In her op-ed for the Interfax-Ukraine news agency, Join Ukraine Executive Director Liubov Tsybulska examines three key factors that will shape Russia's ability to sustain its war in the years ahead.

Recently, speaking at the Land Warfare Conference 2026 in London, I addressed one of the key challenges facing Ukraine today: understanding the Russian war machine more thoroughly — how it recruits people, how it sustains military operations, how Russian society responds to the war, and how all these factors affect Russia’s ability to continue fighting.

It is worth raising a question that concerns all of us. Not simply whether Russia will be able to continue the war tomorrow or next month, but what trends will shape its capacity to wage war in the years ahead.

I would like to focus on three factors. First, Russia’s mobilization potential. Second, the changes taking place within Russian society. And third, our own preparedness — the preparedness of Ukraine and its partners.

Let us begin with mobilization. The Kremlin’s greatest challenge today is not weapons. It is people. Russia still has a larger population than Ukraine and continues to generate manpower. However, sustaining the armed forces with personnel is becoming increasingly expensive.

The first reason is simple. The pool of volunteers has largely been exhausted. Those who were genuinely motivated to fight, who supported the idea of the war, mostly joined the military long ago. Many of them have already been killed or wounded.

Russia is trying to compensate for this with money. Servicemen receive a regular monthly salary, but they are also offered substantial one-time payments for signing a contract with the Russian army. During the first years of the war — from 2022 to 2025 — the size of these payments steadily increased.

What is particularly important is that these bonuses are not financed from the federal budget. Instead, they are paid by regional authorities. As a result, regional governments face a double burden: they are expected not only to fulfill Moscow’s recruitment quotas but also to finance these recruits from their own budgets.

For poorer regions, this is especially draining. They are simultaneously losing both labor and financial resources. In practice, many regions are subsidizing Russia’s war effort at the expense of their own economic development. As of today, these payments remain the most significant incentive for Russians to sign military contracts and join the army. While at the beginning of this year we saw some regions reduce these “combat bonuses” because of financial constraints, the partial easing of sanctions on Russian oil exports has once again provided the means to finance the war machine and restore high payments.

However, financial incentives have their limits. The number of people willing to risk their lives primarily for money is finite. At a certain point, further increases in payments produce diminishing returns. Offering five million rubles instead of three million does not suddenly create a new reserve of motivated recruits.
Instead, it creates competition. Russian regions offer different payment packages, and an increasing number of recruits move between regions in search of more attractive contracts.

This creates tensions between regional authorities and Moscow and makes the recruitment process less efficient. As a result, the Kremlin is relying increasingly on administrative pressure.

We see recruitment efforts directed toward students, employees of state-owned enterprises, debtors, and other vulnerable social groups. We see pressure being exerted through state institutions and enterprises. This trend is likely to continue. An obvious solution would be another wave of large-scale mobilization.

However, the Kremlin remains cautious. Because mobilization is not only a military decision. It is also a political decision. And political stability remains one of the regime’s highest priorities.

Even state-controlled opinion polls suggest that trust in the authorities has begun to decline.
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Western observers often ask whether this means Russian society is approaching a breaking point.
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We should be cautious about drawing such conclusions. A defining characteristic of Russian society is inertia. Russia lacks strong civil society institutions. Independent media have been systematically dismantled. There is also no established culture of horizontal social interaction. Meanwhile, the state possesses a broad arsenal of surveillance and repressive tools.
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We should not expect public dissatisfaction to automatically translate into political action. But we should not draw the opposite conclusion either. What is particularly interesting is that the spread of the war onto Russian territory has not triggered a large-scale wave of patriotic mobilization. It has not produced a society willing to make even greater sacrifices.

On the contrary, more and more Russians appear to be growing skeptical about the war and trying to distance themselves from it. Russian society has not consolidated around the war. And this matters.
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The third factor is the most important. Because it is the only factor that we can directly influence: the preparedness of Ukraine and the preparedness of our partners.
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One of the main lessons of this war is that military power is determined not only by the number of soldiers. It also depends on logistics.

Today, Ukrainian strikes against fuel infrastructure, supply routes, and military logistics are creating cumulative pressure on Russia’s military capabilities.
In the occupied territories, we increasingly hear reports of fuel shortages, transportation difficulties, and mounting logistical challenges.

This may sound technical. But logistics determines whether manpower can be transformed into actual combat power.

A thousand soldiers without fuel, ammunition, or transportation are not ten times more effective than one hundred. Sometimes they are ten times more vulnerable.
The second lesson concerns technology.
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The future of this war will increasingly be determined in the air — by drones, artificial intelligence, electronic warfare capabilities, autonomous systems, and the ability to innovate faster than the adversary. The side that learns more quickly and establishes a faster cycle of producing and deploying weapons systems will outperform the side that is simply larger.

And one lesson stands out in particular. Cheap, scalable, and rapidly adaptable systems often outperform expensive, high-tech platforms that take years to replace.
This is why partnerships among governments, militaries, and innovative technology companies are becoming so important.
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The final lesson concerns society. Ukraine’s greatest advantage in 2022 was not its army. It was society itself. Ukraine endured because society endured. Because people self-organized. Because citizens understood that security is not solely the responsibility of the military. This is the essence of total defence. And it is a lesson that extends far beyond Ukraine.
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The question facing Europe today is not whether another crisis will come. It is whether Europe will be able to build resilience before it is forced to withstand such a test.
When we discuss Russia’s ability to continue this war, we often focus on the fact that Russia still possesses resources, manpower, and military-industrial capacity. These factors matter, but they are only part of the story.
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A much more important question is whether Ukraine and its partners will be able to adapt faster than Russia.

Russia will likely be able to continue fighting for some time. But the future of this war will not be determined solely by Russia’s capacity to withstand the pressures of war. It will also be determined by our shared ability — together with our partners — to find new solutions. And that is the variable that remains entirely in our hands.