As the Russia-Ukraine War approaches its fifth year, the question of operational dynamics remains foremost for military analysts. Both Ukraine and Russia have innovated and adapted enormously since February 2022. Yet neither side has adapted sufficiently to seize significant territory and restore battlefield maneuver. This stems partly from mutual institutional constraints on manpower, training, and command-and-control. However, there is also a technological and operational dimension to this positional paradox: the emergence of a mature reconnaissance-strike complex—a situation that differs markedly from historical cases of positional combat. A potential solution to this paradox is slowly coming into focus: the scaled employment of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) synchronized for operational and tactical effect.
The Russian forces, which had initially counted on a quick victory, suffered extremely heavy losses. However, over time, Moscow managed to rebuild and reorganize its army, taking into account the unique conditions of this war. Ukraine’s pre-war army also no longer exists, having transformed into a totally distinct force. Both sides employ very large numbers of unmanned systems, use sophisticated radio-electronic and cyber tools, rely on space-based assets for command-and-control and targeting, and generally refrain from employing massed armored forces.
Positional deadlock and territorial changes
Crucially, neither side has generated a major shift in the front line in three and a half years. The last significant territorial change came in November 2022, when Ukraine liberated right-bank Kherson Oblast after around 10 weeks of hard fighting—an operation that followed significant Ukrainian gains in Kharkiv Oblast that September. But despite committing significant quantities of men and materiel, neither side has moved the contact line more than a few dozen kilometers at best. Ukraine achieved almost no territorial gains in its 2023 southern offensive, despite committing between 12 and 20 brigades to combat. Russia has made territorial gains, but—with only a handful of exceptions, such as near Ocheretyne in April 2024 and around Dobropillya in August 2025—it has had few opportunities to generate large-scale gains. Russia has consistently tactically underperformed, advancing only 40−60 kilometers from its positions in September 2023 in the Donbas. Ironically, despite its constraints, Ukraine executed the only major operational maneuver of this war since November 2022, seizing around 1,000 square kilometers of Russian territory in Kursk Oblast in August 2024—which it ultimately lost in March 2025.
Institutional and technological causes of the positional deadlock
Institutional factors partly explain Russian and Ukrainian failures to execute a breakthrough. Ukraine’s manpower constraints are well-documented and have hampered serious offensive planning. It also lacks the trained staff officers to plan and coordinate large-scale operations, whether defensive or offensive. The result is that higher-level Ukrainian staff capacities are often applied to relatively limited numbers of troops: Ukraine’s Joint Forces Commander, Mykhailo Drapatyi, worked with the 2nd Khartiia Corps to coordinate the ZSU’s recent offensive near Kupyansk, despite apparently employing the equivalent of an over-strength brigade. Russia, meanwhile, has obvious training constraints, even if its manpower situation is much better than Ukraine’s. Russian commanders, operating under a political directive to take territory, use their manpower advantage to generate additional tactical options. Russian troops advance in small units over several days, taking high casualties but slowly accumulating enough soldiers to attack Ukrainian defensive strongpoints. This process does not generate the conditions for rapid maneuver, but it does maintain maximum military and psychological pressure on Ukraine, supporting the Kremlin’s political efforts to compel Kyiv to accept a punitive peace deal.
However, there is an equally relevant operational and technological explanation for the positional paradox in Ukraine. It stems from the realities of what military analysts have termed a reconnaissance-strike complex.
During the mid-Cold War, Soviet military thinkers anticipated a radical shift in the relationship between detection and strike capabilities. As modern computing combined with persistent sensors and rocket motors to create precision weapons, and radio-electronic communications advanced to improve coordination between scouting and attacking forces, hitting individual targets with extreme accuracy and responsiveness became foreseeable. The result would be what Soviet thinkers termed a military-technical revolution, under which force structure would need to change quite radically, and the reconnaissance-counterreconnaissance fight would become crucial in combat. Soviet thought distinguished between the tactical-level reconnaissance-fires complex and the operational-level reconnaissance-strike complex, although the logic, assets, and divisions between the two are somewhat blurry. The United States came to similar conclusions, partly by intellectual emulation, in the late 1980s, with US analysts subsequently rebranding the concept the Revolution in Military Affairs.
Although this RMA thesis influenced US force design throughout the 1990s and 2000s—and enabled three spectacular US conventional victories between 1991 and 2003—an essential piece was missing. In each conventional conflict, only the United States fielded a force-wide reconnaissance-strike complex. The US military did adapt markedly to the conditions of counterinsurgency, but there was no need to evolve its reconnaissance-strike complex against an enemy that could target it.
The Russia-Ukraine War marks the first conflict in which both sides employ roughly equivalent reconnaissance-strike complexes. This makes the war relevant for military analysis, despite the manifest limitations Ukraine and Russia face. It is this mutual employment of reconnaissance-strike complexes that generates the war’s positional paradox.
Historically speaking, protracted positional warfare—the emergence of largely static fronts dominated by either continuous fortifications or specific strongpoints with consistently high force density—stemmed from logistical considerations. Armies require large quantities of food and materiel to fight. Positional warfare occurs when good logistics routes allow both combatants to build up and sustain large numbers of forces. Protracted combat occurs when the attacking side cannot translate excess forces—the reserves needed to create and exploit a breakthrough—into rapidly moving combat power. Until the mid-20th century, this usually meant a technological distinction existed between tactical logistics, delivered by foot or horse, and strategic logistics, delivered by rail or waterway. This generated the First World War’s tug-of-war operational dynamics, in which anything beyond a shallow penetration in the enemy front was at risk of counterattack after outstripping its logistical support. Motorized transportation helped bridge the gap between strategic and tactical logistics, making greater movement possible. However, barring a strategic collapse akin to Germany’s victory over France in 1940, logistical considerations would determine whether a breakthrough and exploitation would lead to victory. Throughout the Second World War, neither the Western Allies nor the Soviets could maintain continuous operational momentum, necessitating a cycle of major gains, pauses, and subsequent breakthrough attempts.
UAVs: a way out of the positional deadlock
Both Russia and Ukraine field mature reconnaissance-strike complexes that leverage UAS at scale. Each side has attacked the other at 30−50 kilometers of depth with increasing frequency. Earlier in this war, weapons of choice included artillery shells and rockets, with UAS providing fire correction. Today, Russia and Ukraine employ operational-level strike drones as well, alongside FPVs and bomber drones that attack front-line targets.
A mature reconnaissance-strike complex makes a breakthrough extremely difficult by changing the balance between mass and dispersion. Generating the firepower needed for a breakthrough requires physically collocating forces, whether that is artillery for suppression, infantry for frontal attacks, or mechanized forces for exploitation. With consistent UAS reconnaissance out to 30−50 kilometers of depth, and satellite reconnaissance beyond this, massing forces without detection becomes extremely difficult. Once detected, a reconnaissance-strike complex allows the defending commander to rapidly concentrate fire, breaking apart a massed attacking formation. There have been hundreds of examples of this in the Russia-Ukraine War, from Ukrainian HIMARS strikes against Russian rear areas in August 2022 to stall out the first Donbas Offensive to Russian attacks on Ukrainian helicopters and command posts in the past six months.
Undoubtedly, FPVs and bomber drones kill exposed infantry but are less effective against armor and are susceptible to jamming. However, the consistent harassment they can apply against artillery and armor increases the risks of high force density. Towed artillery pieces must dig in, typically underground, to avoid drone attack or drone-cued counterbattery fire. Self-propelled weapons have some advantages in mobility but still require hardened fighting positions. Absent support, UAS are unlikely to disable modern armor. But they can achieve mobility kills, allowing other fires to concentrate.
Russia and Ukraine appear to have arrived at the same conclusion simultaneously: front-line combat success requires not simply high drone density, but drone employment at significant depth. It is here that part of the solution to the Russia-Ukraine War’s positional paradox may exist, with concerning trends for Ukraine and its supporters.
Applying so-called «middlestrike» UAS against targets at operational depth, some 30−50 kilometers behind the contact line, means striking enemy drone teams, command posts, and radio-electronic warfare facilities. The weapons employed in these strikes are increasingly distinct from front-line and deep-strike UAS, like Ukraine’s Shark-M and FP-2, or Russia’s Lancet, KUB-2, and Shahed-Ъ. These are combined with traditional artillery and, for targets at 20 kilometers or closer, increasing numbers of fiber-optic drones that trade maneuverability, weight, and cost for immunity to jamming.
Ukraine and Russia have adopted similar organizational methods to expand their middlestrike systems. For tactical engagements, line infantry units have embedded strike drone companies or battalions. Middlestrike units, by contrast, are concentrated at higher echelons. Ukraine moved first, creating the so-called Drone Line, a half-dozen specialist UAS units that have been scaled up and resourced over the past year. Russia followed suit with its Rubicon UAS center, a specialist strike drone unit that tests new tactics and equipment, scaling knowledge across Russian drone forces.
A greater volume of middlestrikes has restored some fluidity—albeit not mobility—to the contact line. Russian forces can infiltrate between Ukrainian units pinned by drone attack over time, a move exacerbated by Ukraine’s deficit of infantry. Ukraine has also developed new offensive tactics, using smaller assault units to reclaim key positions, counterattack against Russian assaults, and slow Russian advances.
As it stands, Russian middlestrikes are more effective. Volume of drone usage helps. But the key issue is one of focus. Long-range Russian drone units overwhelmingly emphasize the UAS version of counterbattery work—that is, attacking Ukrainian drone teams—rather than hitting infantry or other positions. Ukrainian units have not followed suit, partly because Ukrainian strike drones compensate for the infantry deficit, thereby increasing their exposure to counterbattery attacks.
Ukraine is likely to close this middlestrike gap in the coming months. Ukrainian firms are producing middlestrike drones at a high rate. The new Ukrainian Corps system, despite its growing pains, has institutionalized strike drone units across constituent brigades, freeing up middlestrike units for counterbattery work. Moreover, Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces has fielded new counter-drone weapons that will likely improve middlestrike effectiveness. Nevertheless, this operational adaptation demonstrates a potential path out of the positional deadlock. If a high enough concentration of middlestrikes is synchronized with mechanized forces, then in principle, it would be possible to effect a breakthrough. The key subsequent question would be the attacker’s ability to decentralize UAS employment to support advancing mechanized forces—a problem that artillery faces during the exploitation phase of a combined-arms fight.
Russia’s political leadership does not seem to have demanded that its military execute a real breakthrough. It is comfortable with incremental gains and confident in its ability to maintain its current level of pressure for several years. It perceives Ukrainian domestic politics as fragmenting, the Trump administration as interested in a much broader settlement of differences, and European support as flagging—all with good reason.
However, the issue of UAS integration into a combined-arms fight is obviously a live one in the Russian military. As Moscow plans for a confrontation with European NATO, its ability to integrate UAS into its force more effectively than European armies may well prove decisive. This is particularly true if Russia can establish a defensive line after an initial fait accompli, thereby forcing NATO forces into the Russian reconnaissance-strike complex. Unlike Ukraine, which despite its limitations has built a military that can fight a grinding attrition conflict, NATO forces are designed for rapid armored breakthroughs—precisely the sort of breakthroughs that UAS concentration can slow, and artillery fire backed by remotely deployed mines can neutralize.
