How Russia learned from failure
When Russian troops crossed into Ukraine in February 2022, many expected a swift victory—a demonstration of Moscow’s power and a humiliation for Kyiv. Within weeks, that illusion collapsed. The invasion turned into a series of humiliations for the Kremlin: broken logistics, mass desertions, and a military doctrine unprepared for modern, drone-saturated warfare. Analysts around the world rushed to declare the Russian army a hollow institution, a corrupt relic of Soviet centralization.
But as Dara Massicot shows in her recent Foreign Affairs article, How Russia Recovered (Nov.–Dec. 2025), this interpretation missed a crucial development. Beneath the chaos, Russia was quietly building something new: an institutional capacity to learn. What began as desperate improvisation on the battlefield evolved into a systematic effort to collect experience, analyze it, and transform it into doctrine. The Kremlin, Massicot argues, has turned the war in Ukraine into an enormous feedback loop—one that links soldiers, engineers, academics, and weapons manufacturers in a single network of adaptation.
A new ecosystem of learning
By early 2023, Russia had constructed what Massicot calls an ecosystem of learning. Officers and researchers were dispatched to the front to observe operations and gather data on unit performance. They produced “lessons learned” reports that circulated among the General Staff in Moscow, the military academies, and the defense industry. In a system once paralyzed by secrecy, information began to flow both upward and outward.
This network is now deeply embedded. More than twenty military commissions analyze battlefield reports and feed their conclusions into new training programs, procurement decisions, and combat manuals. Over 450 interim modifications have already been made to tactical handbooks. The Southern Military District holds regular conferences where soldiers, commanders, and engineers debate how to counter Ukrainian drones or improve artillery coordination. The Russian army is still rigid, but it is no longer static.
From improvisation to innovation
The industrial dimension of this transformation is equally significant. In the first months of the war, much of Russia’s equipment failed—poorly maintained tanks, defective circuits in electronic warfare systems, and obsolete communications gear. Instead of collapsing under these weaknesses, Moscow responded by reorganizing the defense sector.
The Ministry of Defense loosened regulations, shortened R&D cycles, and ordered defense companies to work directly with field units. Civilian engineers were sent to occupied areas to repair equipment and study failures. The government also invited universities and private startups into the defense ecosystem. The result was a new hybrid economy: state-funded but commercially agile, capable of testing, modifying, and producing weapons faster than before.
Startups now appear alongside state conglomerates at arms exhibitions. Drones such as the modified Shahed series and the new Rubikon systems reflect this fusion of military need and entrepreneurial energy. Armor has been strengthened, glide bombs redesigned, and electronic countermeasures improved. The Russian war machine remains resource-limited, but it is no longer technologically inert.
Training, discipline, and the human factor
Learning also extends to the human level. Russian instructors now rotate soldiers from the front into training centers to share experience directly. Disabled veterans serve as permanent trainers. Courses for junior officers include new modules on navigation, reconnaissance, and tactical medicine. For the first time, trainees are taught how to plan missions independently—a cautious step away from the Soviet tradition of rigid command.
Yet the transformation is far from complete. Many volunteers still receive minimal instruction before deployment, and basic training remains uneven. Reports of poor discipline, hazing, and inadequate medical care persist. Massicot notes that Russia’s institutional learning is strong at the headquarters level but weak in implementation: recommendations are produced faster than they can be enforced. The Russian army, in other words, learns in theory faster than it reforms in practice.
A flawed but resilient force
The contrast between innovation and dysfunction defines Russia’s military evolution. While it continues to suffer enormous losses, its capacity to adapt explains why Ukraine’s counteroffensives stalled. Electronic warfare systems now disrupt Ukrainian communications; drones identify and strike targets with increasing precision; logistics chains, once exposed, have become more robust.
For Ukraine, the implications are grim. The next phase of the war may bring faster and more destructive attacks on cities and infrastructure. For Western observers, however, the real lesson lies elsewhere: in how Russia has turned war into a process of institutional self-correction.
Massicot warns that Moscow is already planning a decade-long postwar reform cycle, lasting until the mid-2030s. Russian strategists are preparing to redesign their force structure around uncrewed aerial vehicles, robotics, and artificial intelligence. They believe these technologies—autonomous swarms of drones, AI-driven command systems, automated defenses—will define the next era of warfare. The Russian military, she writes, “realizes that warfare is changing, so its military must change as well.”
The strategic lesson for the West
If this transformation continues, Russia will emerge from the war not as the exhausted pariah many expected, but as a battle-hardened learning organization—deeply flawed, yet capable of evolving faster than Western bureaucracies accustomed to peacetime complacency. Its experiences are already being shared with partners such as China, Iran, and North Korea.
For NATO and the European Union, the message is clear: stop underestimating the enemy’s ability to learn. Western militaries should be studying how Russia studies itself—how it collects, analyzes, and institutionalizes experience. That means accelerating their own innovation cycles, reforming procurement, and preparing for an era in which the pace of learning becomes the decisive measure of power.
Massicot’s analysis dismantles the myth of a static, decaying Russia. What she describes is a country that has learned to survive by absorbing punishment and turning it into knowledge. The war in Ukraine is not just reshaping the map of Europe—it is reshaping the Russian state. And unless the West learns with equal urgency, it may soon find itself facing an adversary that failed spectacularly once, but never twice.