1,569 Days: The Ukraine War Has Now Outlasted World War I

The war in Ukraine has officially surpassed the duration of the First World War, reaching 1,569 days. New York Times correspondent Constant Méheut examines the striking similarities — and critical differences — between the two conflicts.

Comparing Two Wars

World War I ended not because armies collapsed first, but because Germany's home front did — the Kaiser fled, and an armistice brought an unbearable war to a close.

How, then, will the Ukraine war end? Attrition alone does not appear sufficient. Approximately 500,000 people have been killed so far — a vastly different order of magnitude compared to the 9–11 million military deaths of a century ago — yet the war continues, and an exit appears no clearer than the Western Front did in 1916.

The conflict mirrors World War I in its tactics, yet differs profoundly in scale, political structure, and economic dynamics. It will likely not end the way WWI did. Drones are not poison gas; oil refineries are not blockaded ports. Even where the experience of living in a trench or dugout rhymes across the decades, the mechanisms of pressure are entirely different.

"The Deeper You Dig, the Longer You Live" — Ukrainian Soldier

This observation is simultaneously a marker of civilizational regression and a piece of pragmatic survival advice. Human beings have returned to the earth because the sky has become dangerous in an entirely new way — surveilled by tireless machines that require no cover.

In World War I, artillery drove soldiers underground. In the Ukraine war, persistent machine-vision surveillance drives soldiers even deeper — and often alone. The trench was an answer to firepower; Ukraine's solitary foxhole is an answer to omniscient technology.

One might ask: which condition is more dehumanizing — climbing out of a trench en masse to face near-certain death, or dying alone beneath the gaze of a drone?

"This Is World War I with Drones." — Ukrainian Historian Yaroslav Hrytsak

What ultimately ended the First World War was not the trenches themselves, but the successive collapse of four empires. Today, the question remains: is there an empire poised to collapse? Or is Russia's system built for prolonged attrition — as it endured Stalingrad and pressed on?

Originally published in The New York Times: "The Ukraine War Has Now Lasted Longer Than World War I"; republished via the Small Wars Journal by Arizona State University.

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