Ukraine’s Near-Victory Inside NATO’s Hybrid Warfare Simulation

The Result: Victory by a Thread

Officially, the alliance’s defenders won. In practice, the outcome was a near miss. According to the jury, the Ukrainian team lost by only a narrow margin across the exercise as a whole, and they outright outmaneuvered the NATO defenders in two of the three sub-scenarios . The alliance’s win required significant defensive effort against an adversary team that was smaller, less bureaucratic, and vastly more practiced at the art of real-world hybrid warfare.

The Combat-Tested Edge Ukraine Brought

NATO observers attributed Ukraine’s near-victory to three distinct advantages that years of actual conflict have forged.

Battle-forged creativity. Ukrainian specialists demonstrated adaptive, unconventional attack chains that exploited gaps in NATO’s standard operating procedures. Their tactics reflected the improvisation required to survive on a digital and kinetic frontline for three years .

Operational speed. The team integrated cyberattacks and disinformation into a single, fast-moving operational rhythm. NATO’s slower, multi-layered approval processes could not keep pace with an adversary striking across three domains simultaneously . A German officer who observed the exercise, Lieutenant Colonel Yvonne Rötter, director of the Bundeswehr’s Centre for Digitalization, noted that the Ukrainian participants simply worked faster and with greater creativity .

AI fluency in information warfare. The red team used generative AI tools to rapidly produce and disseminate large volumes of misleading content—a capability that NATO’s detection and response mechanisms struggled to handle. This exposed a specific and critical vulnerability in the alliance’s cognitive defense posture .

Missed Warnings and a Wider Pattern

The narrow result at Karti did not arrive without warning. In May 2025, during an exercise in Estonia, a single adversary team of roughly 10 Ukrainian experts eliminated two full NATO battalions in a single day. The same exercise involved more than 16,000 troops from 12 alliance countries, yet the Ukrainian team’s superior battlefield awareness, drone integration, and kill-chain speed overwhelmed them completely . Despite this shock result, the alliance had not sufficiently adapted its defensive posture by the time of Karti . The pattern has since repeated in conventional Baltic scenarios, all pointing toward the same conclusion: a determined, creative adversary can inflict significant, disproportionate damage before NATO’s conventional response machinery fully activates .

What the Alliance Must Face

The simulation forces at least three uncomfortable conclusions onto NATO’s readiness agenda.

Bureaucratic decision-making is a security liability. Layered approval processes that work for conventional deterrence cannot match the tempo of an adversary that strikes across cyber, kinetic, and information domains in a coordinated burst . Karti made clear that the alliance’s command-and-consultation rhythm is too slow for modern hybrid warfare.

Information defense is a systemic weak point. The red team’s success with AI-generated disinformation underscores how thinly NATO’s cognitive defenses are stretched. Russia has invested heavily in precisely these techniques, using generative AI to produce propaganda at unprecedented volume and speed, and Karti proved that a motivated operator can do the same .

Real-war improvisation cannot be simulated into existence. Ukraine’s edge is not purely technical—it is experiential. Three years of constant hybrid attack have cultivated a muscle for rapid adaptation that scripted exercises, no matter how realistic, have not replicated. NATO cannot assume that well-drilled procedures will substitute for the instinct-level tempo that combat forces develop under fire .

The Karti simulation is not a prediction of defeat. But it is an urgent reminder that the alliance’s margin of advantage in cyberspace and the information environment is thinner than official readiness assessments tend to acknowledge. A combat-seasoned, AI-literate, and unencumbered adversary proved that the gap can be narrowed to a single scenario’s difference between success and rout.