“Just like in the First World War, we have reached the level of technology that puts us into a stalemate,” Ukrainian basic Valerii Zaluzhnyi admitted late final 12 months. “There will most likely be no deep and beautiful breakthrough.”

That blunt evaluation from the Ukrainian commander in chief, made in a November interview with The Economist, prompted waves of huge pessimism. Headlines all over the world seized on the concept the warfare had primarily ended. Ukraine had fought valiantly—and misplaced.

Politicians within the West, notably Republicans within the United States Congress, declared that it was time to stop supplying Kyiv and push for major concessions to Moscow.

The basic’s precise level, nevertheless, wasn’t fairly so fatalistic. In an accompanying nine-page essay, printed within the British journal, Zaluzhnyi doesn’t use the phrase “stalemate.” Instead, he known as the warfare “positional,” with either side buying and selling simply tiny slivers of land. Critically, nevertheless, he mentioned Ukraine can nonetheless win. But it is going to imply, he wrote, “searching for new and non-trivial approaches to break military parity with the enemy.”

Technological innovation, extra fashionable tools, and modifications in technique may nonetheless flip the tide of this warfare, Zaluzhnyi argued. He laid out 5 areas the place progress may imply overcoming their Russian opponent: reaching air superiority, bettering mine clearing, increasing counterbattery, recruiting extra troopers, and advancing digital warfare.

To obtain these targets, he wrote, Ukraine wants a once-in-a-century technological breakthrough.

“The simple fact is that we see everything the enemy is doing and they see everything we are doing,” Zaluzhnyi writes. “In order for us to break this deadlock we need something new, like the gunpowder, which the Chinese invented and which we are still using to kill each other.”

In latest months, WIRED has spoken to a number of NATO leaders and army analysts, in addition to Ukrainian officers, relating to the way forward for the warfare. The consensus is evident: There is not any silver bullet Ukraine can develop that may win this warfare. But there’s settlement that Ukraine can and should innovate if it hopes to beat its better-resourced and dug-in enemy.

“The thing that will break the logjam will be the right combination of new ideas, new organizations, and new technologies,” Mick Ryan, a 35-year veteran of the Australian Army who writes extensively on the way forward for warfare, tells WIRED. “It’s really about how you combine that trinity of ideas, technology, and organizations into something new.”