How Ukraine Brought the War to Russia
In recent weeks, Donald Trump—whose attitude toward Ukraine and its President, Volodymyr Zelensky, has been notoriously fickle, when not outright hostile—has appeared to warm to Ukraine’s chances in the war with Russia. On the sidelines of the NATO summit in Ankara, he met with Zelensky and later spoke of him in flattering terms, declaring “We’ve actually developed a good relationship. It’s hard to believe.” Trump has a history of favoring those he perceives as winners, and his change in attitude regarding Ukraine seems driven by the country’s newfound ability to strike targets deep inside Russia—“an escalation that can help lead to an end,” Trump said. In Ankara, Zelensky, the inveterate entertainer, riffed on a question from Trump, who asked if Zelensky would consider travelling to Moscow for direct talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin. That would be dangerous, Zelensky said. “There are a lot of Ukrainian drones there.”
Those drones have marked a new phase in the war, defined by the centrality of long-range strikes. Russia has been doing this since the start of the war, terrorizing Ukrainian cities with aerial assaults that have killed thousands of civilians and crippled much of the country’s energy grid for months on end. In June, it launched multiple waves of drones and missiles targeting residential blocks in Kyiv, Dnipro, Kharkiv, and other Ukrainian cities. On July 1st, in Russia’s deadliest attack to date this year on Kyiv, more than thirty people were killed. Five days later, another attack on Kyiv and the surrounding region left at least twenty-eight people dead.
What’s new is Ukraine’s own emerging capabilities. In recent weeks, Ukraine has said that it has hit Russian military sites and energy infrastructure at so-called strategic depth—as much as a thousand miles or more from its border with Russia—including the oil terminal at the main port in St. Petersburg; a satellite-communications center near Moscow; a plant in Volgograd that manufactures specialized components for Russia’s missile program; and major oil refineries in Moscow and Omsk. In Crimea, where Ukrainian strikes on supply routes and infrastructure have become commonplace, gasoline is especially scarce, and power outages are routine. Last month, local authorities cancelled all children’s summer camps—a long-held tradition and point of pride across the Russian state—for the rest of the season.
In a sense, the war now has two fronts. The first remains in the Donbas, in eastern Ukraine, where Russian forces have continued their advance. They are currently poised to capture the city of Kostiantynivka, one of the few remaining Ukrainian strongholds in the Donbas. But, in 2026, Russia’s offensive pace has dramatically slowed. A recent report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies states that Russia has suffered more than thirty thousand casualties per month this year, while advancing, in certain areas, less than a hundred metres per day. “These are among the slowest rates of advance in any war over the last century,” the report notes.
The second front is in the skies over both countries. Repeatedly during the war, Western backers have declined to provide Ukraine with long-range cruise missiles. Initially, the Biden Administration worried that Ukrainian strikes on Russia would disrupt energy markets and lead Putin to escalate the conflict. Germany, in another example, declined to transfer any of its Taurus missiles to Kyiv, cautious of being seen as a direct participant in the war. During the past year, multiple European countries have funded the creation of alternatives, both Western-made and homegrown systems built in Ukraine. Germany set aside three hundred million euros to develop Ukraine’s deep-strike capabilities; the Netherlands pledged five hundred million euros for Ukraine’s drones and other weapons. Last month, the European Commission gave Ukraine nearly four billion euros to pursue advanced drone technology.
The U.S., in the second Trump Administration, has essentially discontinued direct military assistance to Ukraine. Yet it has continued to provide the intelligence that Ukraine needs to reach high-value targets inside Russia. “For strikes at a long distance, you have to calculate flight paths, altitude, how to bypass air defense along the way,” Mykola Bielieskov, a defense analyst in Kyiv, said. “And for this we still very much need the U.S.” The result is a kind of felicitous trinity of European money, American intelligence, and Ukrainian production.
Russia and Ukraine shoot down the overwhelming majority of drones that enter their airspace, which makes the success of any given drone attack a matter of numbers. The two most common Ukrainian deep-strike drones—the Liutyi, developed by the country’s state-owned arms producer, and the FP-1, which is produced by Fire Point, Ukraine’s largest private drone company—have been around for years. They have received recent upgrades in navigation and other technical systems, but the most decisive development has been in their increased scales of production. “In all of 2024, we produced just a little bit more than two thousand of them,” Iryna Terekh, Fire Point’s C.E.O., said of her company’s FP-1 drones. “Now that’s what we make in ten days.”
At the same time, more advanced weaponry has entered Ukraine’s arsenal. The FP-5, known as the Flamingo, a Ukrainian-made cruise missile, developed by Fire Point, has a range of nearly two thousand miles and carries a warhead of two and a half thousand pounds. (A Ukrainian long-range drone, like a Liutyi or FP-1, typically carries a warhead of closer to a hundred pounds.) The missile’s nickname came from the pink color of its test version. “We used to have a joke,” Terekh told me. “What’s the worst thing that could happen if a woman becomes C.E.O. of a defense company? Nothing—but the missiles will start to be colored pink.”
The Flamingo was developed cheaply and quickly, powered by discarded Soviet-era jet engines and lacking the sophisticated guidance systems found on Western cruise missiles, all of which makes it easier for Russian air defenses to intercept. Jack Watling, a fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a defense think tank, who has made dozens of research trips to Ukraine, told me that for a Flamingo to get “on target” it needs to be part of an extensive strike package, including dozens or even hundreds of drones. “If a single Flamingo was used by itself, it would have a very low success rate,” he said. But, as part of a suite of long-range drones and missiles, it comes to serve as the “vicious uppercut that delivers the killing blow.” Flamingos, for example, were used in the strike on the missile-components plant in Volgograd.
As a result, Russia is now facing the same set of dilemmas that it had long forced on Ukraine. “They have a lot to defend and not enough air defense to protect it all,” Bielieskov told me. The front line alone is roughly eight hundred miles long, to say nothing of the potential targets dotted across Russia’s enormous landmass. A defense source in Moscow told me, “Our great historic advantage, our strategic depth”—the vast expanses of space that slow down or trap adversaries, and across which Russia can spread energy infrastructure and weapons plants—“has now become a huge disadvantage.”
Tactics have shifted along with technology. Until recently, most of Ukraine’s drone fleet was directed toward Russian forces on the front lines. In January, Mykhailo Fedorov, who had recently been named Ukraine’s defense minister, outlined one of his chief strategic goals. In the previous month, Ukraine claimed it had managed to kill thirty-five thousand Russian soldiers, with many of those casualties inflicted by drones inside the so-called kill zone, an amorphous twenty-mile territory in which open maneuver for either side was all but impossible. Going forward, Fedorov said, in order to overwhelm Russia’s recruitment pipeline, the country’s armed forces would aim to take out fifty thousand per month. “They treat people as a resource,” Fedorov said. “And problems with that resource are already obvious.”
Ukraine also honed its strategy for striking targets beyond the kill zone. Ukrainian drone units, which had been spread among different parts of the armed forces, often experimenting with their own tools and targets, were brought into a more unified command structure. Among its first targets were Russian air-defense systems, which, since March of 2025, have made up more than half of all targets destroyed by Ukrainian drones. Soon, such drones were striking at will on Russian munitions depots, supply convoys, and transport routes. “The point is to deny mobility to Russian forces,” Michael Kofman, an analyst of the war at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said. “Attack drones are loitering up and down the main roads up to one hundred miles from the front, trying to hit every truck that drives down them.”
Ukraine next targeted Russia’s oil and energy infrastructure. According to an analysis by the Financial Times, so far in 2026, Ukraine has hit Russian refineries nearly two hundred times—an elevenfold increase from the same time frame in the previous year. The wider aim is to create a fuel crisis inside Russia, so that ordinary Russians feel the effects of the war. The F.T. found that fifty million Russians, more than a third of the population, have been affected by gasoline shortages.
Similarly, Ukraine now has “all the pieces of the puzzle,” as Kofman put it, to seriously impede logistics and resupply for both military forces and the civilian population in Crimea. Forcing a full Russian evacuation of the peninsula remains a distant prospect, but complicating the Kremlin’s hold over Crimea, he explained, could be a point of leverage in achieving Ukraine’s larger strategic objective: a ceasefire by the fall.
Last winter in Ukraine was the hardest yet in the war. Russian strikes on energy infrastructure left Kyiv and other major cities with hours of blackouts each day, and whole neighborhoods without heat during freezing temperatures. Ukraine still lacks reliable air defense at scale. Its anti-drone interceptors can shoot down Shahed-style drones, but they aren’t fast enough to hit ballistic missiles or jet-powered drones, which Russia is increasingly sending as part of its swarms. Kofman told me, “Despite all of Ukraine’s success with its strike campaign and Russia’s own floundering offensive in the Donbas, when it comes to missile defense, Ukraine is in pretty bad shape heading into winter.”
To defend itself from long-range Russian missiles, Ukraine needs Western air defenses, such as the Patriot—a surface-to-air missile-defense system—which are expensive, take time to produce, and are already in exceedingly short supply, especially since the start of the Iran war. In the July 6th attack on Kyiv, all twenty-nine ballistic missiles that Russia launched made it through Ukrainian air defenses and hit their targets—a sign that Ukraine may be effectively running out of Patriot interceptors.
The most concrete agreement that Trump and Zelensky reached in Ankara was that the U.S. will grant Ukraine the necessary licenses to manufacture Patriot interceptors domestically. “I think they can produce them pretty quickly,” Trump said, though that seems unlikely. In 2024, Germany agreed to produce a version of the Patriot interceptor that is less advanced than the current iteration; in that case, the first interceptors are expected to be ready in 2027. That is time Ukraine doesn’t have. “If Ukraine finds itself in late fall or winter without a deal to halt strikes, it’s looking at a very difficult situation in its cities,” Kofman said. (There’s also some uncertainty about the future of the strike campaign itself: this week, as part of a cabinet reshuffle, Zelensky was reportedly considering replacing Fedorov, the defense minister, who is widely seen as a spirited, reform-minded leader.)
In Russia, there are some signs of a shift in mood. In late June, German Gref, the head of Sberbank and a longtime Putin associate, said that he did not think “there is a person in the country” with any concern more urgent than “the swiftest possible end to the hostilities.” Days later, the acting governor of the Belgorod region, which borders Ukraine and has come under regular fire, said that residents most wanted “the special military operation to end.”
But the only opinion that really matters is that of Putin. Earlier this month, wearing military fatigues, he visited a command post, in an undisclosed location, where he received a detailed briefing about the state of the war. “I would like to note the positive momentum in the actions of our troops,” Putin said afterward, noting “the increasing pace of advance by units and formations of the Russian armed forces along the entire front line.” He also spoke of Ukraine’s “imaginary achievements” and “successes that we know don’t actually exist.” The capture of Kostiantynivka, he said, is “only the first, but a highly significant” step in Russia seizing the rest of the Donbas—an operation that, using Russia’s current pace as a guide, would take years.
The Moscow defense source compared the coming chapter to a “bloody repeat” of the so-called War of the Cities in the Iran-Iraq War in the nineteen-eighties, in which both sides, stalled on the front, launched indiscriminate air and missile strikes on each other. In a way, more than four years into the war, that’s hardly a new prospect for Ukraine. “They’re used to this,” the source said. “We’re the ones facing this for the first time.” ♦
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