Ukraine has shown us what humans, as flawed as we are, can achieve in their finest hour. This is the essential lesson from 1461 days of war in Ukraine.
Mick Ryan
February 23, 2026
No one will be able to convince or force us, Ukrainians, to give up our freedom, our independence, our sovereignty. But it seems that the Russian leadership is trying to do this by destroying the potential of their country. President Zelenskyy, 24 February 2022.
Today the world marks 1461 days since the military forces of Russia, working to realise Vladimir Putin’s new Russian empire dream, crossed the Ukrainian frontier and commenced their brutal war against Ukraine. It has been a battle of territorial conquest. For Putin, this is a war to exterminate the culture of a nation that he believes “is not real” and ensure the prosperous, democratic Ukrainians do not provide an alternative model of governance to the politically repressed Russian people.
For Australians, the war in Ukraine has already lasted longer than our war against Japan between 1941 and 1945. And while Australians only suffered direct enemy attacks on several dozen occasions, Ukrainians have come under sustained and increased aerial bombardment. But just as Australia did when its homeland was directly threatened, the Ukrainians have leveraged an existential threat to drive innovation in their technology and industrial sectors. They too have learned and adapted in military, intelligence, and other national security affairs.
Much has been written in the past four years about the acceleration in the use of autonomous systems at sea, in the skies and on the land in Ukraine. Concurrently, artificial intelligence has penetrated into an increasing array of military, national security and civil governance functions in the Ukrainian and Russian nations. It would be simple to assess that the greatest developments of the past four years have been in technology and in how it has driven change in the character of war.
That would be wrong.
The past four years have instead shown that despite the influence of new era technologies, and the need to ensure national industrial capacity can work at scale over sustained periods of time, it is the human aspects of war and competition that have been at the forefront of this battle.
Before the full-scale Russian invasion, it was a human who felt compelled to write about Russia’s imperial destiny and how Ukraine’s submission and subjugation were integral to that Russian dream. It has become a nightmare for the people of Ukraine. Scholars in decades hence will argue over whether other humans, Ukrainian and European politicians, might have made different decisions that would have deterred Putin. As a 2025 study by the Hague Centre for Strategic Studies notes, “in Western capitals, a state of incredulity about Russia’s stated intents
and purposes co-existed alongside deep concerns about taking actions that might provoke Russia”.
As the Russians advanced on Kyiv, it was a human who made the decision to not take a ride offered by the Americans but to stay and lead his people. The determination of the young, relatively unpopular (then) President Volodymyr Zelenskyy galvanised his nation into action. Ukrainians, young and old, surged to fight in the defence of their nation, raise money for weapons, provide support from the homefront, and tell the story of Ukraine’s fight to the world.
Throughout the course of the war since 2022, it has been people – not technology – at the forefront of every decision, every act of courage, every act of brutality and cowardice, and every small act of unexpected kindness. Whether it has been Russian soldiers torturing or murdering civilians in Bucha, executing Ukrainians immediately after capture, bombing civilian targets or exhorting their nation on national television to treat Ukrainians as vermin, the world has come to know again the very worst of how human beings are able to treat their fellow inhabitants of this planet.
At the same time, as Europeans argued whether providing artillery or tanks would be escalatory and as Americans now argue that Europe is not their problem, Ukrainians have shown the power of a society that values its independence, its history and culture, and its capacity to set its own future. Ukraine has demonstrated that democracies still possess the will to put aside petty feuds and the more modern invented political and societal schisms to fight against the Russian invasion as a unified society.
Ukrainians – civilians and soldiers – have engaged in fighting as well as broader societal warfare made possible by commercial technologies such as satellites and social media. There have been setbacks, such as the 2023 counteroffensive, periodic corruption and some of the approaches to forced conscription.
But, overall, Ukrainian unity has held. Their courage remains. They have continuously learned and adapted.
The capacity for unified national effort among free people to face existential threats was once – at least in the 20th century – something we took for granted. But societal divisions in the 21st century, political discord and declining trust in public institutions might now indicate that societies no longer have the will to defend their systems.
Ukraine, a young democracy, shows us how we can and must value our own democracies. The people of Ukraine, who for four years have stood on the precipice of national extinction while holding off the barbarous hordes from Russia, have kept their sense of self, and retained a love of their culture and history. At the same time, Ukraine’s soldiers, fighting in the most brutal conflict of the 21st century, have retained their essential human qualities and restrained themselves from visiting upon Russians the kind of cruelties that Russians routinely visit upon Ukrainians.
It is for these reasons, as we commemorate Ukraine’s glorious dead and the millions more who have suffered, we must look past the drones, algorithms and other technological artefacts for the essential lesson from this war. It is the people engaged in this war, the new and old soldiers, the
entrepreneurs, the crowd funders, the journalists, fire fighters and ambulance drivers, power line repair personnel and yes, even the politicians, from whom we must draw the most profound insights.
In a world that is perhaps more uncertain, and more likely to engage in large-scale conflict than at any time since 1945, this lesson about humans in war should be a source of comfort. It is only humans who can make the political and strategic decisions that will deter future conflict. It is only humans who can inspire us to be better than we might have thought we could be. No robot or AI can ever do this. Ukraine has shown us what humans, as flawed as we are, can achieve in their finest hour.
This is the essential lesson from 1461 days of war in Ukraine.
Mick Ryan is a highly skilled leader and strategist with more than three decades of experience working in senior roles in the Australian military and beyond. Mick’s work reaches a global audience, and he is a recognised expert in leadership, institutional strategy, technology, organisational adaptation and change management, institutional reform, as well as personnel development. A prolific writer and speaker, Mick’s expertise in thinking about and preparing for the future is sought after by institutions in Australia, the United States and beyond. Mick is also an adjunct fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC, and a non-resident fellow at the Low Institute in Sydney. He is the recipient of multiple awards for service and excellence from both Australian and United States military institutions. In 2008 he was made a Member of the Order of Australia for distinguished leadership of the Australian 1st Reconstruction Task Force in Afghanistan.
