Ukraine's Strike Campaign - The Moscow Raid & Trends in the Long-Range War

One thing Russia has always clearly wanted to avoid is a Ukraine that has the capacity to strike targets in Russia.When Moscow set out its demands for Ukrainian demilitarisation as they put it back in 2022, one of their proposed restrictions was that Ukraine not be able to possess any kind of missiles or rockets with a range greater than 40km.For weapons produced entirely for export and not the Ukrainian military itself, they apparently might have been willing to concede 280km.As the war continued, Putin repeatedly set the provision of long -range missiles to Ukraine by its allies as a Russian redline.saying that Moscow would view the use of longer -range west missiles by Ukraine against Russian territory as direct NATO participation in the war, and something would quote, "...substantially change the very essence, the nature of the conflict."End quote.

And for the most part, despite repeated requests, Ukraine's allies stayed short of that line.Storm Shadow and ATACMs gave Ukraine a range measured in the hundreds of kilometers, but longer -legged options like the American Tomahawk were requested, but never approved.Denied the best that NATO arsenals had to offer though, through years of war, the Ukrainian defence sector appears to have basically gone fine, I'll do it myself.From relatively humble beginnings, launching converted Soviet target drones or converted civilian aircraft against targets in Russia, Ukraine's long -range strike campaign has grown and evolved.And more than four years in, we're getting videos like this.Because nothing quite says successful demilitarisation like your opponent being able to launch homegrown jet -powered missile -drone hybrids over your capital.

And so today, continuing on from last week, we're going to pivot from the front to the long -range strike campaign, looking at recent Ukrainian strikes at targets including Moscow, some reasons to potentially be optimistic about the trajectory of the long -range Ukrainian strike effort, and of course, a couple of risks and reasons for caution as well.We'll start with a quick look at the role of long -range strike in Ukrainian strategy and recent events around Moscow.Then we'll pivot to three of the main potential reasons for optimism on the Ukrainian side.Evidence of stretched Russian air defences, improved Ukrainian offensive capabilities, and the demonstrated effect we're seeing flow through in the Russian economy.Each of those will come with their own counterpoints and caveats, before we zoom out and give a big picture.conclusion.

Before we jump into it though, let me welcome back a sponsor.Now given the frenetic pace of global events, keeping up can be a challenge.And especially when you're talking about complex major events, any individual headline might not be enough to give you all the information you need.If you look at recent reporting on the US announcement, for example, that they were going to stop their operation to escort ships through the Strait of Hormuz, this headline highlights that that operation, Project Freedom, was only a day or two old at the time it was paused, while this one notes a connection to a plunge in global oil prices and connection to peace negotiations, with the extra detail of the threat of resumed bombing if an agreement isn't forthcoming being contained in this headline.All relevant details that you might have missed if you just skimmed a single headline.The tool being used here to flip between stories is Ground News.

This website and app allows you to quickly compare headlines across global news sources, click through if you want to read more detail, and can also help give you a little bit of extra useful context behind the headline.Think things like ownership information, which might help inform how you engage with a particular source.Ground news also gives you tremendous ability to customize your news feed.For example, zooming in on particular topic areas that are of interest to you, or going in the other direction and using a tool like the blind spot feed.That can help you surf for stories that are overwhelmingly being covered by the kind of news sources you might not ordinarily consume.Of course, that doesn't necessarily make them good sources, but in an era of online echo chambers, I think there's some value in seeing what other parts of the internet might be reading.

Ground News was actually this channel's first sponsor, and years on, I'm still using it.And so if you're interested in adding it to your toolkit, there'll be a link in the description.That'll give you access to a 40 % discount on Advantage Plan, which is the one I use, and which comes with all the features.And so, with my thanks to Ground News as always, let's get back to it.

Let's just quickly begin with some of the big picture why.Why would a Ukrainian command that's constantly fighting to hold back the Russians on the frontline divert scarce resources into a long -range strike campaign?As with the Russian long -range strike effort, the Ukrainian one has ramped up considerably over time and absorbed a lot of manpower, technical and financial focus.But based on the commentary we've seen from senior Ukrainian figures and what we can derive from their targeting decisions, it seems like Kiev has very much come to see the effort as complementary to the ground war.Essentially, if the fighting on the ground gives Ukraine a mechanism to try and hold onto its territory and frustrate Russian gains, the efforts of the long -range campaign usually seem to be directed towards one of two target categories.

Those where the goal is to make the fighting easier, and others intend to increase the cost of the war for the Russian economy.Just a couple of days ago at time of recording, for example, we appear to have seen another drone hit on a refinery in the Samara region, hundreds of kilometres from Ukraine, and that's far from the only one of its kind that we've seen in recent months.

Now, hitting targets like this likely isn't going to impact the fuel supply of Russian forces in Ukraine, for example, but hitting a facility capable of processing 8 .5 million tonnes of oil annually is going to have economic impacts.Then you have more distinctly military targets, think far rear area headquarters, or in this case, the 100th arsenal of the main missile and artillery directorate.These days it's much rarer to see some of the apocalyptic detonations we saw earlier in the war, where a couple of these storage bases seem to essentially fireball when so much is lightly tickled, but as you can see with cases like this attack from January, they still happen.Then, I'd suggest in between the two, you have an entire subset of defence industrial targets, not so much the places that store military equipment as help create it.A recent example that comes to mind here is the case on the right there, a strike back in March where the Ukrainians appeared to have used Franco -British Storm Shadow missiles in order to attack a plant in Bryansk region that was producing components for Russian missiles.That strike was notable not just because of the effect, as you can see it doesn't appear to have responded particularly well to a multi -hundred kilogram warhead, but also because of what it reveals about Ukrainian priorities.

Storm Shadow or Scout missiles are some of the most valuable, supply -constrained munitions in Ukrainian inventory.

If you think of PGMs generally having a trade -off between various factors, lethality, performance, sovereignty and cost.For Ukraine, something like Storm Shadow with a multi -hundred kilogram warhead, effective guns,system, significant range and some stealthy features that make it more likely to reach its target is going to fit in that exquisite top right -hand corner.Whereas a low -cost domestically manufactured one -way attack drone with a much smaller warhead is going to fit on the bottom left.This trade -off structure or something like it is far from unique to the Ukrainians and there's a reason Russian designers, for example, have continued to incorporate imported components into systems like Iskander despite the vulnerabilities to the supply chain that creates.and one suspects the underlying driver there probably isn't brand loyalty.

But in Ukraine's case, because the tradeoff is so extreme and acute...How that limited supply of Western missiles is used can serve as a valuable indicator.

They're never going to have enough of them, the French and British can't manufacture enough of them, and so these days we only tend to see the Ukrainians roll them out to hit something they regard as particularly valuable.Bryansk is easily in range of standard Ukrainian one -way attack drones, so it would have been possible to attempt an attack like this one using only those.By choosing to commit the missiles, the Ukrainians are signalling how much they care about this target.The reason I bring this up is because most Ukrainian long -range attacks tend to pretty neatly fit into one of those three columns.Counter -air strike on Russian airfields, for example, and we saw a couple more of those recently, neatly fit into the making the fight easier column.The fewer aircraft the Russians have, or the further away they need to base them, and the more they need to shuffle them between airstrips in order to avoid Ukrainian drone strikes, all else being equal, the harder it might be for them to generate sorties against the Ukrainians, dropping glide bombs or launching cruise missiles.

The attack on Russia's only fibre optic cable manufacturing facility that's knocked that offline for almost a year at this point fits into the middle column given just how important that cable is in creating drones for the Russian military and also indirectly economic effects because they now have to buy in that wire from somewhere else instead.At first glance though, Moscow itself, just as a general area, doesn't neatly classify as one of the standard Ukrainian target types.It's certainly home to some valuable military and economic targets, but there are plenty of those spread around in places that are more accessible to Ukrainian drones,or far less heavily defended.That might be part of the reason the Ukrainians have only launched a relatively small number of strikes on it in the past.But from a strategic perspective, there are at least two aspects that make Russia's heavily defended capital different.

It's heavily defended, and it's Russia's capital.That gives it immense public and political significance.

Many people around the world, including a lot of Russians, might not pay a huge amount of attention to a headline about Ukraine's X -hundredth drone attack on Crimea.But from a political and information warfare perspective, Moscow's in a different category.And it might be much harder for Russia to maintain the impression of military superiority and inevitable victory if people in the heavily defended capital are asking why the sky is buzzing again.

And Ukraine's most recent decision to go after it at scale appears to have been at least partially shaped as a response.Last week, we mentioned that there was a temporary ceasefire that protected Moscow's Victory Day parade.During that time, Russia and Ukraine mostly didn't launch long -range strikes against each other.What they appear to have done instead is just stockpiled the missiles and drones they would have fired during that time.And so on the 13th of May, just after the ceasefire expired, the Russians began a record -breaking missile and drone attack.According to Ukrainian figures, the salvos totaled about 1 ,600 missiles and drones over the course of 30 hours.

The drones appear to have come first, 138 on the night of May 13, 753 between 8am and 6pm on the 13th, and then after the sun went down, another 731 drones and missiles between 6pm on the 13th and 8am on the 14th.A number of these attacks appear to have been directed either against Kiev or the surrounding areas, and so whether it was planned in advance, developed as a contingency, or developed rapidly as a response, the Ukrainians appear to have decided to include Moscow in their strikes for the coming days.According to the Russians, the Ukrainian salvo on the night of the 16th included almost 600 drones, noting the Russians don't disclose how many drones the Ukrainians launched, but instead only claim 556 shot down overnight, and 30 in the early morning.Of those, only a minority of themminority appeared to have actually gone to the Moscow region.The Russians claim those roughly 600 one -way attack UAS were spread across 14 Russian regions, as well as the Crimean Peninsula and the Black and Azov seas.

Ukraine's unmanned systems forces did give a figure for Moscow specifically, claiming the size of the attack at quote, more than 120 drones, end quote.Now, technically, 600 drones would be more than 120, but based on the limited information we have available so far, I'm going to assume we're closer to that 120 figure.

I think it's worth keeping that number in mind going forward because it puts this entire thing into perspective.According to Russian media, in the week through to May 17, the Russian MOD claims to have brought down 3 ,124 Ukrainian drones.The drones the Ukrainians sent towards Moscow represented less than 4 % of the effort.By the standards of this war, at least in 2026, 120 drones is a strategic pinprick.And from those roughly 120 drones, we've so far been able to visually confirm a handful of apparent hits.And I want to quickly zoom in on three main ones.

The Technopark, which you can see shrouded by smoke on the right there, is about 30 kilometers from Moscow.

This is a roughly 60 ,000 square meter complex housing Russian companies that are engaged in, among other things, the research and manufacture of microelectronics.Some of those feed directly into Russian military supply chains, although there are more than 150 companies on site.Given locals apparently reported hearing a loud bang followed by a fire starting on the site, I think the safest assumption until proven otherwise is that there was only a single hit at the location.That then started a fire, which you can see on the right there.

There was also an apparent hit on an oil loading station about 40 -45km from Moscow, with the video we've seen so far suggesting a single storage tank hit, and obviously burning.

Finally, there were apparent hits on Moscow oil refinery.Moscow's mayor, Sergey Sobyanin, indicated 12 people were injured as a result of the attack.And as far as the open source data can confirm, this was the first strike against the site since September 2024.Notably, despite this perhaps being Russia's most heavily defended oil refinery given its proximity to Moscow, as you can see, the refinery still appears to have gotten the whole passive anti -drone defensive treatment.Anti -drone netting covered the site, and it would have been protected by a whole array of air defence systems.Speaking of air defences, if we chart those hits against known Russian air defence positions around Moscow, I think it helps put these penetrations into perspective.

Many of Moscow's shorter -ranged air defences, so the Pantsirs and the Tours, are arranged in two concentric defence rings.You can see known or suspected positions marked in yellow on the right there, with those red pins indicating those three targets we just went through.As you can see, one hit was scored basically at the edge of the outer ring, one in between the outer and inner defensive ring, while the final hit against the Moscow oil refinery actually involved the drone sneaking through both defensive rings and getting closer than any of the other strikes to the city centre itself.All of these hits were a long way from the likes of the Kremlin, although it's worth noting that many drones were sighted over Moscow and a number of locations not marked here were impacted by falling debris.The reason any drones getting through might be a newsworthy event isn't just because this is the Russian capital, but because the map kind of undersells just how intense Moscow's air defence picture is.Sure, you might see the occasional machine gun equipped ute rolling around after one of these attacks, making it look more Mogadishu than Moscow, but I suspect part of that might be theatre, visual security so to speak.

Something that subtly signals to the public that the authorities are aware of the drone risk and are doing something to protect them against it.

In reality, Moscow's best defense against Ukrainian drones probably isn't going to be a bloke rattling away with an MG.

And given those rounds have to eventually land somewhere, I can't imagine the Moscow authorities particularly keen on these guys burning through belt after belt.The main defense then is a huge array of actual air defense systems.Especially beginning in 2025, as the Ukrainian drone threat started to pick up, Moscow became a giant magnet for Russian air defense assets.Just in 2025, for example, based on satellite images,the Russians built no fewer than 43 new air defence towers.We're talking about high -tech constructions like this one, intended to take a short -range air defence system like Pantsir and give it access to clear sightlines.

These were a very visually identifiable part of what made up the second ring of Moscow's air defences that was steadily built up over the course of 2025.In order to go from one ring to two, though, and to fortify it against lower -end drone threats that might not be suitable for an S300 or S400 engagement, the Russians have had to bring in a lot of systems.One open -source analysis identified around 130 air defence positions in or around Moscow, with the capital reportedly ringed by about 100 Pantsir short -range air defence systems, a number of TORs, and, according to one report, about two dozen batteries of longer -ranged S300s or S400s.Just so you know, those numbers aren't being pulled out of thin air.It was only back in April that one analyst was able to verify about 89 panciers in or around the capital.

This means, on paper, Moscow has better air defences than most entire countries.

The Russian system has decided, whether it be for self -preservation, prestige, or whatever other reason, that Moscow has to be protected almost at all costs.If you take the public figure that Russia is producing about 30 pancier systems a year, for example, you are talking about the better part of three years worth of production just to fill the Moscow defence rings.And if those systems, those crews and those munitions are defending Moscow, they obviously can't be defending something else.Which leads to the possibility, and it is just a possibility, that part of the Ukrainian calculus for going after a target like Moscow is precisely because it's the kind of target Russia feels an obligation to defend.

Meaning all the Ukrainians might need to do is poke it occasionally, confirm the perceived threat, and pressure the Russians to keep concentrating air defences there.

Ukraine arguably also has its own share of must -defend targets.A lot of Ukrainian air defence systems and munitions, for example, are allocated to protecting Kiev or critical rear -area infrastructure.even if military logic by itself might suggest they could be more useful somewhere else or near the front.Part of the Russian logic then for going after targets like this might be to force the Ukrainians to keep those defences there, rather than using them to cover other locations.And then there's perhaps the greatest single example I can think of of an air defence black hole on either side, which is this location right here, ringed by something like 27 visually confirmed panseer towers in two concentric defensive rings, with some of those towers already visually equipped with their panseer systems.So what Russian target you might ask is so valuable that it might be worth ringing with about a year's worth of Pantsir production?

Is it a valuable missile or drone factory?A heavily populated city?A major nuclear arsenal?Or perhaps a critical target in the Russian energy sector which has been suffering extensively from Ukrainian drone attacks?

Of course not, that would make a degree of military sense.And some of those targets are forced to make do with something much closer to the private conscriptivich with the shotgun end of the spectrum.Instead, as some of you probably guessed, this is Putin's Lake Valdai residence.And after several air defence upgrades over the course of the war which have served as a bit of a vacuum for available Russian air defence assets, this residence now comes equipped with all of the traditional holiday home features.Like a panseer on a flak tower near the local petrol station.Perhaps one of the more serene postings in the Russian air defence force with this air defence tower positioned right in the middle of Lake Valdai, just down the road from the 17th century monastery there.

And of course an entire battery of S -400 launchers.because what VIP protection detail would be complete without enough strategic SAMs to shoot down half a fighter wing?

Now, one might suggest that if you were the leader of a country at war, air defence systems were at a premium, and your economy hinged on the ability of you to protect things like refineries and oil export terminals from Ukrainian drone strikes, then the correct response to a potential drone threat against the Russian equivalent of Mar -a -Lago wouldn't be to ring it with a small military's worth of air defence systems, it would be to stop going to bloody Russian Mar -a -Lago.

I mean, the bloke has perhaps the most heavily air -defended capital city in the world, and a nuclear -resistant bunker complex built into Mount Yamantau.It's not like he's lacking for options here if he's willing to give up the lakeside scenery.

But I guess every country has its own strategic calculus, its own definition of a must -defend target, and apparently in Russia that extends to things like the leader's country compound, and not so much more minor considerations like energy targets or Russian troops and airbases.The core point is that if you just compare the value of the target struck versus the number of Ukrainian drones launched, the attack on Moscow was thoroughly underwhelming.It quite possibly cost more to launch than it did direct damage.And while there might have been a potential political payoff, those same drones directed elsewhere might have hit more targets and done more damage.But one perspective is that poking Moscow occasionally, even if relatively limited damage is done, might still be worth the effort.Because Russia clearly doesn't regard any strikes on Moscow as acceptable.

And so the natural response to a drone missile threat or the occasional drone attack is to pile in even more air defense systems.We saw that in 2025 with the second ring expansion.and I wouldn't be surprised if we see even more resources allocated now.

As much as the air defence systems themselves, the Ukrainians might also be interested in how many missiles were used as part of the defence, and how many more will now be allocated.If there was a target that might push the Russians towards using an expansive interceptor, rather than taking the risk of just letting a drone potentially hit its target, Moscow might be a better bet than a more peripheral region.And while the drones might have cost a fair amount compared to the strategic tickle damage apparently done, The cost they're defending against the vast majority of drones that don't appear to have hit their targets might potentially shift the cost logic here back towards Ukraine's favour.

The problem from a Russian perspective is it takes a lot of air defence systems to protect something as large as a city like Moscow, and even more to protect to the point where you don't expect much of anything to get through.Given Russia's available air defence resources, that kind of allocation is possible.But the air defence blanket is only so large.and by poking the Russians into pulling more of it towards Moscow, the Ukrainians might be hoping that they uncover other areas.

And that's deeply relevant, because one very long -term Ukrainian effort that has apparently seen a bit of an uptick lately is the effort to slowly break down Russia's air defence system.Russia began the 2022 invasion with the largest stockpile of air defence systems and interceptors in the world.

But over the course of more than four years of war, the Ukrainians and Russian decision -making have slowly chipped away at that force.If we only look at visually confirmed losses, and even then only for some of Russia's primary types of SAM system, at time of recording, the number destroyed, damaged and captured has now hit 415.Comparatively, little of that pain has been borne by the very long -range systems, the S -300s and S -400s.but some of the more mobile systems have suffered the kind of losses that would completely deplete smaller armies.More than 150 books, more than 80 tours, about 100 of the older, shorter range Strelas and Osas, and a bit north of 40 of the modern Pantsirs.Keep in mind, this data doesn't capture things like the radars or command vehicles, just the launchers themselves, and it only captures cases where there's confirmed aftermath footage.

If it looks like the drone slams into a launcher, but then it can't film the result because it's detonated, then that obviously doesn't count.One reason I suspect that both Russian and Ukrainian SAM system losses in this war are undercounted in the visually confirmed databases.Now, losing more than 400 SAM systems would be notable enough by itself.For the older designs no longer in production, this represents straight attrition, and for the newer stuff that is being produced, like the Pantsir, it's presumably going to have to mean that some of that new production is diverted to replacing existing losses, rather than adding a third or fourth defensive ring around Val'dai.The place where the potential optimism comes in here though, is these losses haven't been linear over time.And if we look at some of the results the Ukrainian unmanned systems force are claiming, a very clear trend emerges.

What you're seeing here is claimed hits on Russian SAM systems by that part of the Ukrainian drone forces for three people.November and December 25, January, February 26, and March -April.What I've also done is divide that bar into two sections, with the red section representing hits resulting in destruction, while the orange presumably just damaged or less.What you can see is a massive increase both in the number of hits being claimed, and also the percentage of those hits that are believed to destroy the target.In late 2026, that meant fewer than 20 hits, with only one target claim destroyed.In March -April, closer to 55 hits, and a much higher destruction rate.

Now, this is just claims data, and you'd struggle to find any military in any conflict in history that didn't exaggerate the opponent's losses.But I think it's notable the USF hasn't been claiming massive increases in other categories in the same way.And while we're not seeing 30 visually confirmed hits released into the open source per month, we are seeing more of them than we're used to.

While the data can be a bit bumpy, as you can see on this chart here, the overall trend has been fairly clear.Russia's visually confirmed SAM losses were just above 10 in September -October 2025, north of 15 in November -December, dropped in January -February, and then hit about 26 in March -April.And over time, the three month moving average of the number of SAM systems and radars hit per month has significantly increased.Suggests that either something's changed about the way these have been recorded and uploaded, or the Ukrainians have gotten more effective at hunting Russian SAMs.

Now, some of the why of that, we'll have to wait for a discussion of Ukrainian mid -strike capabilities in the future.But the point here is, that if long -range strike activity is pulling more Russian air defence systems towards targets like Moscow, at the same time the Ukrainian drone forces in particular are trying to attract that Russian air defence force closer to the front, then the risk from the Russian perspective might be that your system is ground down over time, the blanket becomes smaller and smaller, until you can no longer cover enough of your strategic sites and terrain with it, and the risk of successful drone and missile strikes on a target that isn't or inadequately covered go up.We're also seeing potential evidence of a paired challenge, not just the shortage of launchers, but a shortageof missiles for them.Given the absolutely ludicrous scale of the post -Soviet stockpile, any shortage of that kind in a country like Russia or Ukraine is in some ways an achievement, because if you go back to the early days of 2022, courtesy of Soviet industry, both sides felt like they were rippling off interceptors like they were from a belt -fed machine gun.The Ukrainians just had so many interceptors for the S -300, and after their air defence system reorganised, that made life very difficult for the VTS.

In the early days, the Ukrainians were in the business of firing books at all -armed drones, while the russians openly bragged in their media about firing book interceptors not just at ukrainian jets or cruise missiles but also ukrainian drones ukrainian gimles rounds and even unguided mrl projectiles The Russians also apparently felt their magazines were deep enough to start expending S -300 interceptors in the ground attack role.

As we've covered in the past, that's something the system is absolutely capable of doing and something the Russians have trained in the past, as you can see on the right there, but perhaps not the first option you would go with if you were concerned about your SAM stockpile.That said, at least one Ukrainian firm appears to have potentially taken something out of this experience, but we'll get back to that later.

The problem, of course, is that no stockpile is infinite, and one imagines the Soviet war planners probably presumed that in an all -out conflict with the West, either you would get a decisive battlefield result, or the war economy would mobilize and be able to provide additional missiles by the time the stockpile ran down, or you'd have an all -out nuclear exchange, in which case the whole thing was kind of superfluous.Four years of protracted air defence activity in the drone age, without the old production capacity behind it, likely wasn't the original plan.And there's a couple of things we've seen suggesting the Russians at this point might be trying to get creative.For example, you might see stuff like this.This is a Russian Osa, NATO reporting name Gekko, and I've included a shot on the bottom left of what the system should normally look like, with racks of box -mounted missiles on either side.This one's only carrying two, and the one on the left has been identified as a 9M33M.

That's not just an older version of the missile, it's also not new.this launcher.The 33M is a naval variant intended to be fired from warships, so what this suggests is the Russians have gone to the Navy storehouses and grabbed some of their interceptors in order to try and restock the ground forces.Even better is this one here found in a video put out by a Russian war blogger, once again showing a GECO with the original 9M33 missile.No M need apply.Unlike the 33M, that variant was intended for the OSA, but it was also first produced in 1971.

Unless the ID is wrong or there's some shenanigans going on here, that is a very, very old missile.And whilst capabilities might be entirely sufficient for some of the lower complexity targets out there, I'm not sure being told to repeatedly pull the trigger on Brezhnev -era rocket motors is the kind of thing that would fill an air defence crew with confidence.Russia also appears to have gone down the Ukrainian route of creating so -called Franken -SAM systems, where you take whatever missile you can find and jerry -rig a launcher for it so you can make use of that part of your stockpile.The Ukrainians did it, for example, to fire old Sea Sparrow missiles from their books, and what you're seeing here is the Russians strapping a normally air -launched R -77 to a ground launcher and pushing into service in the SAM role.Absolutely the kind of concept that might work, but probably not the kind of thing you'd do if you had enough of the regular systems and missiles available.

We can also match observations like that with some anecdotal evidence.We've seen some Russian commentators complaining on social media, for example, that air defences in places like Crimea can sometimes see targets but don't have missiles to hit them, while in another case a Russian military correspondent, Maxim Kalashnikov, reportedly interviewed a number of former air defence troops who'd been reassigned to a Russian infantry unit.As to why they experienced that particularly unpleasant form of organisational reshuffle, Kalashnikov simply wrote the following, quote, Now, there are two things to say here.One, there is nothing new about troops complaining about ammunition, no matter how much they have.Secondly, it's not uncommon for you to seeunits to have to underload their launchers as well, because missiles everywhere are in short supply.

However, I still think those kind of complaints are notable, because there was a time where you wouldn't see them.And in the context of some of these other clues, I don't think they point to anything like Russia being out of interceptors, but certainly short on where they might like to be in order to fully equip all of their units.There's also a side question I have here that I don't think we have enough evidence to answer yet, but I think is worth flagging.When we look at the air defence systems that Russia has visibly fanned across the country to deal with the Ukrainian drone threat, we've generally seen things that fall into one of two categories.Relatively capable military systems, Pantsir as the self -propelled anti -aircraft gun, plus Tors, Buks, S -300 and S -400, or at the other end of the spectrum, Ukrainian -style mobile fire groups.Basically, as you saw earlier, Ivan in the back of a pickup truck with a machine gun and a dream.

What's missing from that equation is the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of older self -propelled anti -aircraft guns from the Soviet era that Russia is still believed to have in service or storage, the Shilkas and Tunguskas.Given Ukraine has made such extensive use of a Cold War -era German self -propelled anti -aircraft gun, the Flakpanzer Gepard, and they've also, through Brave One, modernised the number of their Shilkas to push them into the counter -drone role, I think it's interesting that we haven't seen Russia do more of the same.The Pantsir inventory is clearly very heavily stretched between protecting places like Moscow and Valdai, as well as targets at the front.And even if they're not great, you have to imagine that even a Cold War era system with some fire control and sensor upgrades is probably going to have a much better chance of swatting Ukrainian drones out of the sky than someone rocking away with a hand -fired belt fed from the back of a truck.And so far, it hasn't happened.That's despite the Ukrainians proving, you can roll out just about anything up to and including WWII era Bofors 40mm guns, and as long as you employ them correctly with reasonably competent crews, push them into service as serviceable drone hunters.

In terms of performance characteristics, a lot of your propeller -powered one -way attack drones are actually less impressive than a lot of WWII aircraft, and so I think it's interestingthat in the face of similar threats, we've seen much more of this kind of usage from the Ukrainians than the Russians.I also think it's important to note there's a difference between the kind of shortages experienced by the Ukrainians and the kind of shortages that might exist for the Russians.Often when we say the Ukrainians are running out of air defence interceptors, we mean they're running the stocks of systems like Patriot down close to zero.When we talk about shortages for the Russians, it's more a question of priority.not whether Russia is going to run entirely out of air defence missiles for Buk or Tor or Pantsir, but instead running short of those they're able to allocate freely to the front, rather than allocating for strategic reserve in case of an escalation with NATO for example, or dedicating to tasks the Russian government clearly considers to have priority, you know, like Putin's vacation schedule.

But from a Ukrainian perspective, it's probably not necessary to run the Russians out of missiles to the point where they can't even equip the launchers around Valdai in order to achieve strategic effect.That's because as the defensive network becomes more strained or missiles less available, it's possible you start to see gaps emerge, the system become easier to saturate, and as a result the probability of a missile or drone you launch actually hitting its target potentially goes up.What that means is the potential payoff here might not be linear.Destroy or suppress 20 % of an air defense system and you might not notice a huge impact on interception rates.But grind down another 20 % or 20 % again and suddenly your hit rates might jump considerably.That said, I think there's a couple of counterpoints to the more optimistic characterization.

that Ukraine is increasingly able to get its missiles and drones through the Russian air defence system, and might potentially increase its hit rates as the system continues to break down.It assumes that the Russians won't be able to adapt defensively the way the Ukrainians themselves have.If you look at the trajectory of Russian drone strikes into Ukraine a year ago for example, you might conclude that Kiev was facing the same risk.And frankly, they were.It was only because other factors intervened, most specifically the invention and large scale deployment of the interceptor drone, that we arguably didn't see Ukraine hit a defensivebreakpoint in that way.

Another element is that while Russia's air defence system might clearly be under pressure, and missile supply uncertain, Ukraine's position is arguably even more precarious.In particular, the supply cadence for American Patriot missiles was already uncertain going into this year, and after the events in the Middle East that saw thousands of things rattled off, even more so.The point is, while Russia's air defence is looking a bit shaky at the moment, so too is Ukraine's.And going forward, there are a lot of questions around how both are going to be able to resupply, regenerate and adapt.If you leave aside the defensive question for a moment though, you can get to potential reason for Ukrainian optimism number two.While Ukraine's air defence and particularly its ballistic missile defence picture is constantly under strain, when it comes to the trajectory of its offensive capabilities, it's been pretty much all one -way travel.

Even more so than other types of warfare, this kind of long range strike effort is in great part a numbers game.The more munitions you launch, the more targets you can go after, the more you stretch, deplete and strain the opponent's air defence system, the more interceptors they need, and all else being equal, the more damage you're likely to do.To a great extent then, the small drone attacks of 2022 or 2023 by both sides were mostly symbolic in effect.But since then, we've essentially seen a massive production race between the two sides to see who can scale up the number and capability of their long -range drones faster.And in that respect, the numbers for 2026 look interesting.As a bit of a caveat up front, we don't have a perfect data set for how many long -range drones both sides are launching.

But using the data points we do have available, analysts have tried to piece together the picture.The Russians, for example, don't routinely reveal how many Shahed or Gerbera -style drones they launch against Ukraine.But if we take Ukrainian figures on how many drones they claim the Russians launch, and cross -reference those with production estimates, the figures generally play fairly nice with each other.On the flip side, the Russian MoD doesn't release data on how many drones the Ukrainians launch against Russian targets, only how many the MoD claims they down.But while I would never advocate taking full responsibilityby a military during wartime with anything less than a grain of salt, in this case, once again, Ukrainian and Russian numbers are often not that far apart.

In October 2025, for example, Zelensky said the Ukrainians were launching between 100 and 150 one -way attack UAVs into Russia every day.During that same month, the Russian MOD claimed to be downing an average of 122 per day.All that to say, while the following numbers might not be perfect, I think the evidence suggests there is something to them.What this chart compares is the number of Ukrainian drones the Russians claim to have downed over Russia, with the number of Russian drones the Ukrainians claim were launched against them.As you can see, both sides were launching at a relatively small scale in 2024.Then in 2025, Russia scaled up significantly and began launching considerably more than the Ukrainians were.

But in the early months of 2026, Ukrainian launchers jumped again.And in March, for the first time since 2024, By this data, there were more Ukrainian one -way attack UAS launched against Russia than there were Russian systems launched against Ukraine.

It's also not just the numbers that have changed, it's what's being launched as well.If you go back to the earlier stage of the long -range strike effort, where it was still very much a Shedcraft -style campaign, just about any system you can point to that the Ukrainians were using had one or more issues.Limited range, poor performance that made it vulnerable to air defence systems, more warheads, inaccurate guidance systems, limited availability, or in the case of more capable systems, often provided from other countries like Storm Shadow or Scalp, also the issue of political control.Because often, in order to get their hands on those systems, Ukraine needed to concede at least some control over what targets they were used against.For an extended period after American ATACMS TBMs arrived in Ukraine, for example, they couldn't be fired into Russia proper.What these recent Ukrainian strikes demonstrated pretty clearly is the extent to which the Ukrainian arsenal has evolved and diversified over time.

You still saw some older, more established systems, like the Luty drone you can see on the top right there, but that one on the bottom right that we showed in the video over Moscow at the start of the episode?That's the Ukrainian Bars missile drone.And they belong to a family of new systems that kind of defy easy classification.They use a jet engine and a configuration similar to a full -size cruise missile, but they're closer in terms of cost profile and size to a one -way attack drone.Some of the original reporting estimated the range of the system at between 700 and 800 kilometers.

Very long, by the standards of just about any system Ukraine had access to when the war began.But far short of some of the longest distances, we're now seeing Ukraine's one -way attack drones achieve.

If in 2022, Russia might have been primarily concerned about Ukraine's arsenal of old Soviet Tochka -U missiles, maximum reach around 120km, Ukraine now regularly strikes beyond the 1 ,200km mark.

Some of the energy target strikes we saw in April occurred in the roughly 1 ,400 -1 ,500km range, while an airbase near Chelyabinsk stretched that even further to about 1 ,700km or more than 1 ,000 miles.

Compounding that general increase in reach is the weapons Ukraine is able to use to get there.Ukraine's actually had some ability to strike at these distances for quite a while now, but a lot of the systems used had to make significant concessions in order to strike at those distances.A lot of the one -way attack drones used, for example, were relatively slow and vulnerable and had to sacrifice warhead for fuel.Meanwhile, smaller drones, like the ones used in Operation Spider's Web, have to be smuggled into the country first and then launched locally.What we've now started to see the Ukrainians be able to do, at least to a limited extent, is mirror the Russian approach of mixing slower, more vulnerable one -way attack drones with missiles.When Ukraine's Flamingo ground -launched cruise missile was first announced, the commonly given maximum range was 3 ,000 km.

But almost all the early suspected cases of that missile being used were at significantly shorter distances.And what wasn't clear was whether that was because the missile couldn't actually make the advertised distance, or whether the Ukrainians were deliberately choosing, be it for reasons like accuracy or observability, to go after those closer range targets as the missile evolved.Recently though, the limited number of Flamingos have reportedly been flying a bit further,One recent claimed strike reached about 1500km from the Ukrainian border into Russia, which if you assume the missile flew at least a somewhat evasive trajectory in order to avoid known surface -to -air missile concentrations, for example, would actually require a range beyond that.That's starting to get Flamingo closer to the territory of something like Tomahawk when it comes to reach.And while I don't think it's clear what kind of warhead the missile can carry or how accurate it might be at those distances, there's going to be a lot of targets out there that might be able to essentially ignore a drone warhead, but would really notice the impact of a full -size cruise missile.

For Russia, even if their scale and damage is limited for now, this is not likely to be a welcome development.Historically, one of the tools the Russians and the Soviet Union before them relied on to protect some of their industrial heartland is distance.Famously, in the face of the Axis invasion during World War II, the Soviets basically packed up a lot of the industry in Western Russia and moved it almost brick by brick behind the Ural Mountains.That probably wouldn't be a practical move in 2026.And at these kind of ranges, it might not even be enough anyway.Remember that airbase that was recently struck, for example?

That's near Chelyabinsk, and Chelyabinsk is, you guessed it, beyond the Ural Mountains.

And the element here that might give Moscow reason to be nervous isn't just the improvements we've already seen the Ukrainians make, it's the long -term trend line, the improvements they're clearly trying to make.Glidebombs, for example, have made a major contribution in this war, especially on the Russian side, and while they're not part of the long -range strike effort themselves, the more of them Ukraine has, the more pressure is likely to be placed on frontline Russian air defence systems, which potentially has a mutually reinforcing relationship with the long -range effort.To date, Ukraine's glide bombs have overwhelmingly been NATO -types.Think JDAM -ER from the United States, or the rocket -boosted Hammer from France.A potential issue here, though, has been availability.The French Hammer, for example, has proven itself very useful in combat, but the target 2025 delivery rate was only about 50 bombs per month.

Even if that lifts to roughly 100 a month in 2026, it doesn't compare favourably to the Russians'who are dropping hundreds of the things per day.What we've seen the Ukrainians do over the last 17 months then is essentially design their own...JDAMSKI.It's a winged glide bomb in the style of the KAB or the JDAM ER, reportedly with a 250kg warhead, with a target reported cost of about 1 third of JDAM ER.In the short run, it's likely the Ukrainians will be limited by production rate and still very much reliant on those Western systems.

Even once production scales up, it's unlikely the Ukrainians would come close to matching the scale of the Russian effort.And then in any case, the Ukrainian Air Force only has so many aircraft capable of using the things.But it's another challenge the Russians are going to have to be prepared to deal with that didn't exist a year ago.And it might give the Ukrainian Air Force a way to keep up the tempo, even if the JDAMs stop flowing.Then you have improvements to known existing long -range strike systems.Drones that get improved guidance or greater resistance to electronic warfare for example, improved warheads.

Or in the case of the much publicised Flamingo missile, potential improvements in accuracy and more demonstrated range.I still think compared to the amount of media coverage it got, the Flamingo is a bit of a mixed story.Its production was reportedly disrupted by Russian attacks, it's still gated by the availability of the engines, its demonstrated accuracy isn't quite what you'd expect from a NATO standard cruise missile, and at the end of the day, it's still a big ugly missile that's going to be vulnerable to a lot of air defence systems.But it's also proven that it's something the Ukrainians can build, that it can fly a long way, and that it's capable of making a very large bang when it does hit something.And the reason why that matters is because it increases the number of targets that are potentially vulnerable, and also shapes the defences required.Heavy anti -drone netting and mobile fire teams, for example, might be enough if you're primarily worried about the Ukrainian equivalent of something like a Shahed.

But you can put up as much militarised fishing wire as you like, it's not going to do particularly well stopping a 3 -tonne cruise missile.We're also expecting Ukraine to start fielding this year, a category of munitions that a lot of NATO militaries are paying close attention to.Small, low -cost cruise missiles are meant to fill a gap between full -sized, multi -million dollar ALCMs andone side and cheap but slow one -way attack drones on the other.You're generally looking at weapons that are going to deliver a much smaller warhead than something like a Storm Shadow or a Jasm, but with the intention they're able to do so for a fraction of the price.Meaning one, if you do find yourself having to kill something like a Toyota at standoff distances, you don't have to torch a giant pile of cash in order to do it.

And secondly, if you have an opponent, like the Russians, with a great love of air defence systems, this is a way to potentially get more magazine depth and generate larger salvos, and so shift the shot exchange problem further in favour of the attacker.The US Air Force started development of a low -cost cruise missile for Ukraine back in 2024 under the ERAM program.Also notably, as you can see on the right there, the weapon was apparently integrated with the F -16 for testing, which coincidentally is the only US -designed fighter currently in Ukrainian service.The scale here is where things get interesting.The US originally approved the Ukrainians to purchase a casual 3 ,550 ERAM missiles.Unconfirmed reports suggest Ukraine is likely to get a small trial batch, starting as early as October this year.

The two platforms we've heard targeted for integration are the F -16 and the MiG -29, and if it works as advertised and does start to appear in quantity, you can understand how this might complicate the Russian air defence picture.It's likely to be too fast and complex a target to be dealt with by a lot of traditional anti -drone countermeasures like ground -based machine guns or interceptor drones.But at the same time, if you try and counter it with full -sized interceptor missiles, the same way you might with something like Flamingo, it's easy to imagine magazine depth becoming an issue, especially for short periods at a local level.There's also cooperation taking place here with other countries.The Ukrainians have already been working with a European firm on the development of a small cruise missile, one version of which was reportedly tested in Ukraine earlier this year.with a claimed range of about 700km and a 250kg warhead.

The claimed intention is to develop a future version of that missile as well, extending the range out to 2000km without cutting down the amount of bang.The reason programs like this might matter isn't because we should expect them to deliver significant battlefield results anytime in the near future.It's because they help reduce the reliance of the Ukrainians on any single foreign supplier while also letting the Ukrainians draw on an industrial supply chain outside Ukraine itself.That matters because facilities linked to Ukraine's missile programs have often been magnets for Russian missiles.Then you have Ukraine's ballistic missile programs, and at this point, programs plural is the right term.The Ukrainians entered the war with the tactical ballistic missile program, the Thrym -2, but it's been subject to significant delays, both for traditional reasons like development difficulties, and less traditional ones like Russia continually trying to blow up parts of the program.

As best we can tell, the Ukrainians are still trying to push ahead with Krim 2, as well as other missile weapons available to them, like Long Neptune.We've also seen some new potential entrants announced, or in some cases even tested.Firepoint, for example, the same firm that manufactures Flamingo, released the footage on the right there.That is a test of a Ukrainian FP7.And if you're wondering how it's plausible that a Ukrainian firm, in the middle of a war, while under Russian attack, could potentially design and build an entirely new ballistic missile on that time, the answer appears to be very simple.They didn't.

At least not really, as the images I put on the right there hopefully demonstrate, there's more than a few cosmetic similarities between the FP -7 and the kind of interceptors you might see fired from an S -300 or S -400.The Ukrainians operate a significant number of S -300s, they would have access to the technical documentation from the Soviet days, but they also wouldn't be in a very good position to buy reloads from the Russians.And so what some reports suggest has happened here is that Firepoint has essentially cloned the form of an existing missile, updating it to take advantage of modern materials and production techniques and electronics, basically worked to integrate the type of internal components that Ukraine might be capable of producing now, and then simplified it wherever possible to make the S -300 or S -400 equivalent of a Sten gun.As the lineage might suggest, we've been told that eventually the intention is fora version of FP7 to be the basis for a new Ukrainian SAM.likely connected with NATO standard radar systems and Ukraine's modern battle management systems.

As the Russians clearly demonstrated by flinging S -300s at Kharkiv though, a sufficiently chunky high -performance SAM with a big enough warhead is absolutely the kind of thing you can push into service as a poor man's ballistic missile.So the Ukrainians seem to think that even before they get this thing working as a SAM, they can potentially dial up the production line and get some practical experience pushing it into service as a TBM.As one of Firepoint's co -owners reportedly put it, quote, until we have the ability to integrate with European radars, we're using it as a cheap short -range ballistic missile, end quote.I'd add to that that if you knew you were going to use the missile in the ballistic role from the start, rather than just pushing it to service after it was built, there's a bunch you could potentially omit from the relevant production examples.You might potentially be able to skimp a bit, for example, on expensive components like sensors and guidance systems.This may actually be a rare case then where part of the Russian military is actually cheering for a Ukrainian development program to succeed.

Because from an air defence perspective, if the Ukrainians don't successfully make the jump from TBM to surface -to -air missile, it's possible the Ukrainians will just keep spending these things as TBMs, leaving the Russians with a target reportedly capable of carrying a 150kg warhead out to 200km with a circular aeroprombal claimed of 14m.The FP9 by contrast is actually meant to be a ballistic missile by design, rather than air defence interceptor pushed into the role.And here the target performance characteristics are much more ambitious.A range of 855km, a payload of 800kg, and a target circular error probable of 20m.Now obviously characteristics like that aren't impossible.The Iranians for example have multiple systems that fly further, carry heavier warheads, and which demonstrated significant accuracy.

The real question isn't whether the Ukrainians can hit those numbers, it's whether they can hit them soon and under wartime conditions.Given that, at this stage, I think it's safer to treat FP9 as more of a marketing pitch or something.of intention than an imminently functional weapon.But from a Russian perspective, even that statement of intent might be considered problematic, because with that kind of range, a missile launched a little bit back from the Ukrainian border would successfully be able to reach Moscow.And while punces on flak towers might do reasonably well against swarms of incoming drones, as Ukrainian air defences that have had to deal with everything from Russian Iskanders to S -300s would be well aware, A ballistic target is a very different proposition.

A final factor to mention in some of these programs is we've seen cooperation in some cases between the Ukrainians and foreign partners, both in design and production, and the Ukrainians expressing interest in putting at least part of the supply chains in Europe.If you're making a list of important facilities that are hard to conceal and don't respond well to kinetic renovation attempts, Rocket Fuel Factory is the kind of thing that might have a strong argument for a podium place.That might help explain cases like the one on the right there, where it's reported the Ukrainians will start producing rocket fuel at a newly built facility in Denmark.Making that happen notably required the Danish government to temporarily suspend something like 20 laws and regulations to expedite the construction, proving that even in very highly regulated and usually slow -moving contexts, enough political will and a near -wartime emergency can still sometimes be enough to get things moving.In terms of these potential Ukrainian long -range capabilities, there's a lot we still don't know.What will work as advertised and what won't?

When will things be delivered?What will the production schedules look like?The Russians, as the last several years have shown, also get a vote.And so to an extent, what the Ukrainians are able to field and when, might owe a lot to what the Russians decide to throw against these programs in the meantime.That said, there are a couple of things that we do know.For example, contrary to the headline of the article on the right there, there's a limit to what the Ukrainians can practically achieve.

Something like the Flamingo is obviously not, as the article describes it, a quote, fully fledged intercontinental ballistic missile, end quote, and I wouldn't expect to see the Ukrainians fielding conventional MRBMs the way the Iranians do in the near future.But given their potential,they don't necessarily need to.The Russians have made it abundantly clear that they regard any Ukrainian weapons with a range beyond a few dozen kilometres as a potential strategic pain point.And while we may not be sure about how quickly Ukrainian capabilities in this area will improve, what the trends pretty clearly indicate is that they are improving.Once a system's designed, it's hard for any amount of air and missile strikes to undesign it.

Hits on Ukrainian production facilities might slow the rollout, but in the end, the iteration is likely to continue, with the likely trend here being towards a Ukrainian long -range force that fields more and better systems as time goes on.If that's the case for optimism, then where's the counterpoint?Here, I think there's two that deserve particular mention.One, Russia is always active on the other end of this process.Ukraine's offensive capabilities might improve, but so too do Russia's defences.They've set up mobile fireteams, new air defence positions, started to roll out interceptor drones, and also focused a lot on passive defences, everything from netting to protect critical infrastructure, to decoys to protect SAM systems.

In that respect, you could argue that Ukrainian offensive improvements aren't just a nice -to -have that can deliver better effect, some of them are just a necessary step to keep up with the defence, and if the Ukrainians stopped adapting, Eventually the Russian defence might improve to the point where the entire exercise was of much less value.The Russians also roll out new offensive options.What you're seeing on the right there is reportedly a new lower cost cruise missile, the S -71K.With a relatively simple design and a 250kg bomb as a warhead, S -71K might be to the VKS what ERAM is meant to be for the Ukrainians.Something with much more capability than a glide bomb, but less cost and complexity than a Kh -101 that needs to be slung by a strategic bomber.

And that's not even the only new Russian ALCM we've seen come into play.There was also the Izdeliye, or Product 30, which we saw some wreckage recovered of earlier this year.And according to Ukrainian sources, looks intended to be a simplified, easy to produce, but still hard -hitting full -sized ALCM.Think 800 plus kilograms of weight.with the likely carrying platform still being a Russian strategic bomber but without some of the frills you might associate with something like Russia's Kh -101s.

Essentially the case for optimism here is the Ukrainians have been adapting, scaling up and improving quickly.The cautionary point is that this is very much a race and the Russians are in it.

One way to potentially try and demonstrate the effect of all of this though, is rather than just looking at the effects of a couple of drones impacting around Moscow, instead quickly check in on the Russian energy sector.This is only one of the economic strategic target types we've seen the Ukrainians go after, there's also been manufacturing plants, chemical facilities, logistics targets of various kinds, you get the idea.But the energy sector is useful to us because there are a lot of relevant figures, from tax revenues to export figures, that can make it comparatively easier to understand how much effect the Ukrainian strikes might be having.For the month of March, the cadence of Ukrainian attacks against the Russian oil sector was about one every three days.Some targets were only hit once that month, but others, like Osluga and Primorsk, received repeat visits on the 25th, 27th, 29th, 31st and 1st of April, respectively.It was a particularly rough month all up for Russia's export capacity on the Baltic Sea.

With one estimate, published by Reuters in March, being that about 40 % of all of Russia's seaborne oil export capacity was at one point offline.That was led by a collapse in volumes on the Baltic, and a slowdown at Novorossiysk on the Black Sea.As we noted at the time though, whether attacks were repeated was going to be key.Because almost as soon as facilities like this were damaged, Russia would take steps to try and repair them or bring on other capacity to compensate.By mid -April, it was being reported that Russian export volumes were still down after the Ukrainian attacks in March, but shipments from the damaged port had at least partially resumed, and the expectation in some circles was that Russia would be able to ramp up its oil flows.That obviously assumed that Russian regenerative efforts wouldn't be outstripped by new Ukrainian strikes.

And this month, while the attack on Moscow might have captured a lot of the attention, the Ukrainians appear to have continued with their twist on the just -stopped war.The Yaroslav oil refinery, for example, was reportedly hit in early May, with the subtle fireball on the right there giving some clues as to the amount of damage that may have been done, while another more recent strike, several days after the Moscow raid, targeted Russia's fourth largest oil refinery, this one out in the Nizhny Novgorod region, and reportedly forced it to partially suspend operations.Given that one facility represents something like 5 % of Russia's total oil refining capacity, potentially the kind of thing that might have benefited from more air defences, if they weren't already dedicated to protecting other more politically sensitive, perhaps not quite as economically valuable objectives.As of earlier this week at time of recording, it's been reported that quote, virtually all major oil refineries in central Russia have been forced to halt or scale back fuel output, following Ukrainian drone attacks in recent days, according to official data and sources, end quote.The article on the right there also noted that Russia has introduced a gasoline export ban starting from April and running through the end of July, and that combined, the plants affected by their strikes produced something like 30 % of Russia's gasoline and 25 % of its diesel.The combined effect of that gasoline export ban, with the strikes on the refining infrastructure which helped prompt the ban in the first place, was that in April, Russia's exports of refined products plunged to about 2 .15 million barrels a day.

According to the International Energy Agency, that was the lowest level on record.Total crude oil production also fell compared to the same period a year ago, but by a less extreme amount.Production in April was down by about 460 ,000 barrels a day to 8 .8 million.Exports of crude oil were more of a mixed bag, as attacks on the export infrastructure placed downward pressure, as high international prices and limits on domestic refining capacity were pushing in the other direction.But the total sum of the Ukrainian effort was probably that significant pressure was placed on Russian energy exports, but not enough to overcome another factor.The stuff Russia was managing to export was just that much more expensive, and a temporary US sanctions waiver opened the door for Russia to

oil already at sea to be sold into international markets.The net result is that unless we see a major change on either the offensive or defensive side of the equation, in the near term, we might expect to see more charts like this one, where you can see average Russian maritime oil exports on a daily basis represented by that light green line falling, but the total revenue for those exports rising anyway on the back of strong global oil prices.Basically, what the Ukrainian long -range strike campaign appears to be achieving at this point against the Russian energy sector is limiting the windfall they get from the results of the war in the Middle East.The damage inflicted doesn't appear to be enough to stop Russia cashing in to a significant extent on the crisis, but if it wasn't for the drones and missiles continuously finding their mark, the situation from a Ukrainian perspective would be much, much worse.I also think there's a few other closing observations we can make here.On one hand, Russia is clearly very effective at reconstituting its oil infrastructure quickly, and getting stuff back online after a Ukrainian attack.

At the same time, we're also clearly seeing there are limits.For example, this is a photo of some of the oil storage infrastructure at Feodosia in Crimea, where I think it's fair to say that after repeated Ukrainian strikes, this is no longer a case of the kind of damage that'll just buff out.What we need to be aware of then is that while the damage of a single strike or a small collection of them might be relatively rapidly repaired, eventually it's possible we'll get to a point where so much damage has been done that it's harder for the infrastructure to bounce back quickly.Another note is that Ukraine is very much trying to fight against the global economic tide here.If you'd said a year ago that the United Kingdom would issue a sanctions waiver enabling jet fuel refined products made using Russian crude to be imported into the country, you probably wouldn't have found much of an audience willing to back that bet.

But in an environment of very tight global supply and high prices, that's what we've seen.A significant part of how effective the Ukrainian effort turns out to be in the next couple of months, then, depends not just on the Russian defences or the Ukrainians themselves, but also what happens in the Middle East.From a Russian perspective, there's all the demandin the world between having your production and export capacity attacked at a time that oil prices are at $110 a barrel, and the same thing happening if you're trying to scrape by at $50 or $60.It's also the case that at this point, the Ukrainians clearly feel they have enough long -range drones to diversify their target set.Refineries and export terminals continue to be hit.

But March also saw a number of very long -range strikes, we're talking the 900 plus kilometre range bracket, against things like chemical plants or Russian Navy ships.The more the target set diversifies, the more things the Russians potentially have to cover with air defence, and so all else being equal, potentially the greater likelihood that one of the targets the Ukrainians would actually like to go after is going to find itself un - or inadequately protected.The primary point for optimism here is likely that Ukraine is proving it can deliver sustained strikes at long range, and that those attacks are doing consistent damage.With the obvious counterpoints, beyond just Russia building up its own missile and drone campaign, being that while the Ukrainians might be able to stretch the Russian defences and do significant damage, it's very hard for them to apply the level of economic pressure they might like to, as long as the Strait of Hormuz remains a part -time shooting gallery.The future of the Ukrainian campaign also arguably relies on them not falling into a potential targeting trap.The last couple of weeks have arguably seen a bit of a tit -for -tat cycle.

The Russians launched a large -scale attack against Kiev, the Ukrainians poked Moscow in response, and now it seems Russia has hit Kiev at scale again, with Ukrainian authorities even providing advance notice of the potential usage by the Russians of a conventionally armed Reshnik intermediate -range ballistic missile.But while poking Moscow occasionally for information warfare purposes or to keep Russian defences concentrated there might make perfect sense for the Ukrainians, almost all the economic and military damage we talk to is caused by going after other targets that are perhaps less covered as a result of the focus on Moscow.In that respect, launching against Moscow might always be tempting, but a battle of the city probably works on net in Russia's favour.It would take the pressure off many valuable and vulnerable Russian targets, while at the same time shifting the campaigntowards one better optimised for Russia's strengths and weaknesses.For the moment, Ukraine has been able to resist the temptation of going down that route, using just enough material against Moscow to keep the Russians focused, while actually spending the vast majority of the effort more productively elsewhere.

Whether those will remain the target priorities going forward, though, only time will tell.There's more we could say, but in the interest of time, where does that leave us at a big picture level?On the Ukrainian side, the cause for optimism is their offensive potential has clearly gone from strength to strength.While the ground forces on both sides have suffered from a horrific grind and air defence systems are under immense pressure, the trend line for the long -range strike campaign has really only gone in one direction, up and further into Russia.What that notably doesn't guarantee for the Ukrainians is their Shedcraft strategic bombing effort will achieve decisive strategic results.Russia is a large country with a lot of economic resources, significant regenerative potential, and a very high demonstrative tolerance for economic and military pain.

But the bad news from Moscow's perspective is that if this conflict continues, they're probably going to need that pain tolerance.Because unless something significant changes to reverse the trend, every month that passes is likely to mean more Ukrainian developments, more pressure on the air defence system, and more damage done.It also goes to the heart of one of Russia's stated strategic objectives.One of the main stated goals for this entire invasion was the demilitarisation of Ukraine.And when Russia had the opportunity to put what that actually meant into words on paper, it was clear that keeping longer range weapons out of Ukrainian hands was a significant part of it.With a few extreme possible exceptions, almost no matter how the conflict ends at this point, it seems likely the ship has probably sailed on that strategic goal.

After more than four years of their demilitarisation effort, the Russians have succeeded in creating a Ukrainian long -range force that's far more militarised than when they started.And while we don't know what kind of peace agreement may ultimately be struck, it's hard at this point to imagine Ukraine giving up those weapons.For the moment though, those kind of negotiations remain almost entirely hypothetical.There are currently no real restrictions on the long -range build -up by either side, other than those imposed by budget or supply chain limitations.And for the moment, despite those constraints including in Ukraine being very, very real, the current trends seem to point towards a fairly safe conclusion.While what we just saw may have been the largest week for Ukrainian drone strikes of the war to date, and the largest Ukrainian attack on Moscow, there's probably a fairly decent chance that it doesn't turn out to be the last one.

And okay, brief channel update to close out.Firstly, Patrons, after some delay, the call for questions for the Q &A episode is now live and ready for your input.Secondly, in terms of calendar updates, we're starting to get towards the second half of the year.Scary, I know.Which means we're slowly going to get to the point where business travel starts to pick up again.For the moment, I'm trying to plan around those trips that I know are likely to happen, and so there shouldn't be any disruptions to the release schedule.

But if anything ever changes on that front, I'll try to give as much advance notice as possible.Other than that, let me just say, as always, thank you very much, all of you, for your ongoing engagement support, and with any luck, I'll see you again next week.