"The battlefield has become transparent. Anyone who shows up is detected and attacked." That is what Valery Zaluzhny, former commander of the Ukrainian armed forces and now ambassador to the United Kingdom, said. In one sentence he summed up everything the world needs to know about future wars.

Zaluzhny says "operational tasks" - the standard basis for military decisions for decades - are no longer feasible. The old large-scale offensives that punched through 150-250 kilometres in a few days? Impossible. By the time you concentrate your force, the opponent has already spotted every vehicle with drones and prepared the strike.

"The kill zone" is the term Zaluzhny uses. It is the strip 30 to 50 kilometres from the front. Inside it, both sides have so many surveillance and combat drones that every vehicle, every soldier, every unit is a potential target within minutes.

The result? Russia and Ukraine both have the same problem - neither can form a strike force for a decisive blow. Both sides are stuck in the same dead end. That is why the front does not move dramatically, despite hundreds of thousands of casualties on each side.

"Battles on the front line become less important than operations in the deep rear," says Zaluzhny. Translation: warehouses, bridges, refineries, energy hubs - everything far from the front line itself. And that is what we are watching every day now - strikes on Russian refineries deep inside Russia, strikes on Ukrainian power plants, strikes on logistics infrastructure.

What does Macedonia take from this? That any future war in the Balkans - if it happens, God forbid - will not look like the Yugoslav wars of the nineties. There will be no convoys of tanks. No infantry assaults on Vitez or Srebrenica. No tracks rumbling down city streets. There will be drones over every street, every building, every mountain trail. And the only ones who will be ready are those who study what Ukraine is going through right now - instead of staring at Brussels and waiting for instructions.

Zaluzhny also warns about something broader - a technological revolution with AI at its centre. Whoever controls the AI systems will control military decisions. That is today's question, with all its uncomfortable answers. And for our region, it is a new and very dangerous reality nobody has prepared us for.