Chethana Janith, Jadetimes Staff
C. Janith is a Jadetimes news reporter and sub-editor covering science and geopolitics.
Russia’s new war doctrine has left the trenches behind - merging drones, data, and diplomacy into a seamless front that stretches from the Caribbean to cyberspace, where power is measured not in missiles but in algorithms.
"This is the conflict without uniforms or parades, fought by machines that never sleep and economies that can’t stop"
The world imagines the proxy war in Ukraine as something fought in trenches and timelines. Russia knows better. The new wars are fought in clouds, cables, and treaties, in signatures that hide missiles, in whispers that flicker through fiber lines beneath the sea.
Last week, the Russian State Duma ratified a sweeping military cooperation agreement with Cuba, a move that jolted Washington’s memory of the 1960s. The deal grants Moscow the right to deploy advanced systems - drones, missiles, surveillance units - on Cuban soil, while shielding Russian personnel from local jurisdiction. It is not nostalgia for the Cold War. It is strategic aikido: while America plays east, Russia slips west, reminding the Pentagon that small islands can host large consequences.
This isn’t provocation; it’s positioning. The Kremlin is quietly drawing new frontiers of deterrence, expanding the map of relevance. Beneath that gesture lies a deeper shift - one that will redefine not just war, but what counts as human involvement in it.
The Rise of the Machines
In 2025, Moscow formally inaugurated the Unmanned Systems Forces - a standalone military branch equal to the Navy or Air Force. What began as drone improvisation over the Donbas has evolved into a full-blown doctrine of robotic warfare. Russia is the first major power to institutionalize autonomous combat.
Inside the Ministry of Defense, an integrated AI command platform now coordinates real-time data from every drone, tank bot, and undersea vessel. It learns from every jammed signal, every target missed, every strike achieved. What Western observers call attrition, Russian planners call training data.
These unmanned legions are fed by industrial giants like Kronstadt Group, Uralvagonzavod, and Kalashnikov Concern, working through a web of private tech fronts that blur civilian and military lines. In this new ecosystem, humans have become the slowest component of war - still essential, but increasingly peripheral. Valor is bandwidth.
The Future Nobody Votes For
Piece by piece, a new order is emerging - not declared, but assembled from code, circuitry, and exhaustion. The West measures progress in kilometers retaken; Russia measures adaptation rate per algorithm cycle. One fights to hold ground. The other to learn faster. And what if this learning extends beyond the battlefield? What if the same architectures now guiding drones were tuned - just slightly - toward Europe’s electric grids, its fuel networks, its logistics software? Don’t think in terms of an attack, geostrategic leverage. Not a war, but a whisper that makes energy prices twitch and populist moods shift. In such a world, deterrence isn’t about warheads or tanks anymore. It’s about control of the invisible layer - the one that moves electrons, contracts, and emotions. The layer no one votes for, and no one can see. The essence of our machines of civilization.
Cuba, then, is not the provocation - it is the reminder. The Caribbean, the cloud, and the cable are all fronts now. This is the conflict without uniforms or parades, fought by machines that never sleep and economies that can’t stop. And while governments argue about treaties, the battlefield keeps widening - until, one day, people wake up to realize they have been living inside it all along. And that Russia is not the country that “brought it.”
