The common perception of the war in Ukraine is that of a brutal, but fundamentally European, conflict. It’s a narrative of national survival and territorial integrity, a story largely confined to the fields and cities between Kyiv and the Donbas.

However, a provocative new strategic assessment, The Global War in Ukraine 2021–2025, argues that the conflict has revealed deeper, counter-intuitive truths that extend far beyond the battlefield. Authored by veteran analyst Robbin Laird and published in 2026, the book presents the war as a global catalyst that has stress-tested the foundations of military strategy, international alliances, and 21st-century power in ways daily headlines often miss.

This analysis moves beyond the immediate tactical situation to distill five of the book’s most impactful and surprising takeaways. These are the truths that, according to Laird’s assessment, reveal not just the nature of this war, but the shape of the world it is forging.

1. Russia’s Aggression Created the Supercharged NATO It Feared Most

Laird’s analysis begins with a strategic own-goal of historic proportions. Vladimir Putin’s invasion, intended to halt NATO’s influence and push the alliance back from Russia’s borders, has instead resulted in the most unified, militarized, and expanded version of the alliance since the Cold War.

The book provides concrete and transformative evidence of this backfire. Before the invasion, NATO often appeared distracted. Today, Laird argues, it is energized with a renewed sense of purpose:

Finland and Sweden, nations with decades-long traditions of formal neutrality, abandoned their non-aligned status to join the alliance, adding over 800 miles of direct NATO border with Russia.

Germany, long Europe’s economic powerhouse but a military lightweight, launched a massive rearmament program, signaling a historic shift in its post-war strategic posture.

The United Kingdom and France revived a deep bilateral defense compact, intensifying their dialogue on nuclear deterrence and coordination.

In the book’s foreword, former Italian Air Force Chief of Staff Pasquale Preziosa captures how Putin’s grievance-fueled approach produced a classic security dilemma, where actions taken to enhance one’s own security are perceived as threats by others, who then take countermeasures that ultimately reduce the original actor’s security.

Putin’s approach to NATO, threat inflation anchored in grievance, produced a self-fulfilling security dilemma: treat a distracted alliance as existential, and you will eventually face the unified, militarized NATO you feared.

Ultimately, Laird concludes that Putin’s attempt to restore Russian influence through force resulted in a catastrophic strategic miscalculation. It not only failed to weaken NATO but galvanized his primary adversary into a more formidable and coherent military bloc than he had faced before the war began.

2. The Conflict Went Global: Asian Powers Are Now Key Players in Europe’s War

What began as a European regional conflict, Laird’s assessment contends, has transformed into a global proxy war where Asian powers are playing direct and startling roles on European battlefields. The book argues that the clean separation between Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific security theaters has effectively collapsed.

The Global War in Ukraine 2021–2025 details several shocking examples of this new reality:

North Korea’s Direct Intervention: In a move unprecedented since the Korean War, Pyongyang transitioned from an arms supplier to an active combatant. The book details how North Korea deployed thousands of its troops to fight alongside Russian forces in the Kursk region, acquiring unwelcome expertise in modern warfare, including drone operations and electronic countermeasures, that will have direct consequences on the Korean peninsula.

Japan’s Intelligence Pivot: In a historic reversal of its post-war posture, Japan became a key intelligence partner for Ukraine. Motivated by the understanding that “Ukraine today may be East Asia tomorrow,” Tokyo provides crucial satellite reconnaissance from commercial providers like iQPS, whose advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) capabilities have proven invaluable to Ukrainian defenders.

South Korea’s Industrial Might: Seoul emerged as a pivotal defense producer for the democratic coalition, supplying NATO allies with the advanced weapons and ammunition needed to sustain their support for Ukraine. In a potent insight, the book notes that the two Koreas have effectively “exported their competition to Europe,” with Seoul providing legitimate industrial support while Pyongyang offers illicit supplies and expeditionary forces.

This is a stunning geopolitical realignment. A war for territory in Eastern Europe is now being shaped by North Korean soldiers, Japanese satellites, and South Korean factories. The conflict has demonstrated that major security crises are no longer geographically contained; they are global events that draw in actors from across the international system.

3. Ukraine Revolutionized Modern Warfare with a Homegrown Drone Army

One of the most astonishing stories detailed in The Global War in Ukraine is the country’s military-technological transformation. Starting in 2014 with virtually no drone capability, Ukraine became a world leader in drone technology, production, and doctrine, achieving this transformation at what the book calls “wartime speed.”

Laird’s analysis documents this revolution unfolding in distinct phases:

• Adaptation: The initial phase saw the ingenious adaptation of commercial quadcopters and racing drones for military reconnaissance and attack missions.
• Scaling: This was followed by an explosive scaling of domestic production, with Ukraine reaching a capacity of 200,000 drones per month by 2025.
• Self-Sufficiency: Finally, Ukraine achieved near-total technological independence, moving from a reliance on imported components to producing nearly all components domestically.

The strategic impact of this drone army has been profound. Laird highlights Operation Spider Web, a sophisticated deep-strike operation in 2025 that used swarms of low-cost, AI-assisted drones to destroy a significant fraction of Russia’s strategic bomber fleet thousands of kilometers inside Russian territory. The operation demonstrated what happens when low-cost airframes converge with “smart guidance, distributed sensing, and audacious targeteering,” creating an unsustainable cost-exchange ratio for Moscow.

As Pasquale Preziosa summarizes in the foreword, this shift represents a doctrinal, industrial, and cultural transformation in modern warfare.

The shift is doctrinal, industrial, and cultural: from exquisite scarcity to intelligent mass, from platform-centric to network-centric, from hardware primacy to software advantage.

4. Russia’s “No Limits” Partnership with China is Actually an Economic Surrender

While Vladimir Putin’s pivot to China is often portrayed in Moscow as a strategic masterstroke, Laird’s analysis deconstructs this narrative, revealing a starkly different reality. The book argues that the war has, in practice, transformed Russia from a partner into a subordinate, creating a deep and asymmetrical economic dependency on Beijing.

This “strategic subordination” is evident in two critical areas detailed in the book:

• The “Yuanization” of Russia’s Economy: To escape the Western financial system, Russia has embraced the Chinese yuan. Once a marginal currency, the yuan now dominates Russian trade settlements. This expedient trade, however, places Moscow’s financial reserves and payments at the discretion of Beijing’s policy choices and the Chinese Communist Party’s political apparatus.
• The Price of Dependence: China has become the indispensable buyer for Russian energy, but this comes at a steep price. The book shows how Beijing consistently secures Russian oil and coal at significant discounts, turning Russia from a global price-setter into a price-taker.
• The “no limits” partnership is revealed not as an alliance of equals, but as a relationship of necessity for Russia and opportunity for China. Pasquale Preziosa captures this dynamic perfectly in his foreword.

What appears as a pivot is, in practice, a symbiosis with asymmetry: essential for Russia; optional, and therefore leverage-rich, for China.

In his attempt to escape Western economic pressure, Putin has subjected Russia to a different, and perhaps deeper, form of dependency. He has traded reliance on a system of international rules for reliance on the strategic calculations of a single, powerful neighbor.

5. Nuclear Weapons Are Already Being Used—As a “Head Game”

The most counter-intuitive truth about the war, according to the book’s analysis of strategist Paul Bracken’s work, may be this: nuclear weapons are not just a hypothetical threat waiting in a silo. They are actively shaping the conventional war right now. Their influence is subtle but absolute, creating the unstated rules of engagement that both sides are forced to follow.

This is most evident in the concept of nuclear sanctuaries. These are territories that are effectively immune from large-scale conventional attack, not because they are physically unreachable, but because of the nuclear deterrent that protects them.

NATO countries serve as a sanctuary for Ukraine. The book notes that Ukrainian forces can train openly in the United Kingdom and receive massive shipments of weapons through Poland without fear of a major Russian conventional attack on those territories.

Russian territory serves as its own sanctuary. Russia can stage its forces, launch missile and drone attacks, and operate its command-and-control networks from deep within its own borders without facing a full-scale conventional response aimed at its strategic heartland.

This dynamic, Laird argues, is only possible because of the nuclear deterrent held by both Russia and key NATO powers. This creates a “head game” where both sides operate within unstated but understood limits to avoid catastrophic escalation. This reality is often missed in public discourse, which tends to treat nuclear weapons as an all-or-nothing proposition. Bracken’s perspective, featured in the book, is perspective-shifting.

“My response was ‘they already have.’ It’s a nuclear head game, and very dangerous”.

This is a critical takeaway because it reveals that the West is not operating with complete freedom of action. Every decision about what weapons to provide and what targets are permissible is being made within the shadow of nuclear constraints. Understanding this “head game” is essential to navigating the conflict without stumbling into a catastrophic miscalculation.

Conclusion: A World Remade

The Global War in Ukraine 2021–2025 compellingly argues that the conflict is far more than a struggle for territory. It has acted as a powerful accelerator, forcing latent shifts in global power to crystallize into hard realities. From the rebirth of a militarized NATO to the rise of a global proxy war involving Asian powers, and from the revolution in drone warfare to the quiet but constant influence of nuclear strategy, the conflict has revealed the new, and often uncomfortable, rules of international power.

As these new realities solidify, the central question Laird’s analysis poses is no longer just how the war in Ukraine will end, but what kind of world will emerge from the furnace in which the old order was reforged?