone-hunting drone developed by the country’s Wild Hornets group.

These interceptions are notable. The Geran-5 is harder to target than earlier variants because of its higher speed and larger explosive payload. These features require faster interceptors that can close on the target before the attacking drone reaches its destination.

The Ukrainian Air Force has often dispatched manned combat aircraft, including the F-16, to intercept jet-powered Gerans. The appearance of the STING S interceptor alongside other unnamed jet-powered drone-hunting drones suggests that Ukraine is beginning to field multiple purpose-built high-speed counter-UAV systems. Kyiv is adapting in real time, as Russia’s expanded use of jet-powered one-way attack drones forces Ukrainian air defenses to respond with faster, cheaper, and more widely distributed interceptor platforms.

The Ukrainian manufacturer Vluchnyk is one company driving these innovations. The firm has completed internal testing of the Zorelit v5, or Starship, an interceptor designed specifically for high-speed reconnaissance and attack UAVs. The company says the system is ready for military use. Following codification, the Zorelit v5 is expected to become available through Ukraine’s ePoints procurement mechanism, which rewards military units for the confirmed destruction of Russian personnel and equipment.

The Zorelit v5 reportedly reaches 260 miles per hour and has a maximum range of approximately 29 miles. At a cruising speed of roughly 124 miles per hour, the system can carry a warhead and remain airborne for approximately 17 minutes. Its intended targets range from Russian reconnaissance UAVs and Gerbera decoys to Geran-2 attack drones and the faster, jet-powered Geran-3 and Geran-4 variants.

The interceptor can incorporate artificial intelligence–enabled target detection and tracking, including automated terminal guidance during the final phase of an engagement. The system can also integrate with SkyMap, which fuses air-target data from multiple detection layers, including radar and acoustic sensors, into a common picture that operators can access on a tablet.

Where less advanced systems would require individual interceptor teams to locate targets independently, SkyMap can provide operators with updated target tracks and cue them toward the relevant engagement area. This level of sensor fusion can help coordinate mobile fire groups, interceptor-drone crews, and other short-range air-defense elements against large, geographically dispersed UAV raids. In effect, Ukraine’s combination of inexpensive interceptors, distributed sensors, and digital command-and-control capabilities is turning the country’s counter-drone network into an increasingly integrated sensor-to-shooter architecture.

The Zorelit v5 builds on the already-produced Zorelit v4. Vluchnyk representatives say this earlier model has already entered combat service and has even received a North Atlantic Treaty Organization stock number, a unique numeric code used by NATO and allied countries to identify standardized supply items. The newer v5 incorporates combat-proven design features from the v4 system.

At a listed price of roughly $2,000 per interceptor, the v5 system illustrates a central feature of Ukraine’s emerging air-defense model. Against numerous and increasingly capable Russian one-way attack drones, Ukraine is attempting to match mass with a defensive architecture that is both scalable and economically sustainable. This exchange ratio matters as much as, if not more than, the v5 interceptor’s performance.

3. What to Monitor in the Coming Weeks

The Kremlin is reportedly expanding the underground production infrastructure at its drone-manufacturing facility at Alabuga in the Russian Republic of Tatarstan. Officials have built roughly 10 acres of underground space, providing Moscow with additional capacity for future production. Russia appears to have accelerated its construction effort following the first Ukrainian strikes against the facility and is increasingly dispersing its production of Geran drones and hardening supporting infrastructure. This suggests that Moscow is working to reduce the vulnerability of its manufacturing network to Ukrainian long-range strikes. This report will continue to track the open-source intelligence reporting on the Alabuga facility’s expanding subterranean footprint.

in August 2026 shifted toward sustained day-and-night attacks and greater use of jet-powered systems. An estimated 57–62 percent of the Shahed/Geran drones that Russia used during August were jet-powered, up from roughly 10 percent in June. Their higher speed compress Ukraine’s engagement windows and force Kyiv to rely more heavily on faster, more expensive air-defense assets. September’s data will show whether this shift in Russian drone operations is becoming a sustained pattern.

About the author: 

Can Kasapoğlu is a nonresident senior fellow at Hudson Institute. His work at Hudson focuses on political-military affairs in the Middle East, North Africa, and former Soviet regions. He specializes in open-source defense intelligence, geopolitical assessments, international weapons market trends, as well as emerging defense technologies and related concepts of operations.

Source: This article was published by the Hudson Institute

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Is Russia going to war with Europe?

Europe has stopped simply paying for Ukraine's war and started manufacturing it, and the Kremlin is not happy. Whether that makes a wider war likelier is a separate question, and the analysts closest to the Russian order of battle say it does not. / bne IntelliNews

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By Ben Aris in Berlin September 21, 2026

Is Russia about to launch an attack on Europe? In the last few weeks the rhetoric has rapidly escalated and the number of sabotage and arson incidents linked to Russia have escalated fanning the flames of fear. How close is the start of WWIII?

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk told parliament on September 17 that allied intelligence pointed to Russian drones and missiles testing Europe’s eastern flank, entering Polish airspace and then being explained away afterwards as accidents. The design is to leave member states that Nato’s "Article 5 is more theoretical than practical". Poland scrambled fighter jets on September 17 as jet-powered drones crossed western Ukraine, and put ground-based air defence on high alert.

"In the Russian plan, according to intelligence assessments, there are also hybrid drone, and missile strikes on countries supporting Ukraine, including Poland," Tusk said. "The threat of provocations by Russia is real and could materialize at any moment."

French President Emmanuel Macron said the next day that Russian hybrid operations were now aimed directly at France and ordered new protection for critical infrastructure and defence-industry sites, Reuters reported.

When CIA Director John Ratcliffe made an unannounced trip to Moscow in August, reportedly to warn against a Russian attack on Nato. The last time the CIA director made an unannounced trip to Moscow was shortly before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. However, after the trip Lithuanian and Estonian officials reported no increase in the military threat afterwards.

And countries along both sides of the border are making active preparations. Ukraine has already reinforced its border with Belarus. The Baltic states have put up fences and built defences, and Finland completed similar reinforcements this month. Poland's East Shield covers some 700 km of its borders with Belarus and Kaliningrad at a cost of about €2.4bn.

Russia recently built ten new missile launch-pad bases on its side of the Ukrainian and Belarusian borders that now put six Nato states inside Geran range. Behind them sit the powerful Oreshnik and the Iskanders ballistic missiles in Belarus and Kaliningrad that can hit any major capital in Europe.

More worryingly, Belarus ran tank and mechanised battalion exercises from September 15 to 18 at ranges roughly 15 km and 60 km from the Polish border and at Gozha on the Lithuanian frontier, beside the Suwalki Gap, the 104-km corridor that is the only land link between the Baltic states and the rest of the alliance – long seen as the favoured invasion point for Russian troops to take the Baltic states. Minsk called the drills "purely defensive", said they fell below the notification thresholds of the 2011 Vienna Convention and has not disclosed how many troops took part

Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko has also restarted radio relay stations used to guide Russian drones attacking targets in northern Ukraine, after he turned them off following Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s threat to attack Belarus if they stayed in place.

"On his territory, along two regions bordering Ukraine, there is equipment directing fire at the Ukrainian population," Zelenskiy said in June. "Turn it off, take it down, and show us that it's been taken down. If they don't take it down, we'll take them down." Now the repeater stations are back on, there is a chance that Zelenskiy will follow through on his threat to strike them.

Fears of an invasion have risen to the point where Estonia has put in place plans to evacuate the entire population to Finland if Russia invades. Lithuania has published evacuation routes from Vilnius towards Poland. And both Russia and Germany have released plans to allow hospitals in the region to cope with a sudden surge of mass casualties should hostilities break out.

Dutch Prime Minister Rob Jetten said on September 18 that it was "no coincidence" Tusk was speaking so strongly and that the warning had to be taken "very seriously"; the Dutch defence ministry's own strategy, published in June, put a limited war against Nato members as possible within a year of the Ukraine war ending. But that timely appears to have been brought forward now.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen sounded the alarm during her Strasbourg state of the nation speech on September 16, telling the European Parliament that the union was "now dealing with an openly hostile world" and that the EU is now “surrounded by enemies.”

Her list was hybrid rather than military: "cyberattacks and sabotage, arson and drone incursions. They are ramping up every day." She proposed a European version of Article 4 — an emergency security protocol for members that are threatened rather than attacked — and a European Security Council to sit above it.

As tensions escalate, Putin denied Russia has any plans to attack Europe: "We don't want to fight you, we want to cooperate with you… I want to say once again: Russia has no aggressive intentions toward Europe or European countries. We are ready for cooperation and for restoring relations with our European neighbours," Putin told his military-industrial commission on September 18 in televised comments. But then he denied Russia had any intention of invading Ukraine as well, right up to the day before Russians tanks rolled across the border on February 24, 2022.

Another “turning point"?

The “enemies at the gate” rhetoric is reminiscent of the talk of a “turning point” that swamped the airwaves in the run up to the Ankara Nato summit on July 8, where Bankova, Ukraine’s presidential administration, Nato and EU leaders hyped Ukrainian gains ahead of the meeting in an effort to raise a fresh €70bn in funding and more missiles supplies. That talk rapidly faded away after the summit was over that largely failed to meet any of these goals.

Now Ukraine has its back against the wall and the calls for money and missiles are louder than ever. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy revealed in his Independence Day speech earlier this month that the government had a $27bn hole in its defence budget it cannot fill just as it ran out of interceptor missiles completely.

The war in Ukraine has been through a phase change, switching from four and half years of a war of attrition to a full scale total war. This summer Zelenskiy has taken the fight to Russia using new medium- and long-range drones and missile targeting, first Russian oil refineries, and since the end of July Russia's retail sector.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has responded in kind, warning that Bankova had opened “Pandora’s box” and unleashed a brutal retaliation. That includes an effort to systematically destroy Ukraine’s retail infrastructure, taking out 90% of the country’s modern warehousing, hitting megamalls and petrol stations, and most recently targeting over 300 locomotives. The shelves in Ukraine’s supermarkets are emptying, and the country is anticipating the most brutal winter of the war when the heating season starts in November.

As the conflict expands it is now increasingly spilling over into Europe as Ukraine’s only remaining ally goes from funding the fighting to building its weapons. Moscow says that takes Europe from “supporting” Ukraine to become an “active participant” in the war and warns that European defence factors are now “legitimate military targets.”

Fresh interceptor missiles are coming in, in dribs and drabs, and Ukraine’s Ministry of Finance (MinFin) is asking for the second tranche of the €90bn loan, due next year, to be pulled forward to this year. Without it, Ukraine is again facing the same macroeconomic collapse it faced in April, before the €90bn was approved.

With a massive barrage of Russian ballistic missiles and the freezing subzero temperatures of winter looming, Bankova’s need for help is urgent and time is running out fast. Everyone knows what is coming.

Arms production

What has changed is the arms production. Ukraine has all but run out of the critical interceptor missiles it needs to bring down Russian ballistic missiles and the US has halted arms deliveries since US President Donald Trump took over. Ukraine has been reduced to hunting Russian launchers rather than shooting down what they fire. In recent months, Zelenskiy is starting to sound increasingly desperate.

Russia's missile production already vastly outpaces Ukraine's. This week Putin claimed a more than 22-fold increase in deliveries of ammunition and weapons, which has not been independently verified. European stockpiles have been run down to the bottom of the barrel, so to keep Kyiv supplied, dozens of joint ventures have been launched under the so-called Danish model to make weapons in European factories to which are then shipped to the frontline in the Donbas and elsewhere.

Particularly effective have been British-made Nyan drones which only carry a 20kg payload, but as they can fly thousands of kilometres and have state-of-the-art guidance systems, they can pinpoint the most sensitive parts of Russian refineries and put them out of action for months at a time. Previously Ukrainian drones did little more than cause superficial fires and refineries were back in action after only a few days. The Kremlin said the Callen-Lenz factory in Wiltshire that makes the Nyan is now a legitimate target, but has not suggested targeting it with Russia’s ICBMs yet.

In April the Russian defence ministry published the addresses of 21 facilities in 11 European countries making drones for Ukraine — sites in London, Munich, Riga, Vilnius, Prague, Madrid and Venice among them — and Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia's Security Council, called the list a “register of potential legitimate targets for the Russian armed forces.”

And European money is being poured into Ukraine’s defence sector.  The €90bn loan package agreed on in April earmarks €60bn for defence across 2026 and 2027, with the first €5.9bn tranche reserved for Ukrainian-made drones. In particular, Germany has begun series production of long-range drones for Ukraine, and a Ukrainian-European joint venture started building long-range strike drones on EU soil this month – standing on Euro Nato territory that should, in theory, give them Nato Article 5 protection. European leaders are now starting to question the validity of that theory.

Is Europe ready for war with Russia?

Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski told the Yalta European Strategy meeting in Kyiv on September 11-12 that Europe enjoys "overwhelming air superiority", that its air forces could destroy what remains of Russia's refining industry "in six weeks".

“If Russia attacked us and we took our gloves off, I think we would defeat Russia quite quickly,” he said, arguing that Nato enjoys a large advantage in airpower.

“If after six months Ukraine can cause a fuel crisis in Russia with its limited airpower, we can do the same in six days,” said Sirkovsky, estimating that European Nato has some 2,500 more planes than Russia.

Those comments set off a debate on how effective Europe’s airpower is. Kremlin aide and former FSB head, Nikolai Patrushev replied that if Poland tried that, it would “lose its statehood within days.”

Russia has around 1,500 advanced jet fighters and bombers in its fleet that are under a single command and are veterans of a four and half war. Europe’s air forces are divided amongst 21 European commands with little hands-on experience. Eight fleets hold about three quarters of the total: Turkey around 300, France 260, Germany 220, Greece 215, Italy 190, Spain 180, the UK 150 as well as Poland with fewer than 70 planes. Currently, Europe’s air defences are coordinated by a US general based in Ramstein, but the Pentagon told Europe explicitly early this year it was withdrawing from this role next year as part of the Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy (NSS) released last December. If the US general withdraws from running Europe’s logistics, currently, the system requires all 32 Nato members to make logistic decisions by committee unless a new commander is appointed.

Latvian President Edgars Rinkevics has put it flatly. "We are not ready. That's absolutely clear," he said in an interview. "We can't keep simply hoping for a situation where the US remains much involved in Europe."

And there is a “Babel problem”: although these forces are supposed to be Nato-compatible, in reality there are 172 types of major weapons systems in European service across eleven categories, against 32 in American service, according to McKinsey. This problem has already come up on the Ukrainian battlefield where nominally identical EU-made 155mm artillery shells won’t work in guns made by another country due to local “refinements.”

Poland also has a formidable army with some 220,000 men under arms and the highest defence spending in Europe of 4.68% of GDP, with ambitions to create the largest conventional army in Europe. But its military is still dwarfed by Russia’s.

The International Institute for Strategic Studies’ Douglas Barrie said in a report that Europe’s air force is more advanced, more capable and better trained than Russia’s but still doubts Nato could win air superiority over Russia. The obstacle is not Russian aircraft but Russian ground-based air defence — the advanced S-400, S-300, Pantsir and Tor batteries stacked across Russian territory, as well as the effective electronic warfare systems protecting them. Thanks to the thirty year “peace dividend” since the fall of the Soviet Union, Europe has not invested into anything similar.

The issue was put to the test during the Polish drone incursion last September when six unarmed Russian reconnaissance drones flew almost across the entire Polish territory unchallenged. Warsaw scrambled its air force, fired off $1.4bn of air defence missiles and eventually called in the Danish air force for help to eventually bring the Styrofoam drones costing about $10,000 each. Since then Russian drone incursions have become common over Poland, Romania and Moldova.

Clement Molin, the French open-source milblogger argues that Polish and Baltic border defences are patchy at best and ill-equipped to deal with 1,000-strong Russian drone swam. Russia has been investing heavily into both drone production and development. It is on course to make 10mn drones this year and has recently switched to the more advanced jet powered Geran-4 drone that can evade Ukraine’s best interceptor drones. In addition it has rolled out the Geran-5 drone, a lightweight and inexpensive cruise missile, and the Banderol light weight cruise missile.

European leaders have talked about setting up a “drone wall” to protect Europe’s eastern flank. Warsaw has since joined an anti-ballistic missile coalition with Ukraine and other allies, despite the fact that no one has enough ammo. Germany has a licence to make the Patriot PAC-3 interceptor missiles but won’t go into production until next year. The total European drone production is currently estimated to be on the order of 300,000-400,000 drones. Just how unprepared Nato is was shoved in Nato commanders face during the Hedgehog military exercises in Estonia this May, when a ten-man detachment of Ukrainian operators destroyed an entire battalion of Nato troops. Twice. Before the lunch break.

A 24-year-old Ukrainian operator at the exercise said: "They paused the exercises three times to determine how to improve, but if this had been real life, they would already be dead."

The Armed Forces of Russia (AFR) is just as well versed in drone warfare. It would take years of investment to catch up to where Russia is today, and Putin has already put the whole Russian economy on a full war footing.

"What we see is that air defence, drone defence, anti-ballistic defence has serious problems," Latvian President Edgars Rinkevics, speaking in Washington on September 19, said. "Because if Russia decides to use a couple of missiles in that territory, I think that would be a serious challenge today for many countries to cope with that."

Hybrid attack

As von der Leyen pointed out, Russia’s attack, if any comes, is likely to be hybrid – enough to cause destruction, but not enough to trigger an unavoidable Article 5 collective response.

"I don't believe in the threat of a land operation, even a limited one, in Europe," Molin said. “Moscow would instead intensify what he called its "indirect war" against Europe.”

Those fears were stoked by the discovery of a bomb in a bag at the Leipzig-Halle airport next to a Ukrainian Antonov cargo plane ferrying French ammunition to Kyiv that was linked to Russia by Germany’s intelligence services. Medvedev wrote on Telegram, "Germany deserves[s] a direct strike on all German military equipment production facilities for the Bandera clique. And quite possibly on several other locations in Berlin as well," after Russia was accused of planting the bomb.

The contradiction at the heart of the fearmongering amongst European leaders warning of an imminent Russian attack is on the one hand they point to a full scale invasion of the Nordic countries; on the other they scoff at Russia’s failure to take more than 20% of Ukrainian territory after four years of full scale war and its inability to even capture the small chunk of the Donbas Russia still does not control. Russia can’t attack Nato unless the AFU’s defence of Ukraine collapses and frees Russian troops for other duties.

"More than 90% of the Russian army is currently on the Ukrainian front," Molin wrote, with most of the air force, recruits and munitions committed there. "The Russian army has no major forces in Kaliningrad, which would make any offensive against an EU state suicidal for that strategic territory."

Ukraine’s shortage of men, money and missiles is acute, but Russia, while better off, is in the same boat. To raise the additional million men that an invasion of Europe would require, would mean a general mobilisation – something Putin has been very careful to avoid - and that could trigger wide scale protests in Russia.

"As long as the war in Ukraine continues, without a Ukrainian collapse, Europe is not at much risk", because "the Ukrainians have lined up more than 1mn men, which would be impossible to replace by European armies in a few months".

A land invasion remains off the cards for now, but a hybrid attack on the already weakened Europe economy is already underway. Analysts warn that critical infrastructure - refineries, ports, airports, power stations, rail networks and command centres – need to be prepared now.