Valerii Zaluzhnyi, Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Kingdom and former commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, argues that the war against Russia has rewritten the logic of modern conflict, and that those lessons now apply directly to the confrontation around Iran.

In an article published on 21 March, he wrote that the battlefield changes seen in Ukraine “have changed the paradigm of how warfare is waged”. Zaluzhnyi has served as ambassador in London since 2024, after leading Ukraine’s armed forces during the first two years of Russia’s full-scale invasion.

His central point is that wars can no longer be understood through the assumptions of earlier campaigns in the Middle East. He warns that the speed of past regional wars has encouraged false expectations of another short and decisive operation. “Today, it is impossible to predict and forecast the course and options for the end of this war,” he wrote. That judgment reflects Ukraine’s own experience: in February 2022, Russia expected a rapid victory, yet the conflict has become a four-year war shaped by drones, electronic warfare, attrition and economic pressure.

Zaluzhnyi links this directly to the wider decline of the post-Cold War security order. He argues that the failure to stop Russia’s invasion through diplomacy helped normalise the breakdown of international law and encouraged instability elsewhere. In his formulation, the inability to restore balance in one theatre creates incentives to break it in another. That argument now sits against the background of a rapidly widening Middle East crisis, with major disruption to energy flows and renewed warnings from European leaders about the risk of broader escalation.

The most important lesson he draws from Ukraine is technological. Zaluzhnyi argues that relatively cheap but highly effective systems now allow countries to field combat capabilities out of proportion to their economic strength or demographic size. That assessment is consistent with recent reporting on both the Ukraine war and the Iran crisis. Ukraine has become a reference point for anti-drone warfare, and President Zelenskyy said this month that Ukrainian specialists and technology are already being used to help five Middle Eastern states defend against Iranian-made Shahed drones. Reuters reported that Ukraine has deployed more than 200 drone-interception specialists to Gulf states.

That is why Zaluzhnyi dismisses any simplistic assumption that Iran could be dealt with quickly. He refers to two classic wartime approaches: a strategy of defeat and a strategy of attrition. The first assumes an attacker can win decisively and fast. He compares that logic to Russia’s failed expectation of taking Kyiv in a matter of days, adding pointedly: “Probably someone thought that this was also possible in Iran.” His warning is that if the defending side chooses attrition, the attacking side “will definitely have big problems”.

His argument is not only military but economic. He says low-cost strike systems can now inflict damage far beyond the battlefield, especially against critical infrastructure. In his words, such technologies “will not only destroy the oil industry” but could also damage the economy of any state attempting to apply old assumptions to a modern conflict. That concern is plainly relevant in the current crisis. Reporting over the past two days has pointed to damage to energy infrastructure, shipping disruption linked to the Strait of Hormuz, and wider fears over oil and gas supplies.

Zaluzhnyi also warns against any large-scale ground operation. He points to what he calls the “kill zone” — a battlespace so saturated by surveillance and drone strike capability that troops and vehicles cannot move safely. “It is very dangerous if one of the sides tries to test how the ‘kill zone’ works in desert terrain,” he wrote. “This will be a disaster.” He describes such an area as “completely controlled by drones that hunt people and machines”. That description echoes broader assessments of how drone density is changing battlefield geometry, particularly where persistent observation and rapid strike chains deny conventional manoeuvre.

There is also a geopolitical edge to his warning. Russia and Iran are no longer linked only by diplomacy or sanctions evasion. Their military cooperation, above all around Shahed drones, has become a central feature of both wars. Recent reporting describes the Shahed family as a symbol of the Moscow-Tehran partnership, with technology transfers and battlefield learning now moving in both directions. Zaluzhnyi’s claim is that at least three countries already understand this new form of warfare: Iran, Russia and Ukraine.

His conclusion is stark rather than dramatic. Modern war is no longer defined only by mass armies, industrial output and territorial movement. It is increasingly shaped by cheap precision, drone dominance, infrastructure vulnerability and the capacity to endure. For Zaluzhnyi, the lesson of Ukraine is that any war involving Iran may be longer, messier and more economically destructive than those expecting a swift campaign are prepared to admit. As he puts it, “war is the most terrible thing that humanity has invented”.