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.)
