Kyiv’s drone campaign is no longer a nuisance. It is a strategic fact that Russia cannot fix.
Ukraine has now struck all 11 of Russia’s largest oil refineries. The most recent target was the Omsk refinery in western Siberia – a record-breaking flight of more than 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) from Ukrainian launch points. The cumulative effect is staggering: more than 30% of Russia’s refining capacity is gone. Domestic fuel production has plummeted. Moscow is scrambling to negotiate fuel imports from Kazakhstan and Belarus.
This is the subject of a new War on the Rocks podcast featuring analysts Michael Kofman and Dara Massicot, who describe how Ukraine’s expanding use of drones at all ranges has “changed the war’s momentum.” The central question: can a campaign of long-range strikes produce lasting battlefield advantages, or will Russia eventually adapt?
The asymmetry that works
Ukraine has pursued a strategy that mirrors what Russia did to it in 2022. When Moscow’s missiles destroyed Ukraine’s sole operating refinery at Kremenchuk, Kyiv abandoned domestic refining entirely and shifted to fuel imports from Europe via a decentralized rail and road network.
Russia does not have that option – at least not at the scale it would need. Its territory spans 11 time zones. Moving fuel thousands of kilometers by rail from whatever alternatives it can arrange is expensive and slow. Every refinery knocked offline forces longer supply lines to the front.
Russian air defenses have struggled to stop the drones despite layered protection systems. The Ukrainians have developed drones that fly low, route through gaps in radar coverage, and strike with precision. They hit refineries, fuel depots, ammunition storage sites, and military logistics hubs – all of it inside what Moscow considered safe territory.
A war of attrition, but not the kind Russia expected
The ground war remains a bloody stalemate. Russia made significant territorial gains in 2025 – about 5,600 square kilometers, the most since the opening months of the invasion – at a cost of nearly 420,000 casualties. The Donbas front is still a meat grinder.
But the drone campaign changes the calculation. It forces Russia to divert resources to air defense for thousands of miles of territory. It disrupts fuel supply to front-line units. It spooks the Russian public, who now see the war arriving in places like Moscow, Khimki, and Omsk – cities that were supposed to be beyond reach.
Analysts at the Ukraine War Analytics project estimate that drones now account for the majority of documented Russian equipment losses and 60-70% of all frontline targeting intelligence. Ukraine is producing more than one million FPV drones per month. The cost asymmetry is stark: a $500 drone can destroy a $3 million tank.
What comes next
The War on the Rocks analysts pose three questions that will define the next phase: Can these strikes produce lasting advantages on the battlefield? Will Russia adapt its air defenses and logistics fast enough? Will this force Moscow to escalate in ways it has not yet attempted?
The answer to the first question is already visible in the economics. Russia is running out of domestic fuel while trying to sustain a war that consumes enormous quantities of it. If the drone campaign keeps refineries offline, the Russian military will eventually feel the effects on the front line.
The second question is harder. Russia has shown it can adapt – fiber-optic drones, electronic warfare, and anti-drone nets are already deployed. But defending every refinery, depot, and logistics hub across 11 time zones is a problem with no cheap solution.
The third question is the dangerous one. When a nuclear power starts losing a war of attrition to a non-nuclear adversary, the range of options narrows in troubling ways. So far, Moscow has not signaled a shift to strategic escalation. But the drone campaign is removing the safety distance that Russian territory once had – and that is a change with consequences no one can fully predict.