Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy is starting to sound desperate. A terrifying winter bombardment by Russian missiles is clearly on the way as soon as the mercury begins to fall, but the Uralian president said at the weekend, Kyiv is down to its last PAC-3 Patriot interceptor missile left. He has about six months to find some more.
And the chances of getting any more have fallen close to zero. Zelenskiy made a deal with US President Donald Trump during the Ankara Nato summit on July 8 to get a license to manufacture the only missile that can take out Russia’s deadly ballistic missiles, only for Trump to walk his commitment back less than a week later. He talked with Russian President Vladimir Putin by phone in the meantime.
Zelenskiy also asked Trump for an emergency tranche of 300 interceptors from the US stockpile. But an audit of the US stockpile just found the US military is down to only 759 interceptors left, according to the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS), after the first month of the Iran war. Zelenskiy was demanding a third of the remaining US stock of PAC-3s and obviously Trump said no. “We need them ourselves.”
Europe can’t help either as they are also scrapping the bottom of the barrel after generously sharing what spares they had over the last four and half years. Orders to replace those missiles are already backed up for years as the US only makes about 650 interceptor missiles a year. They are very complicated and expensive to produce.
But none of this has stopped Zelenskiy from appealing for help on nearly a daily basis.
“The United States knows what we need. Europe knows what we need. Anti-ballistic missiles must protect people – not sit in stockpiles. And every day without this vital assistance gives Russia another chance to kill our people,” the president said in his daily video address again on August 1.
This campaign is summed up in a project, known as FREYJA, that is the centerpiece of the newly created Integrated Anti-Ballistic Missile Coalition, launched by Ukraine and several European countries to develop a joint missile defense capability. But unless some more actual missiles can be found, all FREYJA is, is a new rhetorical device to pretend something is being done about defence.
The tone has changed. The swagger of the wartime “I don’t need a ride, I need ammo” hero has faded. The talk of Nato membership has been abandoned as that is never going to happen. Plans for counter-offensives and coalitions with the US plus Europe has given way photoshoots with the E3 (France, Britain and Germany), which has been reduced to the E2 after UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer was forced to resign and will be reduced to an E1 when French President Emmanuel Macron leaves office next year. Zelenskiy sounds almost plaintive as he pleads with allies to dig even deeper into stockpiles that have already been run down to below strategic minimums.
Zelenskiy is left grappling with a problem to which it seems there is no solution as Ukraine is about to face its Battle of Britain moment.
One interceptor
Russia is getting ready to repeat last winter’s campaign where Russian President Vladimir Putin attempted to freeze Ukraine into submission by destroying what remains of Ukraine’s power sector. Ukraine went into this war with just under 60GW of generating capacity but currently has 14GW left. Russia has reportedly already begun stockpiling missiles for this year’s campaign and has ramped up missile production capacity in the last year – almost doubling the output to some 2,500 missiles a year.
It's crunch time for Kyiv. For much of the second and third year of the war residents of Kyiv became almost blasé about the air raid sirens, confident that the Blue and Yellow Iron dome of air defences that cover the capital could repel the inbound Russian rockets and drones.
That has changed now as the volume of Russian missile attacks has mushroomed just as the supply to interceptor missiles dwindles. Tens of thousands of Kyivians now find themselves spending the weekend sleeping in the ornate subway stations. Kyiv's mayor Vitali Klitschko warned last weekend that the city's shelter network, roughly 4,000 sites, cannot expand fast enough because district administrations have failed to spend funds already allocated for mobile shelters.
On August 1-2, Russia launched 35 missiles and 185 attack drones at Ukraine overnight - 27 of them ballistic. Ukraine's air force intercepted precisely one.
"Only one ballistic missile was intercepted, simply because there are no interceptors for the Patriot systems," Zelenskiy said in his evening address, adding that Kyiv bore the brunt of the attack while Dnipro, Sumy, Kharkiv and Poltava regions were also hit. Eighteen residential buildings, a school and the Lithuanian Embassy were damaged; nine people were killed.
Russia is rapidly scaling up its missile war, as Zelenskiy correctly said in Turkey earlier this month: “The war is going into the air.” The president has been pleading with the West to close the skies over Ukraine since the first week of the war, but his worst fears have been realised. The skies over Ukraine are now open. This was the worst possible time to sack Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov and then fail to replace him as part of the recent surprise government reshuffle.
But the missile shortage is only the most visible of four crises now running in parallel: a presidency shaken by its worst domestic unrest since the war began, a front line buckling in the Donbas, and a civilian-economy war that both sides are now waging deliberately against each other. None of the four is new on its own; but now they are all escalating at once.
Russia launched a record 376 missiles at Ukraine in July – half of which were ballistic missiles that only Patriot interceptors can bring down, and more than twice as much as in June, according to a new AFP analysis. For comparison, Russia launched between 200 and 300 ballistic missiles at Ukraine in all of 2024. At the same time, the Kremlin has ramped up its use of drones to around 2,000 per month and slightly fewer of the very powerful FAB glide bombs, again which Ukraine has no defences at all. Not even the Patriot interceptors can stop a glide bomb, as it falls rather than flies.
Washington gives, then takes back
The interceptor shortage was supposed to have a fix. At the Nato summit in Ankara, Trump made a dramatic volte-face on support for Ukraine by pledging to grant Ukraine a licence to make Patriot missiles itself, even though the construction of those factories would likely take years to complete.
But only days after Ukraine signed off on joint ventures with the leading US manufacturers in the same week, Trump told a Cabinet meeting at Camp David "we have not agreed to that", calling Patriot production technology "a hard thing to give away". Then Boeing put the kybosh on the project by refusing to share its advanced seeker technology with Ukraine.
As it becomes increasingly clear Ukraine will not be resupplied with new interceptors, Zelenskiy turned to Plan B: if the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) can’t shoot inbound Russian missiles down while in the air, then it will blow up the launchers before they ever leave the ground. But for that to work, Zelenskiy needs US help too.
Zelenskiy asked Trump to lean on US billionaire Elon Musk to widen Starlink access for Ukrainian strikes deep inside Russia: the Kyiv Post reported that Trump said he would consider the request but made no commitment; the owner of the satellite communications company, Musk’s SpaceX, currently allows Ukraine to use Starlink only on its own territory, including Russian-occupied Crimea, and blocks it inside Russia proper thanks to the intervention of Ukraine’s now ousted Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, who struck up a good rapport with the eccentric US tycoon.
Despite Zelenskiy's Churchillian reputation, Musk rejected a Bankova-request for a meeting while in Washington. It appears that the president’s decision to sack his popular Defence Minister has turned out to be a major blunder, The Atlantic reported.
The last plank in Zelenskiy defence strategy is a call on G7 allies to close "all the gaps" in their sanctions regimes and specifically targeting companies supplying components for Russian ballistic missiles as well as demanding a total crackdown on tech aiding Moscow's oil refining sector in a last-ditch effort to cut off Russian supplies of critical technology.
That is not working either. As IntelliNews reported, the Armed Forces of Russia (AFR) is crippling Ukraine’s ports with the new cheap-to-produce Banderol cruise missile that has only recently joined the fray to devastating effect. A large share of its electronics is sourced from the so-called “unfriendly countries” that have imposed sanctions on Russia. The EU recently passed its 21st sanctions package, but was forced to significantly water its measures down thanks to heavy lobbying by member state vested interests. Despite the upbeat rhetoric, the entire “extreme” sanctions regime remains as leaky as a colander.
A presidency under siege
The war in Ukraine has moved into its most brutal phase so far as both sides are endeavouring to make life for the general population as hard as possible – and that is costing Zelenskiy at the polls.
Zelenskiy is fighting a second war at home. Ukraine's largest street protests since 2014 broke out following the dismissal of Fedorov, who local reports claim the president saw as a growing political rival. Zelenskiy is believed to have also sacked the former commander-in-chief General Valerii Zaluzhnyi when he also overtook the president in the polls. The official explanation was an irreconcilable personality clash with commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi, who was also sacked. "Without me they don't sit down together [to talk]," Zelenskiy told the Financial Times.
Tensions in Ukrainian society are rising before the reshuffle scandal broke as weariness with the war and hardship grows. Videos of the much hated Territorial Recruitment and Social Support Centres (TCK) officers snatching young men from the street and bundling them into buses -- the “busification” campaign – are a daily occurrence. There was an outpouring of public outrage after TCK officers grabbed a 34-year-old single father from Kryvyi Rih, snatched in front of his 5-year-old daughter as he picked her up from school. The father was the sole caregiver and the school’s principal took the weeping little girl to the recruitment centre to try and have the father released. They refused. It was only when the video of the girl crying blew up on the social media that Bankova relented.
Violence towards the TCK officers has tripled in the last year, with one officer reportedly dying after being stabbed in the neck by his victims already. There were reports and video of a man opening fire on a TCK officer trying to busify him just this weekend. An anti-conscription riot broke out in Lviv two weeks ago where protestors rioted and smashed up a TCK car causing the officers to flee the scene.
Zelenskiy’s approval rating in the polls have tumbled to 59%, still high but much less than Putin’s own 66%. An Ukrainska Pravda-reported poll from July put trust in former commander-in-chief General Valerii Zaluzhnyi at 70%, Fedorov at 65% and Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine’s former HUR spy master who now the head of the presidential administration, at 62%. All three men now poll ahead of Zelenskiy.
At the start of July Zelenskiy was mulling with the idea of holding elections in September and reportedly asked Zaluzhnyi to stay out of the race. Zaluzhnyi refused. Zelenskiy has since dropped the idea of a vote.
It’s not a political crisis yet: a separate July 20-21 first-round vote-preference poll still had Zelenskiy comfortably ahead of both potential rivals with 22.3% to Zaluzhnyi's 14.9% and Fedorov's 13.4%. But protesters have continued gathering outside the presidential administration on and off for over two weeks now since the government reshuffle in an unprecedented display of public wartime opprobrium. One demonstrator quoted online on July 31 compared the chants directly to those that opened the 2014 Maidan revolution and Ukrainian protestors have already forced two presidents out of office.
Crowds fill a central Kyiv boulevard during one of the ongoing protests against the government reshuffle on August 1. Source: social media.
Fuelling the unrest is the metastasizing Energoatom corruption scandal that has implicated most of Zelenskiy's inner circle, focused on his close friend Tymur Mindich, who skipped town only hours before investigators raid his home and office in Kyiv. He is accused of siphoning off $100mn in kickback schemes – a toilet made of solid gold was found in his apartment – that left Ukraine’s nuclear power infrastructure defenceless in the face of Russian drone attacks and now lives in self-imposed exile in Israel.
More ominously, protests first erupted last year after Zelenskiy attempted to gut Ukraine’s anti-corruption reforms by ramming through law 21414 at the weekend during the Rada’s summer break. Caught out by the popular anger and Brussel’s harsh criticism, he was rapidly forced to back down and reverse the decision. Last summer, Zelenskiy was criticised for becoming increasingly authoritarian. He has yet to directly address the complaints of the crowds currently gathering on the Maidan square.
Coming a year apart, the two sets of street demonstrations have fed a narrative, encouraged by critics and Russian disinformation alike. Iuliia Mendel, Zelenskiy’s former press secretary, has become a vocal critic of her former boss, denouncing the corruption surrounding him in a widely shared interview with US celebrity journalist Tucker Carlson on March 22. Bankova, Ukraine’s presidential administration, has countered with a large-scale media campaign to discredit her and reportedly threatened to conscript her husband and send him to the frontlines.
The front is buckling too
Zelenskiy is facing major setbacks on both the international and domestic fronts, but the most threatening is things are going badly on the battlefield too, although exactly what is happening remains the subject of a lively debate.
In the run up to the Ankara Nato summit, Bankova’s media machine went into overdrive to push the “the war has reached a turning point” narrative that became a well-established meme, but since then reports from the Donbas are starting to admit that the Russian forces are making slow by steady progress, albeit at an enormous cost in lives, and the famed “Fortress Belt” is in danger to falling to Russia.
“We may soon learn that Zelenskiy expended unsustainable levels of Ukrainian manpower in the first half of 2026 to create his "turning point" PR campaign to try to win over Trump by the July Nato summit. And now the damage is coming due,” said veteran Russia reporter Mark Ames in a social media post.
Several key cities have fallen into Russian hands in the last six months. The key logistics hub of Pokrovsk was captured in December that stands at a nexus of road and rail to supply Ukraine’s forces protecting the unoccupied parts of Donbas. Although it is not completely controlled by Russia, it is in effect lost to the Ukrainian government.
More recently Kostiantynivka has also been taken by the Armed Forces of Russia (AFR) this month, one of the three fortress cities that make up the belt cities at the heart of the war today. And in the last week Chasiv Yar that commands the approach to the fortress belt also fell to Russia after just under three years of fighting.
It has been impossible to confirm the status of these battles, and the milbloggers' reports on them disagree on the extent of Russian control. Thanks to the advent of drone warfare, a city's capture is no longer a binary event. The AFR have largely pushed the AFU out of Pokrovsk, but a Russian soldier attempting to patrol its streets faces the constant threat of a death-from-above drone strike by AFU units still operating in or near the city.
The Lyon-based AMK Mapping milblogger has reported that not only has Kostiantynivka fallen, but the AFR are now only a few kilometres away from Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, the remain two fortress cities in the defensive belt and Russian troops are starting to infiltrate the suburbs, which is how Pokrovsk was captured. He released a video, purportedly of a Russian First Person View (FPV) drone flying at ground level through Kramatorsk, hunting for Ukrainian military vehicles this weekend.
Russian FPV drone footage, flying at street level inside the Ukrainian fortress city of Kramatorsk. Source: AMK Mapping
Other milbloggers, such as the Washington-funded Institute for the Study of War (ISW), claim the AFR’s progress is much slower, taking less than 1.2km/day. The oft sited DeepState milblogger also reports slow progress, but critics complain it releases its widely followed maps with long delays and suspended releasing fresh maps in the run up to the Turkish Nato meeting entirely. Nevertheless, all the milbloggers admit that the AFU defenders are on their backfoot and Russia is making progress.
As the Russians get closer to the fortress cities, they come into both artillery and glide bomb range. The massive FAB glide bombs – powerful WWII-era gravity bombs with wings and jets strapped to their backs – can carry as much as 3,000kg of high explosive, whereas a typical drone carries only 50kg of explosives. A drone can kill a man; a glide bomb destroys the entire building he is hiding in.
But glide bombs have a maximum range of 100km, which is why reports by milblogger Military Summary this weekend of a very rare patrol over Donetsk Oblast for the first time in two years by a Russian SU-57 all the way up to the southeastern outskirts of Donetsk city, coming within 78 km of today's frontline, are unsettling. Glide bombs are typically released from the SU-57.
Ukraine remains defenceless against these cheap and plentiful weapons. Even Patriot interceptors cannot stop them. The only way is to shoot down the plane that drops the bomb and Ukraine only has 37 F-16s to Russia’s fleet of 350 highly advanced fighter jets.
One of Fedorov’s innovations was to introduce medium-range drones that have been playing havoc with Russian supply lines, but on balance the destructive power of glide bombs outweighs those disruptions, and Zelenskiy reports that Russia has been using them in large numbers.
“The loss of the people and infrastructure just increased. People are running from Ukraine and this tendency will increase before winter,” said Mendel in a comment on the reports coming out of the Donbas. Last week, unconfirmed reports appeared on social media of a large increase in the number of people queuing up at the border trying to leave.
The deteriorating picture is now the first major test for incoming commander-in-chief Mykhailo Drapatyi, who takes over a front requiring difficult stabilisation decisions before the end of summer.
And the lack of manpower remains a major headache for both Ukraine and Russia. The AFR is reportedly losing around 1,000-1,400 men a month – more than it is able to recruit. However, the AFU is also losing an estimated 200 men a month: four times less than Russia if you accept the official estimate of 35mn people in total, and six-times less if you believe the alternative estimates of 25mn people that includes the 8mn refugees that have left the country since the war starter. In other words, proportionally, Ukraine is losing as many or more men each month as Russia.
Answering in kind
With interceptors scarce and the front under pressure, Ukraine's only option hurt Russia too as much as it is hurting Ukraine. That is fuelling the rapid escalation in the tit-for-tat missile war.
In the middle of July Kyiv's drones destroyed the warehouses of Russia’s largest e-commerce company, Wildberries' Elektrostal and Kotovsk logistics centres that accounts for just under 9% of the country’s entire retail turnover and 3% of GDP. Wildberries also owes trillions of rubles to Russia’s second largest bank, VTB, and could also cause a financial crisis if it goes bust – which seems increasingly likely.
Operation Wildberries killed and reconstruction alone could cost Wildberries' parent RUB35.8bn ($446mn). But the real damage it is has brought the war in Ukraine into the front room of regular Russians; Putin has worked hard to insulate the bulk of society from any effects of the war, but that façade is crumbling now.
Kyiv is also racing to close its missile-production gap rather than wait on empty promises from Washington. Ukraine gave up all its missiles at independence three decades ago, but since the war began has set up new production that is now starting to churn out domestic missiles. Ukraine already successfully adapted its Neptune ship killer and sank Russia’s Black Sea flagship right at the start of the war. Since then Fire Point, a company founded by Zelenskiy’s associates, has already developed the Flamingo cruise missile and the FP-9 programme to make Ukraine’s first true ballistic missile, is expected to go into production this autumn.
Russia's sheer size was the key advantage in the war against Napoleon in 1812, It is now a liability against Ukraine as the Kremlin cannot effectively protect even a fraction of its own territory. Even Moscow has a population the size of most Central European countries. Military analysts say that Ukraine does not even need to reach parity with Russia’s missile production to inflict complete chaos on the Russian economy. But it has become a race against time and time is running out fast.
