The Russo-Ukrainian war as a war of transition
Valerii Zaluzhnyi, Ukraine’s Ambassador to the United Kingdom and former Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, gave a speech at The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI). Ukrainska Pravda has translated the summary of his speech and reproduces it here in full.
The experience of our struggle will be useful to everyone who is looking for a path to peace. And the path to peace may lie through war.
"Si vis pacem, para bellum" – these words are often attributed to the ancient Roman historian Cornelius Nepos, and unfortunately, they are perfectly suited to a democratic society today, in the 21st century. If you want peace, prepare for war.
Yes, this statement is absolutely correct. This is confirmed by me, who happened to be the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and by the entire Ukrainian people, who have learnt this well and painfully.
I was born 28 years after the end of one of the bloodiest and most brutal wars in human history. When I was born, bombs were no longer falling on cities and villages, tanks were no longer crushing the ground and everything on it. The piercing sounds of air-raid warnings were no longer heard, nor were bursts of machine-gun fire.
But today I pray, and I urge all of you to pray and ask God that our grandchildren will never see what our grandfathers saw, what we have seen, and unfortunately what our children have seen.
For this reason, we must not stop fighting for the right to live. Evil is near, and it has come to kill.
Humankind’s most valuable asset on planet Earth is the ability to live. Yet almost all of its history is associated with wars. Or rather, with the killing of people. Over time, these wars, or rather killings, have become unprecedented in terms of their scale and the number of casualties and have acquired the status of world wars.
There were two such conflicts in the last century alone – the First and Second World Wars, which were separated by just over 20 years and claimed the lives of approximately 60 million people.
Is humanity ready to calmly accept the next war, which will be even more devastating – the Third World War?
To a certain extent that depends on us, the professional military, who know almost everything about war. After all, it is the professional military who wage wars and know their true cost: the price of victories and defeats.
Referring to the events of 2022-2024 in the now ten-year war between Ukraine and Russia, we need to tell humanity honestly what is happening and what humanity must be prepared for.
Free and democratic nations and their governments must wake up and think about how to protect their citizens and their countries.
We are ready to share all our knowledge, experience and opinions with those who have not abandoned Ukraine in these challenging times and who are seeking peace and security for their nations.
So what have we Ukrainians learnt from this war, and especially from its full-scale component, which burst into our lives on 24 February 2022?
First of all, wars should be avoided! But if war does come, you must be prepared for it.
Preparedness for war should be viewed as a vast set of measures covering not only purely military aspects, but also every area where the state is active. Perhaps the most complex and most important component is societal readiness, based on honest and transparent communication between the government and people.
Society has to agree to temporarily give up a number of freedoms for the sake of survival.
Unfortunately, modern wars are total wars. They require the efforts of not only the army but also society as a whole.
Politicians can and should mobilise society. To do this, the military and other resources of the state are involved in an integrated way.
These resources include the economy, finance, the public, and allies. Such actions will obviously affect the country's political processes.
Thus, readiness for war will be determined not only by the readiness of the army to repel aggression, but also by the readiness of society to confront the enemy.
Secondly, war cannot in any way be seen as part of the internal political process.
War is the maximum concentration of forces for survival. And for this purpose only!
The Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz said: "War is the continuation of policy by other means." So it seems strange when the war in Ukraine, on the contrary, shapes domestic policies in other countries globally, which is ultimately used by our enemies for their own ends.
I believe that a war for freedom in one country should become a policy of the survival of democracy in the remaining free countries.
War is a science, with its own laws and rules that need to be known and studied.
Using war for one's own ends or attempting to influence its course in one's own interests is a crime that results in huge numbers of victims.
It is always difficult for a democratic army, the army of a free society, to fight the army of a feudal lord.
The enemy considers democracy to be our greatest weakness and is doing its best to exploit it. Fake news, lies, devaluing national interests, lack of confidence in the leadership – these are just some of the tools that the Russians have been using for more than a decade, and democratic societies have still not found ways of counteracting them.
The well-known Chinese thinker Sun Tzu outlined the basic principles of warfare as far back as the 5th century BC. These principles are still relevant today, and will remain so for as long as war is run by human beings. However, they are just basic principles that need to be filled with weapons, the forms and methods of their use, and armies with their structures. It is in this sequence that war changes.
After carefully analysing our experience, backed up by facts and figures, I realise that we are facing not only a huge task but also, most importantly, a difficult choice. For us Ukrainians, this is not just about following the law of "challenge and response" proposed by the British historian Arnold J. Toynbee.
It is not just Russia’s very existence that is now a threat.
Today we have a full-scale war, which has led us to a new challenge—physical survival. A nation's very survival is determined by its choice. How should we respond to this challenge? How can we survive in the face of ambivalence and contradictions in the world around us?
We have to understand that it is up to us Ukrainians now to decide whether we are going to survive and whether our children will have a future.
There is no doubt that history is once again giving the Ukrainian people a chance. On the cold night of 23-24 February 2022, as the rest of the world was enjoying a peaceful life, snuggled in their warm beds, Ukrainians reminded themselves whose blood flows in their veins and engaged in a fierce battle with their eternal enemy.
Paying with the lives of ordinary Ukrainians, we won a chance—a chance not just to continue the eternal struggle, but to win. It has cost us dearly—many of the lives of our finest sons and daughters.
But this was only the beginning. We realised very soon that withstanding the blow and giving a worthy rebuff to the enemy was only the start of a more difficult stage of the confrontation: finding our own special path to victory. It was the search for this special path that led us to understand the already visible outlines of revolutionary changes, primarily in military matters.
Surprisingly, but entirely logically, it is likely that these changes – invented on the battlefields of the Russo-Ukrainian war – will determine the shape of wars and military affairs in the 21st century. Most importantly, they will become the foundation of the entire global security architecture of the future.
Not long ago, it was safe to say that unmanned systems were the main cause of changes in strategies, forms, and methods of use. But today, a new warfare strategy probably needs to include a broader concept—technology.
The war that came to us in 2014 is completely different from the one that burst into our lives on 24 February 2022. Although it was based on the concepts of 2014, it was now different and quickly depleted our forces in May 2022. The intensity of combat actions forced us to restore the level of early 2022, and the need to survive on the battlefield led us into another war, which we faced in the summer of 2023.
The warring parties have stopped looking for new weapons for the time being, and it would be appropriate to look for new ways of applying the latest technologies. The discovery of new ways of application would logically lead to changes in the structure of units and the Armed Forces as a whole. This movement forward is well-founded and science-based.
The development of technologies affects the forms of their application, and only new forms of application affect the structure of the armies that are fighting. This trend is inevitable and will continue. Technology is more than just innovative solutions: it’s also the set of measures for development, scientific support, training and doctrine development that will change the situation on the battlefield in the face of the enemy's current advantage in terms of military potential and resources.
Simply put, we have discovered a way to fight and win against stronger armies in the 21st century. It is clear that technology must ensure the sustainability of the Ukrainian nation.
At the same time, I absolutely agree that the Russo-Ukrainian war is not yet a war of the future. It is only a war of the transitional period. But our war is shaping the new rules.
We Ukrainians, with our blood and our thirst for victory, are shaping new templates for a new war. A war that will be the war of the future.
We have to admit that perhaps the main reason for finding ways to improve weapons is the desire to survive on the battlefield. A combination of factors such as limited resources, lack of proper support, and the inability to focus on producing traditional assets of warfare, has led to significant changes on the battlefield in the Russo-Ukrainian war.
Essentially, a new stage in the forms and methods of warfare has begun. We can see how scientific and technological progress has set the wheel of history in motion and brought to the battlefield technologies that are likely to be decisive in this war and, most importantly, will become the basis for global security in the future. It will be up to us to decide whether the democratic world or the world of tyranny will master these technologies faster.
War is about resources and time. If we regard technologies as resources, then as of now, for various reasons, neither Ukraine nor Russia will be able to master them on their own in the near future. This means that the only solution is to increase the number of human resources involved in combat.
At the same time, technologies will be waiting for those brave enough to master them. Those who master them will decide global security issues. It is difficult to say how the situation will develop in the future.
Only one thing is certain: tyrants will always need war for internal use as a tool to maintain power. The rest of us have to build a reliable defence against them.
Today, more than ever, people in Ukraine are finding ways to survive and creating technologies. But for obvious reasons, they cannot scale them up. Our partners, on the other hand, have the resources, but no applied and practical field in which to test them. It is only by working together that we will be able to make effective use of these resources, because time is no longer on our side.
"Following yesterday’s rules of war will not lead to today’s (or tomorrow’s) successes – that awareness can save lives. We have to start dealing with the consequences of the new rules of war." I took this quote from a retired American general, Stanley McChrystal.
He went on to say, "Otherwise, we will all be left far behind." But I would say more categorically: otherwise we will all die.
Valerii Zaluzhnyi
Translation: Myroslava Zavadska
Editing: Teresa Pearce
