One of the Harshest Wars in Modern History: A Grim Milestone for the War in Ukraine

The war in Ukraine has officially become longer than World War I, and in recent months it has seen a surprising shift in momentum. Ukraine’s deadly weapons are shaking Russia, and the fighting has entered its 1,569th consecutive day.

The war in Ukraine reached a particularly grim milestone today, Thursday, at 1,569 days, more than four years and three months, surpassing World War I, which lasted 1,568 days. When Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the assessment in Moscow and among many around the world was that the country would collapse within days. Even after the Ukrainian army managed to stop the initial assault and drive Russian forces out of many areas, few believed the conflict would last this long.

One Ukrainian soldier, who identified himself only by his call sign, “France,” told The New York Times that at the beginning he thought the war would last no more than two or three years, until the political leaders found some way to reach an agreement. In practice, more than four years after it began, the fighting is still continuing with no clear signs of an end.

Polls in Ukraine indicate that about half of citizens believe the war will not end before next year. If that forecast comes true, it will approach another historic milestone, the duration of World War II, which lasted six years. Although the two wars differ greatly in their global impact, like World War I, the war in Ukraine is also reshaping Europe’s geopolitical system, affecting military alliances, and accelerating rearmament across the continent on a scale not seen for decades.

There are also striking similarities on the battlefield. As in 1914, when Germany tried to secure a rapid victory by advancing toward Paris, Russia also tried to seize Kyiv quickly at the start of the invasion. In both cases, the attacking forces came close to their objective but were ultimately stopped and pushed back.

The war then became one of attrition along relatively frozen front lines. Today, as then, soldiers on both sides are entrenched in trenches and bunkers, and the images from eastern Ukraine often recall the battlefields of northern France more than a century ago. But as the war progressed, one factor emerged that changed the rules of the game, drones. As a result, soldiers have had to adapt to a new reality. Instead of large trench networks, they now hide in small, deep bunkers that hold only a limited number of fighters. Sometimes a single soldier digs a tiny position, barely larger than an individual foxhole, in an effort to reduce the chance of being spotted from the air.

The Ukrainian commander known as “Sauer,” who serves in Ukraine’s International Legion, said his men had to storm a heavily fortified Russian bunker four times before the soldier inside surrendered. According to him, the structure was designed to absorb blast waves from explosions through reinforced corners lined with metal plates. Today, fighters on the ground say, whoever digs better survives longer.

Drone dominance has also created wide “kill zones” around the front lines. Any movement in the area can be exposed and become an almost immediate target. Mass attacks involving hundreds of soldiers, which were common in World War I, have become nearly impossible. Instead, attacks are sometimes carried out by just one or two fighters.

Despite the technological changes, the scale of destruction in many cases still resembles the images from World War I. Drone footage from the front shows scorched forests, destroyed villages, and fields covered with shell craters. The prevailing assessment now is that the lethality on the Ukrainian battlefield is comparable to that of World War I. Russian advances in some sectors have also remained extremely slow, and at times even lower than those seen in some of the fiercest battles of that war.

Alongside the fighting on the front, Ukraine is trying to increase pressure on Russia through deep strikes against military and economic infrastructure. A particularly notable element is the use of the newly introduced FP-5 Flamingo cruise missiles. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced yesterday that several Flamingo missiles flew more than 1,000 kilometers into Russian territory and hit the Progress plant in the city of Cheboksary, the capital of the Chuvash Republic.

The plant manufactures Kometa antennas, key components integrated into Russian drones and missiles. According to Ukraine, these antennas help Russian aircraft contend with Kyiv’s air defense and electronic warfare systems. The Flamingo missile has a payload capacity of one ton of explosives and a reported range of up to 3,000 kilometers. According to Zelensky, the strike targeted a plant supplying the Russian military with components for drones and missiles.

In Ukraine, the strike on the plant is considered highly significant, especially because the upgraded version of the Kometa antennas, which entered use in early 2025, made Ukrainian electronic defense systems more difficult to operate against. Ukrainian engineers spent months trying to understand the technology and develop ways to counter it, so hitting the production chain itself is viewed as a major achievement.

The strike in Cheboksary is part of a broader effort by Kyiv to raise the cost Russia pays for the war. Alongside the hit on the military plant, Ukraine also reported strikes on other targets, including the Russian-controlled port of Mariupol, an oil refinery in the Samara region, and an oil tanker in the Black Sea. Today is the second consecutive day that Russia has reported downing more than 300 Ukrainian drones.

More than four years after the war began, and after it has taken the lives of more than half a million people, Russia appears to be moving farther and farther from the goals for which it launched it. Beyond the tectonic shifts in the global geopolitical arena, which do not appear to favor Russia, the war itself has also seen a surprising trend in recent months, with a change in the battlefield picture. Ukraine is gradually shifting from defense to offense, while the Russian army is barely managing to advance. In the end, in recent months the Ukrainian army has been able to liberate more territory than the Russian army has conquered, and Putin’s military and political predicament is deepening.