The morning of June 3 dawned bright and sunny in Vladimir Putin’s home city of St Petersburg, which might have been seen as a happy portent for the 29th International Economic Forum, the so-called Russian Davos that attracts numerous foreigners. Ukraine’s drone teams had other plans.
At least 50 explosive unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) circled the area and began to strike a range of targets, including a Russian corvette in dry dock and storage tanks at the city’s oil terminals. Towers of thick black smoke could be seen across the city. President Zelenskyy posted a video of what he drily called “long-range sanctions”.
Such attacks are becoming a regular feature of the war and are not limited to high-profile embarrassments of Putin’s regime. For example, extensive attacks on Russian supply routes across its land bridge to Crimea are causing serious supply problems for the military and civilians alike.
Ukraine began expanding long-range strike operations deep into Russian territory in 2024.
What started as sporadic strikes have evolved into a sustained campaign targeting oil infrastructure, air bases, logistics hubs, and increasingly, Russian air defenses themselves. By removing the most sophisticated anti-air systems, the Ukrainians are effectively creating corridors for attacks against key wartime targets.
“At first, nearly all Ukrainian attacks failed, then gradually over time they became more successful,” said open-source analyst Andrew Perpetua. “In the beginning, we saw very large Ukrainian drone attacks where nearly every drone would get shot down, but one or two pieces of air defense might get damaged.”
Kyiv’s attritional logic is having an effect as Russian air defenses come under increasing pressure from repeated drone raids. One open source analyst calls it a “massive campaign”, with reams of drone footage showing anti-air systems being hit.
A March report by the Tochnyi open-source collective identified more than 492 Ukrainian strikes against Russian air defense infrastructure and 433 strikes against broader Russian anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) assets between June 2025 and early March.
The drone campaign is gradually exposing weaknesses in Moscow’s defenses through persistence and scale. Even the air defense ring surrounding the Russian capital has been penetrated with growing frequency, forcing Vladimir Putin to tone down his Victory Day parade on May 9.
That was a celebration of the Soviet Union’s heroic defense in World War II. In the years since that victory, it seems Moscow has become so used to attacking and bullying others that it has forgotten how to defend itself.
A Russian military tech channel observed that Ukraine had penetrated Moscow, the most heavily defended region in Russia, with a relatively modest number of drones, and warned that Kyiv’s long-range campaign is still not fully developed. Ukraine’s drones will continue to improve, alongside the arsenal of domestic missiles being developed.
In July 2025, it was reported that a portable interceptor drone was part of the equipment carried by Putin’s security detail during a visit to St. Petersburg, underlining Ukraine’s growing reach and the Kremlin’s lack of confidence about its defenses.
Drones once reserved for deep strikes are now being used at medium range, while new systems are being developed specifically to hit Russian logistics and military infrastructure 100-150km from the front. Ukraine’s defense ministry says production of mid-strike drones rose 312% in the first four months of 2026 compared with all of 2025.
“There will be more strikes,” said Dmytro Putiata, a drone operator with Ukraine’s 20 Unmanned Systems Brigade. Ukraine may increasingly use air balloons to extend the reach of its mid-range strike drones in Crimea.
Moscow has no shortage of offensive drones. It can now launch massive waves of strikes across Ukraine, forcing Kyiv to build an increasingly sophisticated air defense network with cheap interceptors designed to counter Shahed-style attacks. Ballistic missiles are much harder to intercept, and Ukraine has suffered devastating attacks as a result, as on the night of June 1-2.
But offense and defense are different games. “Russia has seriously under-invested in its drone interceptor capabilities to counter Ukraine’s long-range strikes,” said Jonathan Lippert, president of Defense Tech for Ukraine. “Protecting Moscow and a list of strategic production sites from relatively slow-moving drones should be manageable.”
Strikes around the capital are likely to increase pressure on the Russian leadership to respond. It will probably start by deploying larger numbers of mobile interceptor teams, though building such a system will take months, Lippert said.
Russia has failed to develop an equivalent of Ukraine’s Sky Fortress acoustic detection network, which uses AI-assisted microphones to track drones and direct mobile fire teams into their flight path. Russian military bloggers have complained that this helps explain how Ukrainian drones are hitting targets deep inside Russia, including beyond the Ural Mountains.
But Russia’s air defense gaps are not just technical. Russian drone developer Alexey Chadayev has argued that bureaucracy and legal restrictions are also weakening the country’s response.
Mobile fire teams can face legal liability if a damaged Ukrainian drone crashes into civilian property after interception, he said, creating an incentive to avoid risky engagements.
Moscow only began building a drone-on-drone interception system in the second half of 2025, and it remains a collection of isolated efforts rather than a cohesive network, Putiata wrote in The Economist.
It is now adding small radar stations, training more units, and trying to develop tablet-based software similar to Ukraine’s Skymap and Graphite systems, he said.
But Russia is vast, and Ukraine has a growing list of targets. Defending them with hundreds or thousands of expensive interceptor missiles is not a sustainable strategy.
A Ukrainian long-range drone, such as the FP-1/2, can cost around $55,000, while a Tor interceptor missile may cost more than 10 times that, making each interception an increasingly expensive trade for Moscow.
There are also signs of strain in Russian supply lines, including launchers with empty slots, older missiles pulled from storage, and improvised ground launchers using modified air-to-air missiles.
Ukraine’s strike on two Russian Tor-M2 systems near occupied Berdiansk shows how efforts to protect rear-area supply routes are exposing Russian air defenses to greater risk.
Russia is fielding short-range interceptor drones such as the Yolka, which is reported to use visual tracking and AI-assisted processing to hit incoming UAVs, but the system’s capabilities are limited.
It works only in daylight, cannot be used in rain, and has an effective range of about 3km (2 miles), according to Ukrainian defense advisor Serhii Beskrestnov. Mid-range drones are regularly filmed by reconnaissance drones, showing the widening gaps in Russian air defenses.
“The enemy has discovered our weak ability to intercept small UAVs, and now we’re seeing trucks burning near Mariupol,” wrote Russian war blogger Alexander Karchenko.
Another Russian war blogger contrasted the Yolka unfavorably with Ukraine’s interceptor drones. “Not allowed in the rain, not allowed at night, not allowed if facing the sun,” he wrote. “If a bird flies between the Yolka and an enemy UAV, the Yolka can lock onto it.”
Russian commentators say the country still relies too heavily on electronic warfare, a dependence that is increasingly unreliable as Ukraine fields more drones using Starlink connectivity and AI-assisted targeting, reducing the effectiveness of Russian jamming.
Moscow’s centralized military-industrial system has been effective at scaling production of Shahed-style attack drones and launching them against Ukraine in large numbers, but Ukraine’s decentralized wartime ecosystem has adapted faster in developing cheap but effective defenses.
As Russia continues losing air defenses to mid-range strikes, opening corridors for long-range drones, it could quickly get worse for the Kremlin.
David Kirichenko is a freelance journalist and an Associate Research Fellow at the Henry Jackson Society. He can be found on X/Twitter @DVKirichenko.
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