New-generation weapons in contemporary international relations: A case study of the Russia-Ukraine War (2022-2026)

This thesis examines how new-generation weapons, and the incremental autonomy built into them, have shaped the conduct and the international politics of the Russia–Ukraine war between February 2022 and October 2026, and what the war implies for the adequacy of international humanitarian law and arms-control norms. Its central conceptual move is to separate two categories that public debate often merges: new-generation weapons, a generational and technological class that includes uncrewed aerial, maritime and ground systems, long-range precision and hypersonic missiles, electronic warfare, cyber and space capabilities and military artificial intelligence; and autonomous weapon systems, a functional class defined by the machine performing the critical functions of selecting and engaging targets without human intervention. The war is treated as a critical case study of the first category and as an empirical test of the second. The research uses a qualitative single-case design with process tracing across four phases of the war. It draws on United Nations and CCW documents, ICRC publications, think-tank assessments, peer-reviewed scholarship and open-source monitoring data, graded and triangulated. Three theoretical lenses (offence–defence theory, military innovation and diffusion, and strategic stability and norm theory) are combined with doctrinal analysis of international humanitarian law. A four-point scale, A0 to A3, is used to code the autonomy of the main systems and the strength of the evidence behind each coding. The study finds that new-generation weapons have been transformative at the tactical level, producing very short cycles of innovation and counter-innovation, but evolutionary at the strategic level, where industrial capacity, external supply and escalation management under a nuclear shadow mattered more than any single technology. Autonomy has entered combat function by function, driven by electronic warfare and manpower scarcity. Most systems sit at levels A0 to A2, and the reported systems that select their own targets rest on thin evidence. Existing law remains applicable, and it was applied by the UN Commission of Inquiry to drone attacks directed by humans, but it is under-specified for machine-selected targeting. The thesis concludes with proposals on meaningful human control, weapons review, accountability and export controls.