Valerii Zaluzhnyi: Russo-Ukrainian war as a war of transition

Valerii Zaluzhnyi, Ukraine's Ambassador to the United Kingdom and former Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, gave a speech at The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI). Ukrainska Pravda translated the summary of his speech and reproduced it in full.

The experience of our struggle will be useful to everyone who is looking for a path to peace. And the path to peace may be lying through war.

"Si vis pacem, para bellum" - these words are often attributed to the ancient Roman historian Cornelius Nepotus and, unfortunately, are perfectly suited to a democratic society today, in the 21st century. If you want peace, prepare for war.

Yes, this is an absolutely correct statement. This is confirmed by me, who happened to be the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and by the entire Ukrainian people, who have learnt this well and painfully.

When I was born, 28 years had passed since the end of one of the most brutal and bloodiest wars in human history. When I was born, bombs were no longer falling on cities and villages, tanks were no longer crushing the ground and everything on it. The piercing sounds of air-raid warnings were no longer heard, nor were machine gun bursts.

But today I pray myself and urge all of you to pray and ask God that our grandchildren will never see what our grandfathers saw, what we saw and, unfortunately, what our children saw. For this reason, we must not stop fighting for the right to live. Evil is near, and it has come to kill.

Despite the fact that the most valuable asset of mankind on planet Earth is the ability to live, almost all of its history is associated with wars.

Or rather, with the killing of people. These wars, or rather murders, have become unprecedented in scale and number of casualties over time and have acquired the status of world wars. In the last century alone, there were two such conflicts - World War I and World War II, which were separated by just over 20 years and took the lives of approximately 60 million people.

Is humanity ready to calmly accept the next war, World War III, which will be even more devastating?

To a certain extent, it depends on us, professional military who know almost everything about war. After all, it is the professional military who wage wars and know their true cost. The price of defeats and victories.

Referring to the events of 2022-2024 in the decade-long war between Ukraine and Russia, we need to tell humanity honestly what is happening and what humanity must be prepared for. Free and democratic nations and their governments must wake up and think about how to protect their citizens and their countries. We are ready to share all our knowledge, experience and thoughts with those who have not abandoned Ukraine in challenging times and who are seeking peace and security for their nations.

So, what have we, Ukrainians, learnt from this war, and especially from its full-scale component, which burst into our lives on 24 February 2022? First of all, wars should be avoided! But if war does come, you must be prepared for it.

Preparedness for war should be viewed as a huge set of measures that covers not only purely military aspects, but also all areas of state activity. Perhaps the most complicated and important component is the readiness of society, based on honest and transparent communication between the government and people. Society must agree to temporarily give up a number of freedoms for the sake of survival.

Unfortunately, modern wars are total wars. They require the efforts of not only the army but also society as a whole. Politicians can and should mobilise society.

For this purpose, the military and other resources of the state are comprehensively involved. These resources include the economy, finance, population, and allies. Of course, such actions will affect the country's political processes.

Thus, the readiness for war will be determined not only by the readiness of the army to repel aggression but also by the readiness of society to confront the enemy.

Secondly, war cannot in any way be seen as part of the internal political process. War is the maximum concentration of forces for survival. And for this purpose only!

"War is the continuation of policy by other means," said Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz. Therefore, it seems strange when the war in Ukraine, on the contrary, shapes domestic policies in other countries globally, which is ultimately used by enemies for their purposes. I am convinced that the war for freedom in one country should become a policy of survival of democracy in the rest of the free countries.

War is a science, with its own laws and rules that need to be known and studied. Using war for one's purposes or trying to influence its course for one's interests is a crime that results in huge casualties. It is always difficult for a democratic army, the army of a free society, to fight the army of a feudal lord.

The enemy considers democracy to be our greatest weakness and is doing its best to exploit it.

Fake news, lies, devaluation of national interests, lack of confidence in the leadership - this is an incomplete list of tools that the Russians have been using for more than a decade, and democratic societies have not yet found methods to counteract them. The well-known Chinese thinker Sun Tzu outlined the basic principles of warfare as far back as the 5th century BC. These principles remain relevant today and will remain relevant as long as war is run by people.

However, these are just basic principles that need to be filled with weapons, forms and methods of their use, and armies with their structures. It is in this sequence that war changes. After carefully analysing our experience, backed up by figures and facts, I realise that we are on the verge of not only a huge amount of work but also, most importantly, a difficult choice.

For us Ukrainians, it is not just about following the law of "challenge and response" by British historian Arnold Joseph Toynbee. It is not only the very existence of Russia that is already a threat.

Today, we are already facing a full-scale war, which has led us to a new challenge--physical survival. A nation's very survival is determined by its choice. How should we respond to this challenge?

How can we survive in the face of ambiguity and contradictions in the world around us? We have to realise now that it is up to us, Ukrainians, to decide whether we will live and whether our children will have a future. There is no doubt that history is once again giving the Ukrainian people a chance.

On the cold night of 23-24 February 2022, when the rest of the world was enjoying a peaceful life and basking in warm beds, Ukrainians reminded themselves whose blood flows in their veins and engaged in a fierce battle with their eternal enemy. With the lives of ordinary Ukrainians, we won a chance--a chance not just to continue the eternal struggle but to win. It cost us dearly--many lives of our best sons and daughters.

But this was only the beginning. We realised very soon that withstanding a blow and giving a worthy rebuff to the enemy was only the beginning of a more difficult stage of confrontation, which consisted in finding our special way of victory. It was the search for this special path that led us to understand the already visible contours of revolutionary changes, primarily in military affairs.

Surprisingly, but quite logically, these changes, invented on the battlefields of the Russo-Ukrainian war, are likely to determine the outlines of wars and military affairs in the 21st century. Most importantly, they will become the foundation of the entire global security system of the future. Not long ago, it was safe to say that unmanned systems were the main reason for changes in strategies, forms, and methods of use.

But today, a new warfare strategy probably needs to include a broader concept--technology. The war that came to us in 2014 is completely different from the one that burst into our lives on 24 February 2022. Although it was based on the concepts of 2014, it was already different and quickly depleted our forces in May 2022.

It was the intensity of combat actions that forced us to restore the level of early 2022, and the need to survive on the battlefield led us into another war, which we faced in the summer of 2023. The fighting parties have stopped looking for new weapons for some time, and it would be appropriate to search for new forms of application of the latest technologies. The invention of new ways of application would logically lead to changes in the structure of units and the Armed Forces as a whole.

Such a movement is scientific and reasonable. The development of technologies affects the forms of their application, and only new forms of application affect the structure of the armies at war. This trend is inevitable and will continue.

Technology is not only innovative solutions but also a set of measures for the development, scientific support, training, and doctrine development that will change the situation on the battlefield in the face of the enemy's military potential and resources.

To put it simply, we have already invented a way to fight and win against stronger armies in the 21st century. Obviously, technology must ensure the resilience of the Ukrainian nation. At the same time, I absolutely agree that the Russo-Ukrainian war is not yet the war of the future.

It is only a war of transition. But it is our war that is shaping the new rules. We, Ukrainians, are shaping new patterns for a new war with our blood and thirst for victory.

A war that will be the war of the future. We have to admit that the desire to survive on the battlefield is perhaps the main reason for finding ways to improve weapons. A combination of factors such as limited resources, lack of proper support, and the inability to focus on the production of traditional assets of warfare led to significant changes on the battlefield of the Russo-Ukrainian war.

In fact, a new stage in the forms and methods of warfare has begun. We can see how scientific and technological progress has set the wheel of history in motion and brought to the battlefield technologies that are likely to be decisive in this war and, most importantly, will become the basis for global security in the future. It will be up to us to decide whether the democratic world or the world of tyranny will master these technologies faster.

War is about resources and time. If we consider technologies as resources, then today, for various reasons, neither Ukraine nor Russia will be able to master them on their own in the near future. This means that the only way out is to increase the number of human resources involved in combat actions.

At the same time, technologies will be waiting for those brave enough to master them. Those who master them will solve global security issues. It is difficult to say how the situation will develop in the future.

Only one thing is certain: tyrants will always need war for internal use as a tool to maintain power.

The rest of us have to build a reliable defence against them. Today, more than ever, people in Ukraine are finding ways to survive and creating technologies. But for obvious reasons, they cannot scale them up.

On the other hand, our partners have the resources but no applied and practical field to test them. Only together will we be able to use the resources effectively because time is no longer working for us. "We must come to terms with the fact that following yesterday's rules of war will not lead to today's (or tomorrow's) successes-that awareness can save lives. We have to start dealing with the consequences of the new rules of war." I took this quote from a retired American general, Stanley McChrystal.

He went on to say, "Otherwise, we will all be left far behind." But I would say more categorically: otherwise we will all die. Valerii Zaluzhnyi Translation: Myroslava Zavadska

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