The extraordinary development, intended to help protect vital facilities like ports and power stations, is a major step for Kyiv four years into Russia’s full-scale invasion. It is also an indicator of changes other countries will need to consider to counter a growing array of airborne threats.
The scramble in the Middle East to integrate air defenses against Iran’s arsenal of high- and low-sophistication systems revealed that the warnings of Russia’s war on Ukraine had not been heeded. Now the world has the crisis in the Gulf as a further example of the vulnerabilities and limitations of air defense infrastructure.
The growing record of drone incursions into EU and US airspace, some over critical infrastructure, should already have been taken as a wake-up call.
Instead, as nations rush to shore up air defenses, they will have no one to blame but themselves and their cultural inertia for continued “kinetic destructive” and “non-kinetic destabilizing” attacks by drones and other UAVs on Western infrastructure.
In Ukraine, after four years of full-scale invasion and ever-increasing drone attacks, the government has launched a formal program, under strict government controls, for the private sector to finance and deploy localized, layered air defenses for critical infrastructure. Full details are not available, and may be kept confidential for obvious security reasons.
This new approach was simply not possible, or even considered relevant, at the time of the full-scale invasion in 2022, but necessity drives invention. Ukraine’s innovations should be thoroughly studied by other governments and the private sector.
Kyiv’s new strategy is a result of the remarkable proliferation of technology, including interceptors, radio frequency/electronic warfare systems, data integration systems, and the rapid expansion of skilled operators trained to help Ukraine survive Russia’s relentless air attacks.
Perhaps the most fundamental and challenging shift to have enabled the new policy is a change in cultural and risk perception.
In the fall of 2024, when a formal proposal was first put to Kyiv to allow private sector critical infrastructure projects to finance and deploy limited localized air defenses, it was dismissed as unrealistic and an inappropriate mixing of civil and military roles.
But since then, Russian attacks have increased, with as many as 800 Iranian-designed drones launched at Ukrainian targets each night by the end of 2025, and Ukraine’s production of interception equipment, software programs, and skilled operators has increased exponentially, making private sector defense feasible.
The scale of the threat posed by Russia to Ukraine and the rest of Europe, or by Iran across the Gulf region, is such that old-style distinctions between civil and military must shift. When an adversary makes no distinction between civil and military targets, a country’s defensive posture cannot afford to maintain such divides.
What are the lessons for the West?
First is to recognize that, while affordable technology exists to secure infrastructure, perceptions change more slowly than technology, and policies follow perception. Even in Ukraine’s innovation culture, it took four years of conflict for the public-private policy to be approved.
The West needs to learn from the evolution of others and update its perceptions and policies accordingly. The strain on Gulf states under Iran’s air assaults is a reminder that it is often only when in crisis that a nation is able and willing to change its culture.
Second, the focus should be to optimize and operationalize infrastructure resilience, including by aligning as many stakeholders as possible and expanding capacity and technologies.
Threats to critical infrastructure are increasingly outpacing the centralized, expensive air defense structures, which were suited to an age when long-range airborne threats were limited to a handful of actors.
Today, long-range air attacks, including non-kinetic attacks meant to destabilize and complicate rather than destroy, are a standard part of the threat matrix for civil infrastructure.
Adversaries recognize how fragile commercial operations and markets are in the West. They know they don’t need to destroy a power plant or port to shut it down; they just need to make it feel vulnerable, for example, by sending occasional drones overhead.
They don’t need to sink ships to block global supply chains; they just need to tip the sense of risk and send insurance rates skyrocketing, so markets stall or freeze. It is remarkably easy to gum up a system designed to thrive under the most stable conditions and retract like a turtle into its shell at any credible threat.
The speed at which European airports shut down last year due to drone sightings is indicative of a system unprepared for even the lightest pressures from airborne threats. The West’s adversaries can count on institutional inertia to leave critical infrastructure vulnerable to attack, even after years to learn from Ukraine’s experience.
Steps the West must take:
- Identify disruptive incursions as outright attacks meant to destabilize and harm national security and critical infrastructure, and scale responses proportionally. Seeing them as gray zone asymmetric warfare is outdated.
- Establish public and private collaborative groups to look at hardening critical infrastructure against air attacks.
- Ask Ukraine to include international participants in its private sector-led air defense deployment, to bring global perspectives to support Ukraine’s own unrivaled experience.
- Recognize the limits of the global insurance market in a time of increasing instability and air vulnerability, and work with providers to make it fit for purpose. If adversaries can freeze economic activity simply by spiking insurance rates, it is a glaring vulnerability.
- Work with international financial institutions to integrate physical security into pricing models, just as insurance coverage is baked into project finance.
Western governments and businesses can no longer free-ride off perceived invulnerability, and must increase their efforts now. Continuing to operate as if the world is unchanged, falsely believing past performance is an absolute precedent for the future, is not a credible option.
Derek Berlin is a member of CEPA’s Business Leadership Council, and advises G7 governments and the Government of Ukraine on stabilization and reconstruction priorities.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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