Denial by Design

Our first report audits twelve months of Ukraine’s defense-technology war, mid-2025 to mid-2026.

It’s mid-2026, now in the fifth year of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and from the outside, it looks like the war has ground to a stalemate.

The Russian advance has largely stalled. Its gains are confined to a handful of areas in Donetsk; Ukraine has pushed back onto the offensive along parts of the southern front, and the daily rate of advance has fallen more than 70% year-on-year. Neither side can force a decision: Russia cannot achieve the victory its political objectives require, and Ukraine cannot expel it by force.

When total victory is off the table, the theory of victory has to change — and a new strategy needs to take hold.

President Zelensky sketched its logic in early 2025: the war originated in Russia and must be made to fail there. Analysts at the Carnegie Endowment called it strategic neutralization: denying Russia the ability to wage war, rather than destroying its forces outright. The goal is not victory in the classical sense but to make continued aggression operationally pointless.

Denial by Design is our first report, written by Nataliia Zelinska and Benjamin Wolba, auditing Ukraine’s defense-technology trajectory from mid-2025 to mid-2026 through that lens. Our premise is that a scoreboard of territory and casualties measures the wrong thing. The question, domain by domain, is not how much of Russia’s force has been destroyed, but how much of it can still do its job.

Over twelve months, the answer is uneven.

In the maritime and cyber domains, functional defeat is largely consolidated: Ukraine has pushed the Black Sea Fleet out of the western Black Sea with drones that cost a fraction of the ships they neutralize, and has kept its military, government, and civilian networks running through more than four years of sustained Russian cyber operations.

In the air, the picture is mixed — cheap interceptor drones have made the mass Shahed threat manageable, but glide bombs, jet-powered Shaheds, and ballistic missiles remain major challenges. On land, Ukraine’s kill zone has made massed assault prohibitively costly. Yet Russian fiber-optic drones, which cannot be jammed, are eroding that advantage, and no scalable countermeasure has emerged.

Achieving strategic neutralization depends less on who fields more than on who adapts faster, and that tempo currently favors Ukraine — though a lead that can easily be lost.

The binding constraints are no longer technological. Closing the fiber-optic gap, industrializing innovation without smothering the ten-day procurement cycles that make it work, and turning contingent European financing into durable commitment need organization, money, and political resolve.

For Europe, this is not a distant audit. The weakest points in Ukraine’s posture — air defense, interceptor mass, ammunition depth — are Europe’s own, and the battlefield-iterated procurement model Ukraine has built is a capability NATO does not yet possess and cannot easily buy.

Denial by Design sets out a full domain-by-domain assessment and a prioritized set of recommendations for Kyiv, Brussels, and their partners.