Four years since Russia’s invasion, Ukraine has learned some hard lessons—what about the rest of us?

Kyiv has constantly faced new and challenging political, strategic, and military obstacles, and yet it has found ways to reconfigure itself as the situation demands. It has effectively fought a state with three times its economic and military power to a standstill and inflicted disproportionate losses. Faced with critical deficiencies in materiel and manpower, it has harnessed the power of low-cost drone technologies to fill the gaps and develop a doctrine that has been effective at blunting Russia’s military advantages. In that vein, it is also easy to single out the one that has seemingly learned the least: Putin. By several metrics, he may not feel like he needs to alter his thinking. The war has allowed him to consolidate his political power in ways he could never have attempted during peacetime. To him, that is a win in and of itself. And despite the million casualties his country has suffered, not to mention the economic damage wreaked on his country, Putin has all but dismissed the prospect of a negotiated peace with terms that do not fulfil his maximalist aims. He has clearly focused on the long game—reconfiguring his economy to sustain a long war effort after his original miscalculation of a swift victory. Central to Putin’s “theory of victory” is his long-held dismissal of the West as decadent and weak-willed, which he attempted to exploit at every instance—from election interference to direct threats. Through this reasoning, he believes he can ultimately prevail in Ukraine by waiting out the West. He has ample evidence supporting this position. Neither U.S. administration over the course of this war has displayed any great fortitude in standing up to Putin. The Biden administration’s fecklessness was evident. It consistently denied providing critical arms, often under the rubric that they could be potentially escalatory. Yet several months later, it would provide the very same arms, well after their window of maximum utility had passed. While it was prudent to adopt a modicum of caution towards escalation in the early months of the conflict, it should have been discarded soon after Putin’s determination to pursue his war goals was made evident. Whether that would have made a significant material difference in the war on the ground is debatable, but it would have clearly signalled the West’s early determination to fight this conflict and derail Moscow’s central assumption behind continuing the war. Rather, the boiling-frog approach likely confirmed all of Putin’s existing biases about the West’s ultimate lack of determination to commit to Ukrainian victory. The Trump administration’s education has been as significant. Clearly, early in their term, they viewed Ukraine as the obstinate party and pressed for a peace deal with Russia. This was famously illustrated by the contentious White House meeting between Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky. However, Putin’s hardline positions have forced a difficult reappraisal by the president and his advisors, which has started to increase pressure on Russia’s economic activities. The situation has tempered the administration’s ardour to pursue a deal and provided more support towards its isolationist tendencies. The main European powers have done little better in learning the lessons of the war. Germany under former chancellor Olaf Scholz outdid the Biden administration on concerns over escalation, and was extremely timid in providing support early on, a position France and other states followed. Although Europe now underwrites the preponderance of the financial aid that sustains Ukraine’s economy and war effort, its own modernization remains slow and unable to sustain the war effort independently; this has left Ukraine vulnerable to the whims of the Trump administration at a crucial time. Other European countries have not been so complacent, however—Poland, the Baltics, and other Central and Eastern European states have taken meaningful steps to strengthen their capabilities while urging their compatriots to accelerate their own preparations. On the whole, though, Europe has been slow to adapt. Canada’s own trajectory mirrors that of many European states: slow to absorb the lessons of the war or its new geopolitical situation. Certainly, Canada has been a significant financial provider for Ukraine, but its material contributions to the war effort have been limited compared to other states. Nor has it internalized the new geopolitical threats it now faces. It has failed to scale up production of many critical arms, particularly 155mm shells. Even now, according to the recently released Defence Industrial Strategy, Canada is only set to expand Nitrocellulose production—the key explosive in many munitions—by 2029, seven years after the war started. Ukraine has clearly illustrated how innovation, the capacity to adapt and think through a crisis, can enable a state to survive an existential crisis. It’s a bloody lesson that the country has paid dearly for, and one Canadians should be keen to heed, given our own uncertain future.