The war in Ukraine has now exceeded the first world war in duration. And while the comparison between these two conflicts is imperfect, it is becoming difficult to ignore.
Some of the similarities are obvious. At the tactical level, the conflict in Ukraine has witnessed the return of artillery as the dominant arm of battle.
During much of the first year of the war, artillery was responsible for the vast majority of casualties. Although drones have since transformed the battlefield, artillery remains indispensable to both sides.
Equally striking has been the return of extensive trench systems. Not since the Iran-Iraq war, which was fought between 1980 and 1988, has a major interstate conflict depended so heavily upon field fortifications and prepared positions such as trenches, concrete obstacles and belts of barbed wire.
Large-scale manoeuvre has given way to attritional combat measured in hundreds of metres rather than tens of kilometres.
Yet the deeper similarities lie not in trenches or artillery, but in the underlying logic of the war itself. Like the first world war, the conflict in Ukraine has become a contest of endurance: manpower, industrial capacity, economic resilience and political will.
These factors, rather than any individual weapons system, are likely to determine its eventual outcome. Of these, the most important is manpower.
Broadly comparable losses
During the first world war, British, French and German governments routinely published casualty lists. The public knew that victories often came at immense cost.
Military leaders understood that the key question was not simply how many casualties the enemy had suffered, but whether their own societies could continue to bear comparable losses for longer than the opponent.
Battles such as Verdun and the Somme in 1916 and Passchendaele (also known as the Third Battle of Ypres) in 1917 generally produced losses that were severe for both sides. This was well understood on the home front.
Yet in the Ukraine war, we are regularly invited to believe that Russia sustains several times the number of dead than is suffered by Ukraine. In a particularly unlikely example, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, claimed that 47 Russians were dying for every Ukrainian earlier in 2026.
About a year ago, I was having dinner at a London club with a well-connected former Ukrainian government official whom I have known for some time. Our conversation turned to casualties.
I asked them: “Tell me, no bullshit: what is the real casualty ratio?” My companion paused before replying quietly: “Same as the Russians.” Surprised, I asked for the source. “The General Staff,” they replied.
The General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine is the senior military command headquarters of Ukraine’s armed forces – the body responsible for planning, directing and coordinating military operations at the highest level.
This is an anecdote, but publicly available evidence tends to support this assertion. Sources such as the New York Times have also confirmed that casualties on both sides are similar, with Russia sustaining more, but not multiple times more. Russia, of course, has a far larger population than Ukraine.
The precise casualty figures remain contested and are likely to remain so until long after the war ends. What matters for present purposes, however, is that the available evidence points towards a war of broadly comparable losses rather than one in which either side enjoys an overwhelming advantage in manpower attrition.
Even if these figures are broadly correct, Ukraine has held the line against a much larger adversary for over four years now and has shown extraordinary resilience in the face of invasion. Its capacity for innovation has repeatedly surprised observers.
New drones, autonomous systems and precision-strike technologies are often presented as solutions to the country’s growing manpower difficulties. Some commentators even suggest that robotic systems may compensate for shortages of personnel.
The difficulty with this argument is that war is an interactive contest. Almost every significant Ukrainian innovation has been met by a Russian adaptation and vice versa. The result has been a continuing cycle of measure and countermeasure rather than a decisive technological breakthrough by either side.
Technology matters enormously, but it rarely abolishes the need for manpower. Artillery, tanks, aircraft and machine guns transformed warfare between 1914 and 1918, yet none removed the requirement to occupy and defend ground with soldiers.
The same remains true today. As military doctrine has long recognised, drones, missiles and aircraft can destroy, disrupt and delay, but ground can only be taken and held by troops.
There are other echoes of 1918. The small infiltration and assault groups employed by both sides in Ukraine’s drone-saturated battlefields bear a striking resemblance to the German stormtroopers who achieved remarkable successes during the Spring Offensive of 1918.
As so often in warfare, however, innovation did not confer a lasting advantage. The British and French adapted, developed countermeasures and eventually improved upon many of the new tactics themselves.
What transformed the strategic balance in the first world war was not tactical innovation or a decisive technological breakthrough, but the arrival of the US Army and Marine Corps. More than 2 million American soldiers ultimately served in Europe, and their battlefield presence convinced Germany that time was no longer on its side.
Ukraine faces no such prospect today. For all the discussion of technological revolution, the war in Ukraine remains a contest of human endurance – just like the first world war.
Frank Ledwidge does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
