By New York Post (World News) | Created at 2026-06-12 01:06:03 | Updated at 2026-06-12 06:31:31
5 hours ago
The war in Ukraine has raged on longer than World War I as of Thursday – reaching 1,569 days of bloodshed, with no end in sight.
World War I veterans who endured the horrors of the trenches hoped it would end all wars, but more than 100 years later historians have increasingly compared it to the conflict that’s consumed Ukraine since Russia’s invasion in Feb. 2022.
Both wars began with aggressive advances from invaders.
Germany in 1914 charged towards Paris before being violently halted, and in 2022, Russia penetrated dangerously close to Kyiv — but both quickly descended into grinding stalemates.
“In many respects, this war in Ukraine is the one that most closely resembles World War I,” French military historian Michel Goya told the New York Times.
“In general, when the front freezes, you’re back to World War I,” he added.
And that’s exactly what the war in Ukraine has been like since it began, with the front lines sometimes changing by yards over the course of days – only to swing back the other way days later.
Russia’s capture of Pokrovsk, for example, advanced by just 70 meters per day – slower than the advances during the bloody Battle of the Somme in 1916, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The battlefields across both wars even look alike – with the stalemate in Ukraine leading to the same kind of grinding trench warfare that carved up the French countryside in WWI.
Ukrainian and Russian troops have spent battles just hundreds of yards from each other, and following the exact type of tactics that dominated WWI – devastating artillery barrages of the enemy trench, and then desperate and often gruesome charges across the no-man’s land between.
Both wars have also upended the traditional warfare of the day with new technologies.
WWI was the first wide-scale conflict to employ easily maneuverable machine guns, chemical weapons and tanks, which decimated the traditional European battlefield where ranks of soldiers would face each other in open fields for volleys of rifle fire.
Similarly, the war in Ukraine is the first wide-scale conflict that has employed drone technology.
The tiny flying menaces –rigged with explosives or guns – have neutered the tank warfare tactics that dominated wars across the planet since WWII, forcing both sides to improvise and adapt from one battle to the next.
“This is WWI, but with drones,” Ukrainian historian Yaroslav Hrytsak told the Times.
The casualties don’t compare between wars, but the scales of them are also far different.
WWI involved troops from across the planet, while the war in Ukraine has been largely limited to Ukrainian and Russian troops.
Somewhere between 9 and 11 million soldiers were killed in World War I, while about 500,000 have died in Ukraine.
The Ukraine war is showing no signs of stopping, with rounds of peace talks repeatedly leading nowhere and neither side showing any sign of yielding.
World War I lasted 1,568 days, ending on November 11, 1918 for four years and three and a half months.
