Olena Davlikanova, Senior Fellow at the Sahaidachnyi Security Center, has co-authored the Ukraine conflict overview in a new report from the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) and the New York Office of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (KAS) — Terrorist Exploitation of Armed Conflicts for Digital Content.
The report examines how terrorists and violent extremists exploit the wars in Afghanistan, the Sahel and Ukraine to produce online material that can incite further violence and deepen grievances.
Written with Olya Korbut (CEPA / Black Sea Institute of Strategic Studies), Davlikanova’s chapter sets out the strategic backdrop to the Ukrainian case, and argues that Russia’s war has outgrown the frame of a territorial dispute — it is better read as a live experiment in future warfare and a template for Russian aggression well beyond Ukraine.
The authors indicate that across 2025, Russian forces seized roughly one percent of Ukrainian territory, at a cost of more than $100 billion and monthly casualties above 30,000. Even so, and despite repeated mediation efforts, Moscow has shown no willingness to negotiate. Olena Davlikanova and Olya Korbut read this imbalance as a sign of imperial ambition, as no army that measured costs against gains would have kept going.
Much of the chapter tracks how the battlefield has become a testing ground, moving from mechanised to digitised and now to AI-enabled combat. Unmanned systems are routine across reconnaissance, strike, logistics, electronic warfare, evacuation and mining, while deep strikes reaching beyond 1,000 kilometres hit production sites, airbases, ports and fuel depots with growing precision. The authors highlight the successes of the Ukrainian side in disabling around a third of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet and, through Operation Spiderweb, damaging more than ten percent of Russia’s long-range aviation.
Against that, they warn of two misjudgements that echo 2022:
- The first is the assumption that Russia’s losses have left it too depleted to threaten NATO.
- The second is the habit of dismissing drone warfare as something only “poor countries” fall back on.
Ukraine, the authors argue, has in effect trained Russia into a modernised, next-generation force, and the shift towards manned–unmanned teaming, and eventually largely autonomous systems, is now irreversible for every military.
The chapter also documents the sustained campaign against Ukrainian civilian infrastructure — more than 13,000 Russian missiles and over 140,000 attack drones have targeted power, heating and urban centres in an effort to wear down civilian resilience. Even Ukraine’s layered air defence struggles against ballistic and saturation strikes — a warning for less-defended states that would meet the same tactics with far fewer means to answer them.
The chapter turns to Russia’s wider ecosystem of proxies and partners: private military companies, far-right militants, cyber and hacktivist units, criminal networks, mercenary recruitment across the Global South, and deepening cooperation with China, Iran, North Korea and Belarus, drawing on NAKO’s 2026 report on Russia’s war network.
Read the full report for more insights.