Five ways the Russia-Ukraine war has changed the world forever

When historians look back at the Russia-Ukraine war, they will record not just a brutal territorial struggle in eastern Europe but a turning point that permanently altered how wars are fought, how alliances are built, and how the world orders itself. Even if a ceasefire comes tomorrow, these shifts are already irreversible.

1. Drones made modern battlefield unrecognisable

For the first time in military history, unmanned aerial vehicles have become the dominant force on a conventional battlefield — and there is no going back. Ukraine and Russia have both deployed drones in volumes and roles that no military planner fully anticipated: as reconnaissance tools, kamikaze weapons, supply interceptors and now, with Russia's fibre-optic tethered variants, as systems impervious to electronic jamming.

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The consequences are profound. It is now effectively impossible for either side to mass significant numbers of troops or armour without being spotted and struck. The traditional set-piece offensive — tanks rolling forward in formation, infantry surging across open ground — has been rendered near-suicidal.

Future armies will be built around drone swarms, counter-drone systems and dispersal tactics rather than the massed formations that defined 20th-century warfare. Every major military on earth is rewriting its doctrine accordingly.

2. Industrial warfare came roaring back, exposed West's weakness

The conflict demolished the post-Cold War assumption that modern wars would be short, precise and fought with expensive, limited stockpiles of high-technology weapons. Instead, Ukraine and Russia have burned through ammunition, missiles and artillery shells at a rate reminiscent of the First World War (1914-18) — hundreds of thousands of rounds a month.

The West was caught badly underprepared. European Nato members had spent decades running down their defence industries and stockpiles under the assumption that large-scale conventional war was a relic. The scramble to supply Ukraine exposed just how hollow that assumption was. The result has been a painful, ongoing effort to rebuild industrial capacity that was hollowed out over 30 years — a process that will take at least a decade and reshape the economic and political priorities of every major Western nation.

3. Nuclear blackmail became routine instrument of statecraft

Russian President Vladimir Putin's repeated brandishing of his country's nuclear arsenal to deter Western intervention has done something deeply damaging that will outlast this war: it has demonstrated that nuclear weapons can be used as a shield behind which a nuclear power wages conventional aggression with relative impunity. Every authoritarian government with nuclear ambitions — and every government contemplating acquiring them — has taken careful note.

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The logic is stark and will be hard to contain. If possessing nuclear weapons allows a state to invade a neighbour while keeping stronger powers at bay, the incentive to acquire them becomes almost irresistible. Arms-control regimes that were already under strain now face an existential challenge. The war has, in this sense, made the world measurably more dangerous for decades to come.

4. Europe was forced to grow up; Nato found its purpose again

For much of the post-Cold War era, European security was a comfortable abstraction. American guarantees, shrinking defence budgets and the dream of a "common European home" stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok had lulled much of the continent into strategic complacency. Russia's invasion shattered that entirely.

Germany abandoned its decades-long pacifist consensus and committed to rearmament almost overnight. Finland and Sweden — neutral for generations — joined Nato in rapid succession. Defence spending surged across the alliance. The bloc itself, which French President Emmanuel Macron had declared "brain dead" just three years before the invasion, suddenly had the clearest sense of mission it had possessed since 1991.

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Whatever peace eventually looks like, European strategic culture has been transformed in ways that a single generation of politicians could not reverse even if they wanted to.

5. Rules-based international order was exposed as aspirational

Perhaps the most uncomfortable and enduring legacy of the war is what it revealed about the international system itself. A permanent member of the United Nations Security Council invaded a sovereign neighbour, annexed its territory in violation of every norm of international law, and faced no mechanism capable of stopping it. The Security Council — the body designed to prevent exactly this — was paralysed by Russia's veto.

The war has accelerated the fracturing of the world into competing blocs. China, India, Brazil and much of the Global South refused to condemn Russia, exposing deep fault lines between the Western-led order and a broader world that views that order with suspicion or indifference.

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The assumption that economic interdependence would prevent great-power conflict — the same assumption that was made, with equally misplaced confidence, in 1914 — lies in ruins. In its place is a harder, more transactional world in which military capacity and strategic alignment matter more than institutions and norms. That world will be the inheritance of the next generation.

This piece draws on reporting by the Associated Press