Last May, NATO invited 10 Ukrainians to act as an opposing force during Hedgehog 2025, one of the alliance's largest exercises in the Baltics. Within hours, they simulated the destruction of 17 armored vehicles and carried out 30 strikes, effectively neutralizing two NATO battalions before dinner. One observing commander summarized the broader implication in three words: "We are finished."

Bryan Daugherty, a former U.S. Marine who spent nine months in Ukraine with the United Nations and USAID, described the episode in a recent analysis as evidence of a growing disconnect between how NATO treats Ukraine and what Ukraine actually brings to the table, "Hvylya" reports.

Daugherty, who served with the Marine Corps and the private military company Triple Canopy, said his own combat experience felt "obsolete" after speaking with Ukrainian soldiers returning from the Donbas. "These men had mastered a new kind of war completely foreign to me," he wrote. His friends still in the Marines were enthusiastic about drone integration but were months, if not a year, behind the innovation cycle unfolding in real time on the front.

The exercise took place without American forces. Daugherty called this a symptom of Washington's broader disengagement from NATO - and from the alliance's most battle-tested partner. At the 2025 NATO summit, the United States signaled it did not view Ukrainian security as essential to European security - even as Ukraine had just humbled two of the alliance's battalions on the training field.

Russia has suffered approximately 1.2 million casualties since the full-scale invasion in 2022, according to estimates by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the U.K. Ministry of Defense. In exchange, Russian forces gain between 15 and 70 meters per day on average. The gap between NATO's simulated exercises and Ukraine's four years of continuous large-scale combat, Daugherty argued, is precisely what those 10 Ukrainians exploited in Estonia.

Also read how Ukrainian soldiers revealed the harsh truth about allied readiness after joint NATO training.