Center for Defense Strategies: Strategic Neutralization Could Lead Ukraine to Victory

Ukraine is seeking a form of victory that does not fit into old schemes — not about “defeating,” not about “exhausting.” It’s about something else: knocking out the opponent’s working functions until their mechanisms simply stop performing tasks.
This approach is called strategic neutralization. And it is gradually becoming the basis of new defense planning.

Essentially, it’s about breaking not armies as masses of people, but those nodes that hold the entire system: management, logistics, communication channels, information chains. If they stop working, the strike forces can stand in the fields — they are of little use.
The model is multilayered: land, sky, sea, cyber. “Failures” should occur everywhere, paralyzing the enemy’s ability to move.

Ukraine is already doing this with targeted actions, asymmetric tools, innovative systems. The enemy formally remains strong, but increasingly acts inconsistently: losses in management have an effect that was previously considered impossible.

History suggests that such solutions work. Israel adopted a similar model in the 60s: air superiority, technological breakthroughs, constant pressure on the key functions of enemy armies.
Today, Ukraine is creating its own “kill zones” on the ground, covering critical segments of cyber defense, and in the information space, limiting the advancement of enemy narratives. It’s not about destruction — it’s about depriving the ability to act.

But the system needs a theory.
Partners want to understand where the strategy is heading, and the lack of an articulated model gives critics a reason to say that “victory does not exist.” This is a false thesis, but it works if not challenged at the conceptual level.

Strategic neutralization can become the framework around which a comprehensive plan is built. It does not replace de-occupation. It creates an environment in which the aggressor is no longer able to produce operational effects. Their tasks are empty, their pace is disrupted.
Functional defeats reflect the very nature of modern warfare: not by fronts, but by systems. And Ukraine in this logic is not catching up, but setting the pace.

Success here is not a single moment and not one flag over a city. It is a process in which innovations, flexibility, and speed of decisions force the enemy to constantly react, rather than dictate conditions.
And it is this model, if brought to a complete form, that forms a scenario that can convince partners: victory is not an abstract idea, but a practical architecture of future security. We are watching how it is being formed in reality and will continue to analyze its elements in the materials of “NANews — News of Israel | Nikk.Agency.”