The war between Russia and Ukraine is about to enter its fifth year with a grim but obvious reality: Moscow is learning how to sustain a grinding industrial conflict. The most important changes in 2025 are not spectacular new weapons, but quieter and steadier reforms in military logistics, repair and casualty care that aim to turn mass into staying power.
From Shock and Awe to Industrial War
In 2022, Russian forces stumbled under the weight of their own logistics. Fuel shortages, abandoned vehicles, inadequate maintenance and chaotic medical support compounded tactical failures around Kyiv and Kharkiv. Subsequent Russian and Western analyses have been blunt: logistics and enablement, not just tactics, were central to Russia’s early setbacks.
By 2025, Moscow’s approach looks different. Russia’s budget for the year allocates roughly 7 per cent of GDP to defence, a level not seen since the late Soviet period, with a rising share funnelled into sustainment functions—transport, infrastructure, repair capacity and war-related social spending in occupied territories. The Kremlin appears to accept that this is an endurance contest, and logistics is the arena in which it must avoid defeat.
Repair Hubs and the Politics of Rust
The backbone of Russia’s material solution has been a vast refurbishment effort. Rather than fielding wholly new fleets, Russian factories are overhauling tanks, armoured vehicles and artillery at scale; in some categories, refurbished equipment reportedly dominates the flow to the front.
This choice has direct logistical consequences. Heavy, ageing platforms require more spare parts, more frequent maintenance, and more complex repair chains. To manage this burden, the Ministry of Defence has expanded a network of mobile repair brigades and forward maintenance hubs in its controlled areas, designed to conduct modular repairs. These efforts focused on swapping engines, turrets, or optics rather than sending entire vehicles back over the border. It is a pragmatic blend of Soviet mass and Western‑style in‑theatre sustainment.
Yet structural limits remain. Russia still struggles to replace or repair systems that rely on Western-made electronics and components for precision weapons, for instance, the US, Taiwan, Japan and the Netherlands. Despite sanctions‑evading imports, these constraints mean that high-end systems cannot be regenerated as easily as older armour, ensuring a persistent gap between battlefield demand and industrial capacity.
Casualty Evacuation in a Transparent Battlespace
Russia has begun experimenting with unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) to support high-risk medical evacuation tasks in Ukraine, though the effort remains limited in scale and sophistication. These Russian ground robots are typically small tracked or wheeled platforms adapted from logistics UGVs that were originally designed to deliver ammunition, food and water to forward positions under pervasive surveillance by Ukrainian drones. In the medical role, they are employed mainly for casualty extraction from the most exposed segments of the front, moving to pre-planned pickup points where wounded soldiers can be loaded before the robot is remotely driven or semi-autonomously guided back toward safer treatment nodes.
Robots at the Front: Promise and Limits
One of the most striking developments of 2025 is the tentative normalisation of ground robots in frontline logistics. Both Russia and Ukraine now use UGVs for resupply and, increasingly, casualty evacuation.
Russia has fielded several platforms intended to move ammunition, food and water to positions under persistent drone observation. Small tracked or wheeled UGVs, such as systems identified under the designations “Volchanin” and “Courier”, are used on pre-planned routes to limit exposure of human drivers. Their autonomy is deliberately modest: they follow waypoints or physical tracks, with a premium placed on resilience against jamming rather than sophisticated navigation.
There are early efforts to adapt these platforms for casualty evacuation, echoing Ukrainian and Western experiments with robotic stretchers and medical UGVs. Yet scale matters. Ukraine has openly set ambitions to deploy thousands of robotic platforms across the front; Russia’s deployment appears more limited, an important supplement rather than a transformation of its logistics system.
The Unfinished Reform
Russia’s logistical evolution in Ukraine is both impressive and incomplete. The country has demonstrated an ability to mobilise industry, create forward repair capacity, stabilise supply chains under fire, and experiment with robotics and new medical practices. These changes have enabled Moscow to sustain a costly, attritional campaign into a fourth year despite heavy equipment losses and unprecedented sanctions.
Russia is not the caricature of logistical incompetence that early‑war images of abandoned convoys suggested, nor is it a fully modern, agile sustainment machine. It is something in between: a state willing to spend heavily, improvise pragmatically, and absorb losses in order to keep fighting.
In such a war, logistics is not a backstage concern but a central battlefield. The contest will hinge not only on who fields more drones or better missiles, but on whose supply depots, repair hubs, casualty chains and nascent robotic fleets prove more resilient under relentless pressure. For now, Russia is working methodically to ensure that its soldiers at the front do not run out of shells, fuel or medical support before Ukraine does. Whether that will be enough is a question only the coming years can answer.
