A group comprising politicians and civil society leaders from Malawi, South Africa, Angola, Namibia, and Zimbabwe recently undertook a 10-day field-trip to Ukraine along with European colleagues. They spoke to soldiers, government officials, drone manufacturers, diplomats, media, aid workers, POWs, and entrepreneurs from Lviv to Dnipro. A common message from Ukrainians was: we thought Africa would support us in our anti-colonial struggle. Below is a compilation of our impressions of Ukraine, and what we can learn from the Ukrainians struggle against Russian aggression.

As Ukraine enters a new and terrifying phase of the Russian invasion of its territory, the cost of war is mounting for both countries in lives and economic development.

At stake is Ukraine’s right to exist as a sovereign, independent nation. But the stakes are much higher than that. The central question is whether or not the world can accept a reversal of the democratic gains of the 20th century and return to a feudal system where elites rule, rights are trampled, and might is right. Ironically, a return to a 19th-century world of power politics is being spearheaded by Russia in Ukraine, the former displaying acute schizophrenia in being a permanent Security Council member of the United Nations, and (like China) calling for an overhaul of the global system. A case of having your cake and eating your neighbour’s slice too.

At the heart of the Ukraine war is a clash of values. On the one side is an open democratic society with a free press, freedom of expression, a vocal civil society, and the entrenchment of democratic rights. It may be messy, but it’s a democracy, where people protest, openly criticise, and speculate.

No one is afraid to be the first person to stop clapping at a Zelenskyy speech. (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago contains the famous story of a man arrested for being the first to stop clapping during an 11-minute ovation for Joseph Stalin.)

In the words of a member of the Ukrainian Rada, Hryhoriy Nemyria, “This war is not about territory. Russia is the largest country on earth. This war is about who will write the rules about the new security order.”

Reconstruction

A Russian victory in Ukraine would lead to a particularly odious reconstruction of the global order, throwing the world back into the era of imperial contestation and violence.

The model would be the Russian system, where rule is autocratic, and economic development is about the accrual of wealth for a tiny, powerful elite that benefits from political favours. But Russia is no pariah. The Russian model is admired by accumulative elites around the world.

In Africa, a growing band of autocrats and military leaders are abandoning the inconvenience of democratic accountability in favour of Russia’s model of a political class joined at the hip to accumulative oligarchs.

The paper-thin fig leaf that attempts to conceal the greed is Russia’s supposed role in “supporting liberation movements” in their struggle for independence in Africa. The truth is that much of this training took place in Ukraine. And Russia was not fighting for “independence” so much as to extend its sphere of influence or to give its arch-rival in the United States (US) a hard time.

In the words of Sasha Danylyck, a former special adviser to the head of Ukraine's Foreign Intelligence Service and assistant to the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine: “You have dozens of leaders of African countries visiting Moscow, but Russia is the most racist and xenophobic country in the world.”

If you don’t believe him, ask the Africans who have fought for Russia on the Ukrainian front.

Prisoners of war from Zimbabwe and Botswana interviewed in Lviv told how they were promised jobs and money for working in Russia and elsewhere, only to find themselves transported to a military training camp.

After what one described as “two-and-a-half days of training”, they were given weapons and told to lead the way in advances on the enemy.

“We were pathfinders,” says one. The Russians used the Africans to clear land mines – by stepping on them – and to establish where the Ukrainian forces were located. They were viewed as expendable. Food was barely supplied, and some had to scavenge rations from corpses. One recounted how, as they drew closer to the contact zone, his magazines were taken away from him. He was not expected to fight so much as to serve as an alert to Russians as to the whereabouts of the enemy.

After walking through fields and forests littered with dead bodies, these Africans took the first opportunity to surrender to Ukraine. The Ukrainians, by contrast, treated them with empathy and gave them proper nutrition and medical attention.

Propaganda

Russia’s war on Ukraine is backed by a massive propaganda effort via social media.

According to United24, an operation that seeks to counter disinformation, Russia’s message is spread through the distribution of some 3.6 million articles published each year in 49 target countries. Using 150 domains that aggregate fake news, the messages draw attention on social media, leading to them being promoted to audiences around the world.

Some 207 conscious disinformation narratives were promoted in this way from 2022 to 2025.

The Russians use political actors supported financially by covert actions and military actions.

Without the guardrails of conventions on human rights in conflict, Russia openly resorts to terrorising civilians.

Sasha Romansova of the Centre for Civil Liberties has spent twelve years cataloguing Russian war crimes, of which there are now 120 000 recorded incidents, including hits on 3 000 educational institutions, 1 244 hospitals, 19 humanitarian convoys, alongside countless incidents of assault, murder, and the abduction of children.

Technology is now enabling terror on a wider scale. Andriy Zagorodnyuk is a former Ukrainian defence minister who has studied the evolution of warfare in Ukraine.

He points out that Russia has become a world leader in the development of affordable, precise mass weapons such as jet-powered versions of the Shaheed drone supplied by Iran and cheaper missiles designed to literally reduce cities to rubble in an effort to bludgeon civilians into submission.

Meanwhile, the West has fallen behind, opening the way for Russian aggression. In the 1980s, advances in precision-guided munitions led to the dominance of the US military and the decision by Europeans that they no longer needed their large standing armies.

Zagorodnyuk said: “[The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation] NATO decided that the US could lead. European armies became smaller. Generations of Europeans grew up thinking they would not have to fight. Military budgets shrank. Military service and weapons companies became unpopular – called ‘merchants of death’.”

Now the shift to cheap, accurate long-range munitions such as jet-powered drones and inexpensive missiles has caught Europe unawares.

The philosophy is: “You can afford to lose 90%, and 10% will work. The same way Russia treats its people.”

In this new battlefield, air superiority is no longer the bulwark against attack it once was. While jets can fight each other for control of the skies, the air is now saturated with cheap, fast, and hard-to-stop munitions. “Airspace was a single domain. Now there is no single domain. At different altitudes, you have drones.”

The scale of the fighting is astounding. According to Danyil Vakhovskyi of the Ukrainian drone company General Cherry, Russia has fired around one million drones at Ukraine since January 2026. Ukraine will produce between seven and eight million drones in a year.

Tank warfare is dead in Ukraine. “From 2025, almost no heavy vehicle is getting to the frontline. If they are near the frontline, they are destroyed some 40–50km from the frontline.” Tank drivers are switching to piloting drones which, risky though it is, is far less risky than driving a slow, cumbersome vehicle into a swarm of munitions.

Victor Andrusiv, an officer in the Ukrainian Armed Forces and the former director of the Kyiv School of Public Administration, points out that looming over the horizon is a terrifying innovation – swarms of jet-powered drones using artificial intelligence for autonomous navigation and targeting.

Zombies

NATO countries that have for decades prepared defences against traditional assault methods now face a new threat. “They will send a lot of people and a lot of drones. They will walk like a zombie army. The traditional war of manoeuvre is gone.”

Ukraine, which has shown innovation, adaptability, and resilience in the face of Russia’s malign tactics, is now the continent’s most powerful military and its best hope of stopping the Russian war machine in its tracks. While allies in Europe have supported it, that support has not matched the existential threat it faces.

Supplies of missiles are slow or absent, leading to the frequent crump of munitions in the country’s cities, many getting through depleted air defences. But even this appears not to have inspired real urgency from Europe.

Riven by populist posturing, transactional politics, and weakened military forces, NATO appears unprepared for this new era of warfare. And that assault is coming as Russia seeks to own and control the global rules of engagement.

“The biggest lesson learned," says Viktor Andrusiv, “is that you can fight this huge army and win. A democratic and free society can be very effective in war.”

In Ukraine, a thousand ideas to counter Russia have bloomed as the country’s creativity and entrepreneurship have been released to find ways to stop the occupation.

At the centre of the ecosystem sits BRAVE 1, a government-supported initiative to inspire new technology harnesses the country’s “warchangers” by providing grants and creating an ecosystem that includes private investment, product codification, and testing in combat conditions.

It prides itself on being able to deliver a system to a unit on a two-week horizon, radically shorter than the traditional four to seven months.

Units are motivated to accumulate points through proof of their combat effectiveness, and they exchange these for products on the marketplace in a radical innovation in how procurement takes place.

Yevhen Karas, commander of the 413 RAID UAS Regiment, is responsible for commanding a large “unmanned systems” operation.

He lives by three rules: “You must preserve peace. Weakness is a risk – be strong or be defeated. Speed of innovation is a key to victory.”

A rapid turnaround in technology is essential or weapons systems become obsolete. “We don’t have the time to wait like many Western companies – half a year, a year.

“It’s really hard for countries not at war to keep up. Government people, big funding.”

New Doctrine

Fedir Sediuk, of Modern Warfare Advisory (MOWA), says that a new doctrine is needed to redesign forces for the new technology. New commands have been set up for air and ground drones, for example. There are now more than 30 certified schools teaching drone warfare in Ukraine. Rapid training on new capabilities has to be delivered quickly.

“Ukraine has to build the plane while flying it – others still have time to learn,” he says.

Ukrainians are tired of war, but the alternatives are more painful: death or occupation.

By standing up to Russia, Ukraine is standing up to authoritarian elites everywhere. Every day that Kyiv and its citizens hold out, Moscow’s influence diminishes. For Putin, however, failure in Ukraine would mean something more profound: Russia losing again, for the second time in 35 years.

Putin’s failure in Ukraine would serve not only the West, by avoiding the need for a direct confrontation with Russian forces, but Russia itself: it would offer Moscow its clearest opportunity to contribute to stronger global governance and a fairer international order.

The stakes are high for Africans, the continent where more than three-quarters favour democracy over any other form of government, yet 93% of its 1.5 billion people live under various forms of authoritarian rule. Victory for Putin’s Russia would be a boost for autocrats everywhere, just as Ukraine carries the hopes of the democratic world in its struggle.

In this way, all Ukrainians are Africans and vice versa. To reinforce relations between our peoples, it is important for Africans to speak out on behalf of Ukraine in this war. It is also crucial for Kyiv not to make common cause with the very governments in Africa that oppress their own people.

В біді пізнаєш друга. “A friend is known in trouble.” That much is as true for Ukraine as anywhere else.

The Platform for African Democrats (PAD) is a forum for Africans dedicated to building democracy and ending autocratic rule. Only with democracy and the rule of law can economic growth, the delivery of services, and a better life for citizens be achieved.