Ukraine Military History Institute
Offensive success comes down to four things, and drones are not one of them
Dmytro Putiata closes a long conversation with Rob Lee by compressing everything they have discussed into a short list. If Ukraine wants a successful offensive operation, it needs a goal, proper planning, reconnaissance, and responsibility.
The last item is the one he dwells on. By responsibility he means a single person who owns the operation. Not the commander at the very top, he says, but someone at the level of a colonel or a brigade general, whose name is attached to the outcome.
That framing matters because of what is missing from it. The list is not about technology. Putiata treats the drone problem as one that has already been worked out: "we know how to deal with drones," and dealing with them is not only about interception. The remaining obstacles are organisational, and the fix he describes is a command fix.
Manoeuvre will return, but do not expect a second Robotyne
Both men had said several times during the conversation that manoeuvre would come back to this war. Putiata repeats it here as a firm expectation. "It's gonna happen."
He then sets the scale straight away. Nobody should expect it to look like "Robotyne 2.0". What he anticipates is much smaller.
Smaller does not mean ordinary, though. His claim is that the operations Ukraine conducts will include things not done by anyone before, built on combinations of different technologies. The novelty is in the method, not in the size of the formation committed.
This is a useful corrective to the way offensives tend to be imagined from outside. A reader waiting for a large armoured push to judge whether Ukraine can attack again may be waiting for the wrong signal entirely.
Units are still tinkering, and that is where breakthroughs come from
Rob Lee picks up the thread with the concept of assault forces. How to fight in a drone environment, how to conduct offensive operations in one, how to combine counter UAS with offensive UAS: all of this, he says, is new, and the system is still being tinkered with.
His judgement is that people are still figuring it out and that units are innovating. That bottom-up development is where he sees the chance of a unit achieving a breakthrough.
He adds the qualifier himself. This is happening despite the manpower problems. The development is outrunning the constraint, not removing it.
Ukraine has become the only real test range
Lee's second point concerns Western industry. He believes Western defence companies have finally realised that Ukraine is the incubator for everything.
His reasoning is narrow and practical. If you want to test a weapon in a real combat environment, you can only do it in Ukraine. If you want to test a UAV against real electronic warfare in a peer conflict, you can only do it in places like the Donetsk region.
He goes further, and Putiata agrees. Conditions differ sharply along the line itself. A UAV that works in Zaporizhzhia may not work in Pokrovsk, because of frequencies and the particular mix of jamming in each sector. A system proven on one stretch of front has not been proven on another.
What Western firms are bringing, in Lee's account, is often not a finished system but a component of technology that can be integrated into Ukrainian drones or other developments. He calls the combination of Ukrainian and Western innovation a potent one that Russia cannot compete with, and he does not think the Russian system can compensate. His condition is funding: as long as the companies are funded properly, he expects the pace to continue.
He expects more adaptation cycles in the war. His bet is that Ukraine keeps the innovation advantage through them.
Crimea is where Russia's leverage is quietly draining
The most consequential argument is about negotiation rather than battle.
Lee's projection is that middle strike and deep strike capabilities keep expanding through the end of the year. If that holds, Russia's ability to protect what it holds in Crimea, its military facilities and other assets, becomes a problem for its bargaining position.
He sets out the logic as a question. In an eventual peace deal, the front line may have moved further into Ukrainian territory. But if Russia cannot protect Crimea, does it really end the war in a stronger position?
The contrast he draws is with the start of the full-scale war, when Ukraine could do nothing to Crimea. Now it is repeatedly struck, and the Black Sea Fleet headquarters has already been hit. Putiata interjects that this happens "on a nightly basis". Lee notes that the Black Sea Fleet is now in Novorossiysk, not Sevastopol.
The point is that territorial gains on the mainland and the security of Crimea are not the same ledger. Russia can add to one while losing on the other.
Cautious optimism, explicitly not a turning point
Lee is careful about how far he goes. There is a lot of conversation about whether the war has reached a turning point, and he says directly that he will not go that far.
What he will say is narrower. There are reasons to believe the situation is better now than it was a year ago, and reasons for cautious optimism about specific developments, some of which he expects Ukraine to keep. He also suggests Russia risks overextending itself.
Putiata calls it a decent conclusion on where the front line stands. It is a conclusion built on capability trends rather than on any single result, which is why it holds up better than a prediction of a breakthrough would.
What to watch
- The shape of the next Ukrainian offensive action. Putiata expects manoeuvre on a small scale with methods not seen before. A large armoured push would contradict him; a small, technology-heavy operation would confirm him.
- Whether a single named commander owns it. His list ends with responsibility at the level of a colonel or brigade general. Whether operations are run that way is observable after the fact.
- The strike tempo on Crimea through the end of the year. Lee's leverage argument depends on middle and deep strike capabilities continuing to expand. If strikes on Crimea slow, the argument weakens.