Ukraine Has Been Liberated (from Us)

I n the end, there is no substitute for fighting your own war. Since the failed counteroffensive of 2024, Ukraine and those supporting its struggle against Russia have feared abandonment by the United States. But one could now argue that nothing has been better for Kyiv than Washington’s lack of interest. Ukraine has been paradoxically liberated from fighting the war Washington wanted it to fight — and developed its own genuinely new military doctrine, based on innovation born by constraint. Although it took some painful adjustment, it has been able to keep up its tremendous fight against Russia even with severe manpower constraints and increased war weariness among the Ukrainian public.

Washington’s support simply never matched the realities of this war. In its first years, so much ink was wasted talking about Patriot missiles. Lockheed produces 600 annually. Ukraine burned through 700 of them in just four winter months. And those Patriot Interceptors cost $3 million apiece. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian-made Sting interceptor costs perhaps $2,500 to make. Ukraine produced more than 10,000 such interceptors in March 2026.

But it’s not just that Ukraine has adapted to the cheapest, most useful weapon in a war in which the Russians were outproducing the West in cheap shells. Western weapons came with a Western philosophy of battle, a way of fighting that Ukrainians weren’t trained in. The weapons we were giving Ukraine came with doctrinal dependency, an assumption that Ukraine’s path to victory would be a NATO-style combined-arms operation, with air superiority and high-end strikes that broke Russia’s will.

This assumption is what turned the much-vaunted 2023 counteroffensive, which was supposed to sever the Russian land bridge to Crimea, into an expensive debacle. Western advisers pushed to delay the counteroffensive to get Ukrainians better trained in the NATO way of warfare they were trying to execute. Ukrainians wanted to push the date forward, knowing that Russia was well aware of the counteroffensive plan and was laying down deep defensive fortifications — the infamous “dragon’s teeth” to chew up tanks, etc. Both Western and Ukrainian military planners hoped that a successful counteroffensive then would bolster and lock in Western support for a full Ukrainian victory no matter what happened in U.S. politics.

Instead, Donald Trump began promising to end the war on his first day in office, and before his first year, he and Pentagon planners said the drawdown of American stockpiles for Ukraine was at an end. Europeans then stepped up their financial commitments, increasing them by 67 percent while America’s dwindled. The Czechs also produced an astonishing number of shells for Ukraine to use in 2024 and exceeded their target, delivering more than 1.8 million shells in 2025.

But now that America is no longer the chief patron — and using its money and military aid as a reason to make itself the chief strategist — Ukraine is now producing 8-plus million FPV drones annually, drone units account for more than 80 percent of enemy casualties, and the innovation loop between frontline operators and manufacturers lasts weeks rather than years. This has made the U.S. downright envious. The U.S. “drone dominance” initiative has shipped fewer than 3,000 systems; Ukraine produces that before lunch. Our “abandonment” of Ukraine freed it to fully innovate and adapt and make us want to imitate them. Ukraine’s gains on the battlefield have come just this year from leaning more deeply into the strategy and strengths that Ukraine pioneered.

I don’t want to overstate things. Ukraine still financially depends on the West to sustain its effort. I’ve often retreated to the analogy of the Anglo-Irish war to understand Ukraine. The Irish did not have any foreign state that was sponsoring or directly aiding their effort. This freed Michael Collins and Richard Mulcahy to develop their flying-column style of guerrilla warfare. Instead of trying to build a professional army and meet the British in open combat in pursuit of a traditional form of asserting sovereignty, the Irish Republican Army used highly mobile un-uniformed units who relied on popular support of the cause both for intelligence and to simply melt back into the population after ambushes. The IRA could make Ireland ungovernable, and it won a provisional “freedom to achieve freedom” — at the cost of partition of their country and ultimately a foreign policy of neutrality as both the proof and outer limit of its practical independence.

I have objected to deep U.S. involvement in Ukraine because I do not think it serves U.S. interests, and it poses moral and strategic hazards for America. As Ukraine has been forced to “Ukrainize” its own war efforts, it has been more successful. And this means that any outcome of the war is more truly theirs and less attributable to NATO. Though it may mean a victory that is short of the sacrifices made, or short of the greatest aspirations of Ukrainian nationalists, it will be more its own and will enable Ukraine to strike better deals for reconstruction with the West too.