At the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Western analysts said its missile stockpiles would last six months. Four years later, Moscow is producing more than 100 ballistic and ballistic-trajectory weapons every month, and plans to double that by the year’s end.
Putin knows that Ukraine is chronically short of interceptors to bring down its ballistic missiles and that will be a major worry once winter nears. But he also knows that Ukraine now has the means to hit back. This developing battle will not be one-sided, and it is absolutely in Western interests to ensure Russia suffers as much, or more, pain as it dishes out.
The Kremlin now seeks to exploit a gaping wound. The war against Iran has depleted the availability of Patriot missile interceptors, and there is no obvious fix, beyond President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s “millions” of calls to allies seeking more.
Russia is racing to raise production. It now produces ballistic missiles much faster than the United States produces PAC interceptors to stop them. That gap will not close soon, and in the meantime, that spells serious trouble for Ukraine.
This winter is likely to be extremely hard. The scale of Russia’s production advantage is worrying. In a single week, according to Zelenskyy, Russia launched 61 missiles, including 56 ballistic missiles, more than 1,560 strike drones, and 1,540 aerial bombs, while also intensifying attacks on railways, fuel infrastructure, and energy facilities.
That scale reflects the arithmetic of a production race Russia is now winning. In July alone, Moscow fired more than twice the ballistic and cruise missiles it used in June, 364 versus 178, including a 34% increase in ballistic missiles and a tenfold surge in guided aviation bombs. These are not stockpile drawdowns. Russia has replenished much of what it fired and is accumulating reserves to hit even harder.
Putin is applying what we might term the Stalin Principle. Place critical facilities deep in the interior, protect them with the best available air defenses, and run the economy in service of the military machine.
The Votkinsk Machine Building Plant, Russia’s primary Iskander producer, sits 1,500 km (900-plus miles) from Ukraine’s border, inside the country’s densest air defense umbrella. It has expanded its workforce, built new production workshops, and runs around the clock on 24-hour shifts.
Ukrainian intelligence estimates this factory and similar facilities will be able to produce up to 700 Iskander 9M723 ballistic missiles this year alone, with Russia already exceeding its monthly targets: in July, it produced 65 against a planned 60; and 87 Kh-101 cruise missiles against a planned 72.
Taken together, its production lines could provide Moscow with more than 100 ballistic or ballistic-trajectory weapons every month.
Ukraine has been hitting back. Its less-advanced long-range drones have nonetheless hit Russian oil refineries with extraordinary frequency and precision. Likewise, grain facilities and naval dockyards, while Crimea is effectively under siege. Taken as a whole, Ukraine is far better able to hurt Russia than at any earlier point of the four-year war, but while it is hitting missile and component factories, it has not yet seriously degraded output.
Russia’s growing ballistic missile capability enables a doctrine that has been in place since the front lines froze: a systematic infrastructure campaign designed to weaponize winter and make Ukraine increasingly ungovernable.
Since October, Russian attacks have damaged more than 9 gigawatts (GW) of thermal, hydropower, and combined heat-and-power capacity, more than half of Ukraine’s roughly 17.6 GW of generation capacity available for the 2025-26 heating season. Ukraine has restored 4 GW and is racing to restore another 6 GW before the 2026-27 heating season. Moscow is seeking to destroy faster than Kyiv can rebuild. The coming winter, just months away, will be a test of national resilience and a contest between Russia’s expanding strike-production base and Ukraine’s increasingly stretched air defenses and infrastructure-repair capacity.
Energy is only part of the target set. Since January 2026, Russia has carried out 250 attacks against Naftogaz facilities, not isolated strikes but a sustained campaign to reduce domestic gas production and exhaust repair capacity simultaneously. Overnight on 6-7 August, Russia carried out one of its largest recent attacks on Ukrnafta, damaging seven oil and gas production facilities in eastern Ukraine and forcing several sites offline.
The geographic spread and frequency point to a single objective: force Ukraine to defend a dispersed network of facilities that cannot all be protected at once with finite interceptors.
Railways are the third front. Within the last week, Russia reportedly attacked Ukraine’s railway 41 times, damaging 11 locomotives. Russia is also targeting repair teams. The cumulative effect is a logistics crisis in slow motion: reduced capacity to move military supplies, evacuate civilians, and export the goods Ukraine needs to fund its own defense.
Is there an answer?
There is. Western assistance to new Ukrainian anti-ballistic missile systems is key, and so too are increased Patriot interceptor deliveries — Zelenskyy said on August 13 that he needs at least a fivefold increase in stocks.
But that will not be enough. Ukraine must be able to attack the production sites on multiple fronts simultaneously. That means financing the mass production of long-range weapons, like the Ukrainian-produced Flamingo and other developing systems, plus providing the intelligence, components, and targeting support needed to strike missile factories, storage sites, and launch infrastructure within range.
It means closing the sanctions gap, tightening export controls, and imposing secondary sanctions against the companies and countries supplying Russia with foreign electronics and machinery. European dual-use components are still being found in recovered Russian weapons. That is not a secondary issue. It is a direct contribution to the missiles hitting Ukrainian cities.
As long as Ukraine’s strike capabilities cannot consistently reach the production facilities that matter most, the West as a whole will remain on the losing side of this missile-production race; bear in mind that alliance officials say an open Russian attack on NATO by 2029 is entirely possible.
Europe could, of course, finally start to confront what has so far been politically avoided: extending air defense coverage from NATO territory over western Ukraine, a proposal known as Sky Shield, thereby freeing Kyiv’s finite interceptors to concentrate on the regions most exposed to ballistic attack rather than defending the entire country simultaneously.
Russia has spent four years building a production base designed to outlast the Western response. This winter will reveal whether Ukraine and its allies can counter it.
Maksym Beznosiuk is an analyst whose work focuses on Russia, Ukraine, and international security. He is an Associate Fellow at GLOBSEC.
William Dixon is a Senior Associate Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute and an Associate Fellow at GLOBSEC. He specializes in cyber and international security issues.
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