The Strategy of Exhaustion: Russia’s War Doctrine in Ukraine

Inside the thinking that turned Ukraine into a meat grinder

Different Ways to Skin a Cat

Russia does not fight to win quickly. I wish I had understood that before I went to Ukraine in 2022. It would have fundamentally changed how I approached the war, which I thought was going to be over before the end of summer. Russia fights to endure—slowly, methodically, with no regard for tempo or the media optics that once fueled George W. Bush’s “Shock and Awe.” On the steppes of Ukraine, the war has taken on the shape of something older than NATO doctrine, older even than the Cold War: a conflict designed to sap, to grind, to outlast. Aleksandr Svechin, the long-buried Russian strategist purged by Stalin, would have recognized the logic. He wrote that not every war should be fought for decision; some are meant to exhaust. And that is exactly what Moscow appears to be doing.

This wasn’t the war I expected. Like many volunteers shaped by Western notions of warfare, I came prepared for rapid maneuvers, decisive engagements, and clean lines between front and rear. But the front in Ukraine is rarely linear. It’s a vast, shifting wasteland of overlapping drone zones, artillery kill boxes, and positional skirmishes over hamlets that no longer exist. Russia doesn’t need to take ground—it needs to deny tempo. Its doctrine prizes endurance over elegance, mass over finesse. What looked to us like chaos was, in retrospect, method: a slow war, built not to break through but to wear down.

Russian military thinking has long diverged from its Western counterparts—not in its brutality, but in its patience. Aleksandr Svechin, writing in the interwar years, warned against the seduction of rapid campaigns. Unlike Clausewitz, who saw decisive battle as the core of war, Svechin argued that some conflicts must be protracted by design: “We must resolutely reject the idea of a single pattern for the conduct of war.” His vision wasn’t theoretical—it echoed Russian history. From Kutuzov's scorched-earth retreat against Napoleon to Stalin’s attritional defense in 1941, Russian commanders have often favored strategic depth and the slow erosion of enemy will over sweeping battlefield victories. The current war fits squarely in that lineage. Russia is not failing to win; it is executing a familiar script—one that bleeds adversaries slowly while absorbing losses with political indifference and demographic steel.

Despite the myth of Russian military improvisation, the logic of strategic exhaustion remains deeply embedded in its command culture. The General Staff, under figures like Valery Gerasimov, continues to think in terms of "strategic operations in a theater of military action"—a Soviet-era framework designed not for rapid victory, but for shaping conditions over months or even years. Russia’s battlefield decisions often appear clumsy to Western observers: attacks with under-supported infantry, relentless shelling of already-destroyed positions, the repeated sacrifice of mechanized waves. But this is not mere incompetence—it is a form of operational stubbornness rooted in historical precedent. The goal is not to win cleanly but to grind persistently, to stretch the conflict until the enemy’s logistics, morale, and political will collapse under their own weight. This is Svechin modernized: not elegant, but enduring.

I wasn’t the only volunteer who thought, at first, that Russia’s way of war was stupid—primitive even. We saw the meat waves, the sloppy assaults, the disregard for casualties, and mistook it all for incompetence. What we failed to grasp was that it wasn’t chaos—it was doctrine. Only later did I begin to understand what Russian officers are actually taught in their academies: that manpower is expendable, speed is optional, and victory is measured not by territory gained, but by will exhausted. Where Western militaries obsess over casualty ratios and tactical efficiency, Russia’s strategic culture accepts mass loss as a feature, not a flaw. It has the men—men who are either willing, coerced, or simply born into a system that prepares them for hardship. I’d argue a conscript pulled from a second-tier Russian city is more psychologically suited for brutal ground warfare than a middle-class Parisian pulled from civilian life. That’s not a moral judgment—it’s a sociological one. Russia also has two assets the West underestimates: time and political insulation. In democracies, wars must be justified to the public; their cost is measured in headlines and elections. But Russia has kept the war confined to its lower classes, shielded the urban elite from sacrifice, and crushed dissent before it could metastasize. When I once asked my ex-girlfriend—a Russian from a major city—what she thought about the war, she shrugged and said, “I don’t think about politics.” That’s by design. The war was meant to stay invisible. It no longer is—but the delay gave the Kremlin a critical window to let the grinder do its work.

(Shock and Awe, 2003)

We Fight Differently

The West, by contrast, still clings to the fantasy of decisive wars—short, surgical, morally palatable. NATO doctrine, shaped by decades of counterinsurgency and precision warfare, revolves around maneuver, joint fires, and technological overmatch. Victory is imagined as swift: air supremacy followed by rapid ground thrusts, regime change, then reconstruction. Casualties are meant to be minimal, legitimacy preserved. But this model collapses in a war like Ukraine, where the enemy refuses to play by the same rules. Western militaries train for tempo, for initiative, for breakthroughs. Russia, instead, builds depth, absorbs shock, and weaponizes duration. One side looks for a knockout punch; the other trains to take it—and keep moving forward, even if crawling. That clash of doctrines isn’t just operational—it’s civilizational. And in Ukraine, it's the West that’s struggling to adapt.

The 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive was not a failure of courage, but of doctrine. Western-trained brigades, equipped with Leopard tanks and Bradleys, were sent into what NATO planners hoped would be a breakthrough campaign—a combined arms blitz designed to rupture Russian lines and reclaim occupied territory. But the assumptions underpinning that plan—maneuver dominance, rapid tempo, air-ground coordination—collapsed in the face of Russian depth. What they met instead were endless minefields, layered trench systems, kill zones triangulated by drones and artillery, and a Russian force that refused to panic. Ukraine had trained for mobility; Russia had prepared to be immovable. And when the spearhead stalled, the strategic imagination behind it fell apart too. The problem wasn’t just tactical—it was that Ukraine had been handed a playbook designed for wars that no longer exist.

I remember studying the maps religiously during the summer 2023 counteroffensive—equal parts hope and dread. I didn’t just want Ukraine to succeed; I wanted proof that Western military doctrine was superior, universal, unbreakable. But NATO doctrine leans heavily on airpower, and Ukraine, at that time, had no F-16s. Russia’s air defenses remained largely intact, blunting any air-ground coordination that Western battle plans rely on. By the end of summer, that vulnerability was clear—not just on the battlefield, but in the relationships between commanders. Tensions emerged between Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskyi, whose thinking reflected a Soviet-era emphasis on attrition and positional warfare, and his Western counterparts like U.S. General Christopher Cavoli. Syrskyi resisted calls to commit fully to the southern thrust toward Melitopol, instead diverting forces to retake Bakhmut—a city of enormous symbolic weight, but dubious strategic value. By the time autumn arrived, I was in Dnipropetrovsk. The air had turned grey and wet, and the cost was no longer theoretical. The streets were filled with wounded men—on crutches, missing limbs—staggering reminders of a campaign that never achieved its promised breakthrough. The energy I remembered from spring 2022—hopeful, defiant, almost electric—had dimmed.

Integrated Drone Attrition

Now there is an urgent need to define a new warfighting doctrine—one that synthesizes the core principles of both Soviet and NATO schools of thought. I call it Integrated Drone Attrition: a form of warfare in which drones fill the void left by conventional airpower and deliver a level of precision once reserved for high-end missile systems or manned aircraft. The logic of this approach crystallized during Operation Spiderweb, which demonstrated for the first time that drones could achieve strategic-level effects typically associated with cruise missiles and bombers. But the shift had been underway long before that. Russia, for example, has used relatively cheap Geran (Shahed) drones not only to strike critical infrastructure in Ukrainian cities, but to exhaust civilian morale—grinding down the population through a campaign of psychological and physical degradation. On the tactical level, drones have become indispensable. They provide real-time ISR for assaulting infantry, target supply lines with precision, and have forced a complete reevaluation of how armored vehicles are deployed. The era of massed tank formations pushing deep into enemy lines is over. Tanks now behave more like aerial gunships—appearing for brief, violent engagements before retreating, lest they be hunted and destroyed by a $500 FPV drone flown from a trench line.

Ukraine, more than any other military in the world, has adapted to this new reality by constructing a drone-in-depth defense—a distributed, decentralized network that merges civilian ingenuity with battlefield necessity. At the outer edge, long-range recon drones patrol the contact line, feeding targeting data back to mortar teams and HIMARS batteries. Closer in, FPV drone squads operate in grid-like kill zones, swarming Russian infantry and armor with cheap kamikaze quadcopters. Behind them, electronic warfare teams—often using modified commercial gear—jam incoming drones and suppress enemy UAVs with handheld or vehicle-mounted systems. It is a defensive system not built in think tanks, but in workshops, Telegram channels, and forward trenches. There is no single doctrine behind it—only adaptation, iteration, and ruthless pragmatism. Ukraine didn’t invent drone warfare, but it has arguably become its most agile practitioner, transforming its battlespace into something closer to an aerial minefield: invisible, intelligent, and endlessly replenishable.

Russia entered the war underestimating drones—and now builds its strategy around them. What began with Iranian-supplied Shaheds has matured into a full-spectrum drone warfare doctrine, combining mass production with battlefield method. Unlike Ukraine’s decentralized, volunteer-driven drone ecosystem (which is becoming more centralized), Russia has moved toward centralization: dedicated drone assault units, factory-scale FPV assembly (or sourcing from China), and a command structure that links tactical ISR to deep-strike coordination. In places like Avdiivka and Chasiv Yar, Russian forces begin with reconnaissance drones to provoke Ukrainian positions into revealing themselves, then follow with synchronized FPV strikes and concentrated artillery. Increasingly, these FPVs are hardwired with fiber-optic tethers—rendering them immune to jamming and giving Russian operators a critical edge in heavily contested EW environments. The attacks are not sophisticated in design—but they are overwhelming in effect, built to exhaust defenses through constant pressure. Moscow has adapted to the drone age not by out-innovating Ukraine, but by scaling faster. Long-range Shaheds grind down Ukrainian infrastructure; short-range FPVs bleed the front. This is not a revolution in tactics—it is an evolution in mass, where the industrial logic of attrition has simply found a new platform.

These rapid technological shifts—layered atop the enduring brutality of old-school warfare—have made life for the modern soldier nothing short of hell. In World War I, the skies were still primitive; artillery reigned supreme, and the rear offered at least a semblance of safety. It wasn’t until the Spanish Civil War that the nightmare of airpower came home to civilians, seared into collective memory by Picasso’s Guernica. Today, drones have finished what bombers began. They have collapsed the distinction between front and rear, soldier and civilian, combat and spectacle. The infantryman no longer has hope of protection—armor is obsolete, air defense too slow, and concealment nearly impossible. Attrition has gone digital. A teenager in a shipping container with an FPV rig can vaporize a squad and upload it in 4K, turning war into content, death into propaganda, and grief into algorithmic engagement. The horrors of mechanized war once promised to end war altogether—we called it “the war to end all wars.” But that was a lie forged in the smoke of 1918. We are only now beginning to grasp what the digital revolution has unleashed. And the age of AI-driven warfare hasn’t even begun. Perhaps Aleksandr Svechin saw all of this coming—not the drones or the data streams, but the deeper truth: that the nature of war doesn’t change with the tools we use, only the speed at which it devours us.