The CIA has worked closely with Ukraine’s intelligence services since Russia’s 2014 invasion, growing a partnership built on assistance and training into a two-way exchange of intelligence, according to Forbes. However, the relationship nearly collapsed in February 2025, when a contentious Oval Office meeting between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy ended with Washington temporarily cutting off the flow of intelligence and weapons to Kyiv.

But Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the Senate Intelligence Committee’s ranking member, said this month that the two countries have moved past previous hurdles and returned to a strong intelligence partnership.

“I don’t want to get into any specifics, but it has improved,” Warner told Politico.

The CIA has spent more than a decade and millions of dollars training and equipping Ukrainian intelligence officers, building around a dozen secret forward-operating bases along the Russian border, ABC News reported in January 2025, citing former U.S. officials.

The senator said the current arrangement has helped Kyiv gain an edge, with long-range drones and missiles now hitting targets far inside Russia.

While American weapons deliveries have taken the spotlight in what Washington gives Ukraine, intelligence is the one U.S. asset Kyiv cannot replace, especially for the long-range strikes now making headlines.

That intelligence reaches directly into the strike campaign, including “the targeting packages for strikes on Russian-troop positions in Ukraine and on energy infrastructure inside Russia,” The Atlantic reported, citing American and Ukrainian sources.

Those sources called intelligence “the one thing the United States still provides free of charge,” crediting CIA Director John Ratcliffe with keeping it that way.

Zelenskyy seems to have risen in Trump’s estimation as Ukraine increasingly fights on its own terms, redefining modern warfare by crafting new tech and strategies, clawing back territory and taking the war deep into Russia — leaving Kyiv looking less dependent and more like an ally with something to trade.

“Trump doesn’t like losers,” one Western intelligence official told the outlet.

Sens. John Cornyn, R-Texas, another intelligence committee member, and Roger Wicker, R-Miss., who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, told Politico they see a direct connection between the White House’s view of Ukraine’s battlefield successes and Kyiv’s access to intelligence.

“It sure seems like that,” Cornyn said. “Everybody loves a winner and looks like Ukraine has turned the tide.”

The strengthening relationship between Washington and Kyiv is apparent on multiple fronts.

Trump’s negotiators to end the war, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, plan to head to Ukraine for the first time later this month, a trip that coincides with the country’s independence celebrations, according to Radio Free Europe.

The intel trade is going both ways, with Zelenskyy stating publicly as early as March that Kyiv had proof of Moscow passing intelligence to Iran that he later promised to put in front of Trump.

“We have irrefutable evidence that the Russians continue to provide intelligence to the Iranian regime,” Zelenskyy wrote on X. “Russia is using its own signals intelligence and electronic intelligence capabilities, as well as part of the data obtained through cooperation with partners in the Middle East.”

American officials are backpedaling too. Trump on July 20 told the Financial Times that the U.S. has to be “a little bit careful of who we license to.” Despite that, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Saturday posted on X that the two sides have “now reached an agreement.”

The glacial progress may reflect American defense giants’ fear that Kyiv could become a defense industry competitor — rather than posing risk to technology or intellectual property — a Republican official on Capitol Hill told The Atlantic.

“Their real worry is that the Ukrainians will find a way to improve the Patriot and then produce them at scale faster and for much less money than what the existing production lines in the U.S. could do,” the official said, adding that the companies will publicly frame their concerns around “IP theft and tech transfer” instead.

Ukraine’s weapons industry, honed by nearly five years of Russia’s full-scale invasion, has been booming since the U.S.-Israel war with Iran began in the spring. The conflict with Iran has drained an estimated two-thirds of America’s pre-war Patriot interceptor inventory, sparking discussion about inventory and strategy.

Some defense partners are eager to work with Ukraine, a country with rare recent experience fighting a large-scale land war, and have shown strong interest in collaborating with Kyiv to develop and field cheaper, faster-to-produce alternatives to million-dollar weapons.

The race toward competition is problematic for the defense giants, the official said — not because Ukraine might steal the Patriot — but because the country’s partners might outbuild it, cutting into the current monopoly on antiballistic capabilities and profits.

Trump first pledged the license at the July NATO summit in Ankara, promising Ukraine permission to produce Patriot missiles for the first time.

“We’re going to give a license to you to make Patriots. That’s pretty cool. This way, you can’t complain that we’re not giving ‘em enough,” Trump said, adding that the companies had not yet been consulted on the plan.

Zelenskyy said the next day that the question had been “resolved politically,” telling reporters that technical teams needed to start work “without delay, so that we can get licenses very quickly and start production in Ukraine as soon as possible.”

Five days after Trump’s pledge, Ukraine, nine European countries and defense heavyweights including Eurosam, Leonardo, Thales and Saab launched a coalition in Paris to field Freyja, an entirely new antiballistic system built around a Ukrainian interceptor priced at roughly one-fifth of a Patriot round.

A week after that, Lockheed unveiled its own cheaper, faster-to-produce Patriot missile at the Farnborough International Airshow, advertising the PAC-3 ACE at roughly $2 million a round – less than half the price of the round Ukraine fires at Russian ballistic missiles today.

The Patriot line rarely moves that fast. Its current top round, the PAC-3 MSE, was first accepted by the U.S. Army in 2015 and took until 2018 to reach full-rate production, per the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance.

On July 21, one day after the ACE debut, Tim Cahill, president of Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control, described production talks with Ukraine as simply “early,” telling reporters the company will “support the US Army and the [Trump] administration on what they want to go do,” according to Breaking Defense.

Raytheon’s process “has just started,” with the company working with the U.S. government “to determine what is feasible and what is best for Ukraine,” its president of land and air defense systems, Tom Laliberty, said at the same show.

Two days later, Zelenskyy wrote in a post on X that he was “grateful for the company’s readiness to take our partnership to an even higher level, where Ukraine would co-produce, together with Raytheon, some of the most vital air defense assets – Patriot interceptors,” after meeting representatives of the group.

But when Zelenskyy asked Trump for “several hundred” interceptors at a July 28 Oval Office meeting, the president refused, citing America’s shrunken stocks, The Atlantic reported.

Three days later, Trump reversed course on the license entirely.

“We have not agreed to that,” he said at a Camp David Cabinet meeting. “We’re talking about it, but it’s a hard thing to give away that kind of technology.”

Then, U.S. NATO Ambassador Matthew Whitaker dampened expectations further on Aug. 3, telling Fox News that “we do not allow anybody but US manufacturers to make those in the United States,” adding that a long-term production agreement “will not be concluded before this winter,” per Euronews.

The deal’s current status is unclear.

“The decision has been made,” Zelenskyy said during an interview on Ukrainian television over the weekend, according to United24. “It was made by the President of the United States and other important American government institutions.”

American officials have yet to respond to Zelenskyy’s latest comments.

Ukrainian F-16s have destroyed more than 2,500 Geran and Gerbera one-way attack drones, wrote airpower expert Justin Bronk in an analysis of the Ukraine air war for the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank.

“[The] use of fighters against such drones has consumed an unsustainable number of airframe flying hours and air-to-air missiles … since mid-2024, when the Ukrainian Air Force received its first Western aircraft and trained crews,” the analysis reads.

“Russian industry produces more than 6,000 [one-way attack] drones per month, and fighter aircraft have only a finite number of airframe hours available before they need time consuming deep maintenance cycles to be performed at a factory by expert technicians.”

Ukraine’s fleet currently operates an estimated 39 F-16s, out of about 79 promised by various Western European nations. Ukraine also flies an estimated four Mirage 2000-5 fighters, out of up to 20 promised by France, plus a few Soviet-era Su-27 and MiG-29 fighters.

The F-16s have been a game changer in the Ukraine air war. They enable Ukraine’s small air force to launch stand-off attacks against ground targets using American-made JDAM and French-made AASM Hammer glide bombs. The threat they pose to Russia’s air force became evident earlier this month, when a Ukrainian F-16 reportedly downed an Su-35 over eastern Ukraine.

Ironically, the F-16 has proven such a capable aircraft that it has become a victim of its own success.

“The F-16 fleet has been over-tasked, mostly by C-UAS [counter-drone] interception duties, for which there is almost unlimited demand over time,” Bronk told Defense News.

The root of the dilemmas is that Ukraine is squeezed between multiple aerial threats.

In addition to drone strikes, Russia has launched numerous cruise and ballistic missiles at Ukrainian cities. Russia has become adept at launching massive combined strikes that begin with waves of drones, followed by cruise missiles, such as the Kh-101, and then ballistic missiles, such as the Iskander-M and Kinzhal.

Ukraine has managed to at least partially tame the drone threat by creating dense belts of short-range air defenses, or SHORAD. These SHORAD belts combine short-range anti-aircraft missiles, anti-aircraft guns, mobile machine gun teams and a variety of homegrown interceptor-drones.

The drawback there is maintaining dense SHORAD coverage along the 745-mile front line — plus defending cities in the rear — with short-range weapons.

“What unites all these mobile air defense teams and counter-drone teams is that their equipment and ammunition is relatively cheap and thus their operations are sustainable,” the RUSI analysis noted. “However, they are relatively personnel intensive to deploy at scale and require both force density and geographical depth to be effective.”

These limitations also point to the difficulties NATO would face in creating its own Ukrainian-style SHORAD system.

“NATO cannot replicate the density of SHORAD defenses that Ukraine deploys for C-UAS coverage, due to the huge personnel requirements of doing so on a sustainable basis,” Bronk told Defense News.

However, NATO could invest in radar-guided anti-aircraft guns to protect key installations, such as airbases and headquarters, and develop cheaper drone-killing munitions for aircraft such as the APKWS II rocket.

Nonetheless, this still leaves Russia’s cruise and ballistic missiles, against which SHORAD is largely ineffective.

As with the U.S. and Israel versus Iran’s missiles, Ukraine must carefully manage limited stockpiles of air defense interceptors like the American-made Patriot and the European-made SAMP/T.

Ideally, Ukraine should rely on SHORAD to stop the drones, while reserving its F-16s for other missions, Bronk argues.

“Other systems need to be used wherever possible for [one-way attack] drones so that F-16 capacity can be used to intercept cruise missiles and deliver strike missions,” Bronk explained. “Within the Ukrainian Air Force inventory, it is by far the most efficient asset for this.”

Bronk believes that F-16 stand-off ground attacks could be even more effective — if Ukraine’s high command was less rigid.

“There is potential for the Ukrainian Air Force to have greater effects if squadrons and wings are given more authority to plan strikes themselves rather than being centrally tasked by Army-centric headquarters elements,” he said.

Throughout the war in Ukraine, Kyiv has had to counter Iranian-designed drones deployed by Moscow. Kyiv has offered its drone interception expertise to countries in the Middle East that have suffered strikes from Iran.

Tehran described the attack on its vessel as an act of aggression and said it would defend its national interests and security, while accusing Kyiv of seeking to expand the war in Ukraine.

The Iranian Foreign Ministry summoned Ukraine’s chargé d’affaires in Tehran to convey its protest over what it described as a “hostile and criminal” attack, Iran’s state news agency IRNA reported.

The Iranian denunciation coincided with comments by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that Kyiv had noted Russia was passing on its satellite observations in the Middle East to Iran to enable it to direct strikes in the region.

Zelenskyy had earlier said that Ukraine’s forces struck a Russian warship and vessels used for transporting Iranian-linked military cargo in the Caspian Sea.

The Ukrainian president, in subsequent remarks posted on X, said Kyiv had recorded since the beginning of July “active Russian satellite surveillance of the Gulf states and U.S. military facilities located there. These images subsequently appear in Iran.”

“At the same time, there is a clear correlation between Russia’s satellite imagery of these sites and Iranian strikes — both before the attacks, in preparation for them, and afterward, to assess the damage inflicted,” Zelenskyy said.

He said that on July 19 and 20 alone, Russian satellite observation had included four air bases: two in Bahrain, one in Jordan and one in Kuwait.

Operating far behind the front line on Ukraine’s sweeping steppe, such units have hit more than 180 vessels and other sea-borne targets around the peninsula over the past three weeks, opening a new front in the war.

The attacks, first in the Sea of Azov and now expanding into the Black Sea that it opens into, are designed to raise the cost for Russia of occupying Crimea and to swing the initiative towards Kyiv in the fifth year of full-scale war in Ukraine.

“We work day and night, every day, without time off,” said battalion commander “Ray” of Magyar’s Birds, a brigade that is an important part of the effort. In line with Ukrainian military practice, he identified himself only by his call sign.

During a recent visit by Reuters, his team launched drones every couple of minutes. The unit said it struck a cargo vessel and floating crane in the Black Sea and a power substation in south Crimea. Reuters could not independently verify this.

The attacks are part of the growing duel in strategic waters in recent weeks, during which Russia has stepped up strikes on Ukrainian ports and international cargo ships.

Kyiv’s agriculture minister said on Thursday that shipowners had ​temporarily suspended vessel arrivals at Ukraine’s Black Sea ports for agricultural exports following the surge in attacks.

BATTLE OVER CRIMEA

Crimea, which serves as a transit and military hub for Moscow’s troops, has become a new focus for Ukraine’s drone forces as they scale up their strike capabilities.

In recent months, they have targeted road and rail links in a swath of occupied southern Ukraine that connects the peninsula to Russia — which seized and annexed it in 2014, long before Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

That has led to fuel shortages and a state of emergency in Crimea, with power and gas facilities also systematically hit.

Now, attacks on oil tankers, dry cargo ships and other vessels mark a widening of Kyiv’s effort to pressure Russian forces by starving them of resources.

Since the new phase of their campaign began in July, drone forces under commander Robert “Magyar” Brovdi have reported hitting about six vessels per day, detailed by Brovdi in mocking, emoji-riddled reports.

The attacks have choked Russian shipping through the Sea of Azov, which receives ships from Russia’s main southern grain-producing region via the Don River.

Brovdi’s forces said the Kerch ferry crossing between eastern Crimea and Russia’s Krasnodar region had lost around 75% of its capacity. Reuters could not verify this.

The commander told Reuters the attacks were aimed at “ruining the myth” of Russian domination and establishing total control over Ukraine’s territorial waters.

The new campaign is dubbed “Molochko”: a portmanteau that sounds like the word “milk” but denotes the phrase “Moscow will collapse because of Crimea.”

Sidharth Kaushal, a senior fellow at the Royal United Services Institute think tank in London, said Ukrainian attacks on Russian overland logistics had led to an increase in shipping through the Sea of Azov, thus providing more sea-borne targets.

The attacks, he said, are “a logical continuation” of Ukraine’s Crimea campaign.

RUSSIAN ATTACKS ON PORTS AND VESSELS

Ukraine’s strikes have been mirrored by intensifying Russian attacks on southern Ukraine, particularly the city of Odesa and ports that send much of the country’s grain through a maritime corridor to international markets.

On Sunday, 10 sailors were killed after Russian forces struck a Guinea-Bissau-flagged vessel carrying corn from the port of Odesa, Ukrainian officials said.

Last week, at least three people were killed in attacks on Odesa and Mykolaiv, another port city.

In the first two weeks of July alone, Russia struck Ukrainian ports 23 times and civilian vessels 17 times, Kyiv’s seaports authority said last Thursday, leaving traders struggling with logistics headaches.

Agricultural exports such as grains and vegetable oils remain Ukraine’s biggest source of foreign currency earnings, with more than 90% shipped from ports in the Odesa ​region through a maritime corridor.

Russia has said its attacks are aimed at infrastructure storing military cargo and fuel.

HUNTED BY RUSSIANS

The Ukrainian-made FP-1 and FP-2 drones used by battalion commander Ray’s team are a staple of Kyiv’s growing arsenal. They fly automatically to the operational zone, then pilots — often based far away — take over to land the final blow.

Minutes after catapulting their last propeller-powered drone using a small jet booster, the launch team packed up and prepared to move. No site is re-used and teams are often sent to new locations at a few hours’ notice.

Although technological advancements have allowed them to launch from over 100 km, or 62 miles, behind front lines, they are still a prized target for enemy drone teams.

“This is a constant war — a continuous struggle of measures and countermeasures,” said Ray, who commands his brigade’s ninth battalion, called Kairos.

Panama, a squadron commander, said he and fellow troops were motivated by the “tangible results” of their operations.

Beyond complicating Russian logistics, the campaign is boosting Ukrainian morale.

“It’s great that our tempo is so high,” he said, “but we still need to sustain it.”

The assessment comes as Ukraine’s battlefield technology has stalled Russia’s advance along the front and drawn foreign partners ready to spend billions of dollars in deals with its defense industry.

European and Ukrainian officials have said for months that Russian casualty rates have climbed to record levels, with Ukraine’s top general telling NATO allies in May that Russia loses at least 1,000 soldiers a day.

“Our intelligence is consistent with some of the open-source reporting you may have seen in Ukraine,” Ratcliffe said at the Defense and Innovation Summit in Pennsylvania. “The average life expectancy of a Russian recruit right now, arriving on the battlefield in Ukraine, is estimated to be between 20 and 30 minutes.”

“That’s because AI-powered drones have gotten to be such specialized, low-cost killing machines,” he added.

Ratcliffe’s confirmation shows how decisively emerging technology can shape a war — and why the U.S. cannot afford to fall behind.

The Russia-to-Ukraine casualty ratio reached nearly 8-to-1 in the first half of 2026, up from roughly 2-to-1 or 3-to-1 for most of the war, as AI-powered drones expanded across the front, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

More than 2 million soldiers on both sides have been killed or wounded since Russia’s February 2022 invasion, with Russia bearing 1.4 million of those casualties, the CSIS researchers found, including as many as 450,000 dead — the highest battlefield death toll suffered by any major power since World War II.

“The takeaway is that the mastery of these emerging technologies is every bit as important as military strength,” Ratcliffe said during the summit. “That’s why an inferior force, four and a half years later, has held off the superior force of Russia.”

Ratcliffe said the U.S. needs to take the lessons learned on the battlefield in Ukraine seriously.

“The pace of their advance has stopped as Ukraine’s mastery of emerging technologies and, in this case, drone warfare, asymmetric warfare, is such a great equalizer, and shows why we have to be leading on this in all respects for us to maintain our place in the global marketplace,” he said.

His remarks came as Washington and its European allies race to fund Ukraine’s drone programs and lock in access to the technology behind them.

The day before, the European Union and Ukraine signed a drone-production deal in Kyiv worth over $6 billion, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said last week that progress had been made on a package of multibillion dollar deals with the U.S.

The balloon-born missile, DART, drops from a balloon at about 7 to 11 miles and runs on satellite guidance until it falls to about 4 miles, where its navigation cuts out and a solid-fuel engine carries it along a fixed course, according to its creators at the Ukrainian company Center of Innovative Technologies Program.

Once the navigation shuts off, Russian jammers can not pull the missile off target.

The company built DART to drop from a balloon rather than fire from a plane or a launcher as a cheap, silent and electronic warfare-resistant vehicle to carry guided weapons deep into Russia.

Its roughly 22-pound warhead scatters conductive graphite filaments designed to short out Russian power grids, according to Militarnyi, though it has not yet cleared Ukrainian military codification.

“Balloons are actively used by the Defense Forces of Ukraine mainly as support platforms and as means for medium and deep strikes,” retired Col. Viktor Kevliuk, a 35-year veteran of the Ukrainian Army now with the Kyiv-based Center for Defense Strategies, told Euromaidan Press last month.

“They are inexpensive, inconspicuous on radars, can hang in the air for a long time and carry a payload,” Kevliuk said.

Ukraine has already floated more than 1,000 of them into Russia, he said.

Now Kyiv is using those balloons to launch a guided missile. They ride the prevailing west-to-east winds deep into Russia and have drifted as far as Moscow, where air defenses tracked them at an altitude of about 6 miles during a strike last September.

The debut comes at a turning point in the war. Ukraine has clawed back more ground than it has lost for the first time since its 2023 counteroffensive, a shift the Institute for the Study of War has linked to Ukraine’s emerging drone dominance over Russian technology across land, sea and air.

That edge has begun to reshape Kyiv’s leverage at the negotiating table, drawing American interest in its battlefield technology as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy presses a mid- to long-range strike campaign that sends cruise missiles and one-way drones as far as over 600 miles into Russia, what he has branded the country’s “long-range sanctions” on Moscow’s war economy.

Balloons are a cheap way to reach into that same fight. They can drift over a hundred miles on the wind before they release anything, then hand off to a drone or a missile that flies hundreds more, stacking the two ranges to put a strike far deeper than either could manage alone.

Ukrainian forces have used military balloons in the past, most often for surveillance or as decoys.

The cheap, wind-borne balloons can bait Russian defenses into firing million-dollar S-300 and S-400 interceptors at a target that costs about $200, draining the batteries that guard Russian cities.

Ukraine floated several balloons over Moscow and Tatarstan during an overnight combined strike in September, a strategy that analysts assessed was meant to confuse Russian air defenses, according to United24, citing Russian sources.

The strike side of the story broke into view in May when video circulated online of an American-made attack drone falling from a Ukrainian balloon over the front. The clip, which spread across Ukrainian military channels, was the first public glimpse of Kyiv pairing a balloon with a precision weapon.

The drone was a Hornet, a roughly seven-foot, AI-guided strike drone built by the American firm Perennial Autonomy, and already in wide Ukrainian use against Russian supply lines. Ukrainian troops launched it from a balloon that carried it dozens of miles and released it at over 26,000 feets’ altitude, with the drone just using a tiny percentage of its battery along the way, according to Euromaidan Press.

Launched from Ukrainian-held territory, that balloon reportedly carried the drone dozens of miles toward its target before the flyer ever fired its own engine.

Ukrainian operators say that head start roughly doubles the Hornet’s reach from about 93 miles to at least 186 by adding the balloon’s distance and altitude to the range the drone flies on its own, according to The Defence Blog.

Perennial Autonomy, which produces the Hornet, was founded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt out of his earlier White Stork and Swift Beat drone ventures in Ukraine, which won the biggest counter-drone award in American military history, valued at up to $500 million, last month.

“We must be proactive with creating a layered defense that deploys and scales low-cost, attributable air-to-air drone interceptors at all our facilities at home and abroad,” Brig. Gen. Matt Ross, who directs the task force that awarded the Perennial contract, told Inside Unmanned Systems last month.

Weaponized balloons may be part of that plan, evidenced by the U.S. Army’s own testing of balloon carriers.

The service has been evaluating a tethered balloon known as an aerostat, or lighter-than-air, to detect drones and relay communications, with an eye toward launching drone swarms from it.

Russia has gotten wind of the idea too — if not the backing of the breeze itself.

The prevailing winds across the front blow west to east, so a Russian balloon launched at Ukraine tends to drift back over Russia instead — a quirk of geography that runs in Kyiv’s favor.

Moscow is trying to field them anyway.

After SpaceX restricted unauthorized Starlink terminals over occupied territory, cutting Russian units off from a link they had leaned on, the military began trialing the Barrazh-1, a stratospheric balloon meant to haul a 220-pound relay station to an altitude of 65 feet, Defense Ministry adviser Serhiy “Flash” Beskrestnov told Defense Express last month.

Russian developers say the balloon is built almost entirely from Russian parts, a hedge against the same sanctions that grounded its Starlink link.

“We don’t want this war, we never did, and everyone knows it, and our partners know it,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a voice message sent to reporters on a WhatsApp group. “But if Ukraine burns, your Moscow will burn.”

Russia, for its part, fired missiles into Kyiv, also for the second time this week, following the attack that damaged the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra monastery and drew international condemnation. Russia denied striking it.

In Moscow, Reuters saw flames and plumes of smoke over the densely populated southeastern district of Kapotnya, where the refinery supplying the capital is located.

Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said that several drones managed to reach the refinery, adding that a shopping centre also suffered minor damage.

DIPLOMATIC PUSH

Russia’s defense ministry said 555 drones were shot down across the country. Sobyanin said 180 were shot down around Moscow alone. State news agency TASS said the attack on Moscow was one of the biggest this year.

Zelenskyy confirmed the attack on the refinery. Ukraine’s military said that Ukrainian forces also hit an oil depot in Russia’s southern Rostov region and another two bridges as Kyiv intensifies its campaign to hamper Russia’s logistics.

More than four years since Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukraine has increasingly been targeting Russia’s energy infrastructure with long-range drone strikes, while Russia has continued firing missiles at Ukrainian cities.

After years when Russian forces made slow but relentless gains on the battlefield, Kyiv says its improving drone capabilities are shifting the war’s momentum in its favor, providing new impetus for Moscow to agree a peace deal.

Zelenskyy has launched a diplomatic push to increase pressure on Russia to negotiate an end to the war.

“One of the most popular questions asked by Muscovites this morning is ‘What is going on?’ I can answer. Your country started a war of aggression against ours. For years, it has been killing our people. Now that you know what’s going on, ask Putin when he is planning to end it,” Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha posted on X.

MOSCOW SAYS ATTACK PUSHES BACK PROSPECT FOR TALKS

Moscow, which says Ukraine is losing, has demanded Kyiv cede its territory before it will discuss peace.

Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov said that Ukraine’s latest attacks on Russia are pushing back the prospect of any direct contacts between President Vladimir Putin and Zelenskyy, the Interfax news agency reported.

Zelenskyy called the attacks on Russia a “totally fair response to Russian strikes on our cities and communities and another important result of the work of our soldiers on facilities that provide support for the Russian war machine.”

A drone strike on Tuesday on Moscow’s refinery had already halted operations there, sources said, adding to widespread damage to Russian energy facilities.

Russia, the world’s third-biggest oil producer and a major oil and fuel exporter, is set to import fuel by sea this month as it seeks to manage a gasoline shortage following Ukrainian drone attacks on refineries, according to industry sources.

In the surrounding Moscow region, a high-rise residential building, an industrial facility and a number of private houses were damaged in the drone attack, which also injured 16 people, the regional governor said.

Flights were suspended at all Moscow airports and traffic shut on the highway around the capital near the refinery. Sheremetyevo airport, Moscow’s busiest, said it had been evacuated.

Elsewhere in Russia, officials said a Ukrainian drone strike killed a man in his car in the Belgorod border region, and a Ukrainian drone attack killed one person and caused a fire at two commercial facilities in the Rostov region.

EXPLOSIONS IN KYIV

Meanwhile explosions rang out in Kyiv and airstrike alerts were issued for most of Ukraine’s territory.

Tymur Tkachenko, the head of Kyiv’s military administration, said Russia was attacking the capital with ballistic missiles. There were no further reports from the authorities on damage or casualties in the city.

Authorities in the northeastern Ukrainian city of Sumy said one person was killed in a drone attack overnight, while a man was killed and a further 11 people were injured in a Russian attack on the southeastern city of Dnipro early on Thursday, the regional governor said.

Russia is now losing roughly 1,000 troops a day in killed and wounded along the front, according to Ukraine’s General Staff.

Western officials are reaching a consensus that Ukraine has gained a serious edge on the battlefield for the first time in years as Russia struggles to break through Ukraine’s multilayer air defense or stand up to Kyiv’s growing arsenal and strengthening counteroffensive.

“[Russian President Vladimir] Putin is going backwards on the battlefield, with new intelligence showing that almost half a million Russian soldiers have been killed since the conflict began,” the UK’s GCHQ intelligence director Anne Keast-Butler said Wednesday.

Until now, Western governments have hedged on Russia’s total losses, citing only a combined killed-and-wounded of around 1.2 million by late 2025.

The new figure recasts that picture: If nearly half a million Russian troops are dead, hundreds of thousands more are almost certainly wounded — and Moscow’s real casualty cost is far steeper.

The disclosure hardens a growing consensus: Russia is on its heels for the first time since the war’s opening months.

Russian battlefield gains are “approaching net zero” as Ukrainian forces are beginning to break out of the positional warfare that has gripped the front since 2023, the Institute for the Study of War concluded this week, after Russia lost 116 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory in April — the first net territorial loss in 20 months.

“This should now be regarded as an official estimate given its source,” Michael Clarke, former director-general of the Royal United Services Institute, told CBS News.

The real toll “might well be higher” because Russian forces are “so neglectful of their front line wounded,” Clarke said.

The figure broadly tracks an earlier Dutch military intelligence assessment that put Russian “permanent losses” at roughly 1.2 million, including more than 500,000 killed.

It runs well above the floor that independent Russian investigators have documented: more than 108,000 Russian war dead individually named through open-source reporting and an extrapolated minimum of around 350,000, according to Meduza.

U.S. intelligence agencies have not publicly endorsed a Russian fatality-specific estimate of their own, but the Office of the Director of National Intelligence assessed in March 2025 that Russia had suffered more than 750,000 killed and wounded.

Britain’s new estimate, covering only the dead, suggests Russia’s total casualty bill now runs far higher than either U.S. assessment noted.

Ukraine’s General Staff has put cumulative Russian losses higher still, at roughly 1.36 million killed and wounded.

The Russian casualty count came up during a broader discussion about Russian hybrid operations targeting the UK, including cyberattacks on critical infrastructure, sabotage attempts and efforts to smuggle Western technology to Moscow’s defense industry, according to British intelligence.

GCHQ is “working tirelessly with intelligence and defence partners to degrade and reduce the Russian threat,” Keast-Butler said.

For now, Moscow is replacing those losses through a recruiting machine built on cash signing bonuses, prisoner conscription and waves of North Korean troops dispatched by Pyongyang to backstop the front, allowing Putin to avoid the politically costly second mobilization wave that destabilized his rule in late 2022, experts have said.

Despite the toll, Russian forces remain on the offensive across Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia and continue to fire massed missile-and-drone salvos at Ukrainian cities, with Moscow recently warning foreign diplomats to leave Kyiv ahead of what it called “systemic and sustained” strikes on decision-making centers.

But the trade is becoming visibly unfavorable.

Russia ground its way through more than a year of combat to capture Pokrovsk in late 2025, an advance the Center for Strategic and International Studies assessed was slower than Allied progress at the Battle of the Somme.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said earlier this month that Russia is losing roughly five soldiers for every Ukrainian casualty — a ratio that, if accurate, suggests the Kremlin is paying far more per square mile of captured ground than during any earlier phase of the more than four-year war.

“The Ukrainian armed forces are the strongest, most powerful armed forces in all of Europe,” Rubio said earlier this month.

Russian forces have made grinding gains since their full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, but the advances have slowed this year and Ukrainian troops are increasing pressure on the battlefield to try to push them back.

Brigadier General Andriy Biletsky, who commands Ukraine’s Third Army Corps, one of Ukraine’s most respected fighting forces, told Reuters in an interview that he believes Russia’s army is exhausted and incapable of making major breakthroughs.

If Ukraine’s military can build and maintain momentum over several months, it can gain the initiative along the frontline and push Russia to abandon its designs on the last part of the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine that it does not yet occupy, he said.

“I believe the next six to nine months are a turning point,” Biletsky said at an undisclosed underground location in the northeastern Kharkiv region.

“More precisely, I think the next six are the most critical,” he said.

The issue of who controls Donetsk has been a stumbling block in U.S.-backed peace talks that have stalled, with Russia wanting the entire region and Ukraine refusing to withdraw from territory that Moscow’s troops have been unable to conquer.

“We need to define those directions where we can improve our positions, take some strategic points, and then speak with the Russians from a position of strength – not weakness – about a truly stable truce,” said Biletsky, a right-wing political leader who founded the battle-hardened Azov Battalion and now commands tens of thousands of troops.

“From a military point of view, this is realistic.”

Russia’s Defence Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this story. Russian President Vladimir Putin has vowed victory in Ukraine and said this month he thinks the war is nearing an end.

‘CRITICAL’ MONTHS AHEAD

Russia’s advances have been complicated by a decision by billionaire Elon Musk to deny Moscow’s forces access to his Starlink satellite-based internet service. Kyiv has meanwhile stepped up medium-range drone attacks on Russian air defenses and logistics, helping more long-range strikes get through to hit oil and military facilities in Russia.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said last week Ukraine had retaken nearly 600 square km (230 square miles) of territory in 2026. Reuters could not independently verify the figure. Moscow currently controls almost one-fifth of Ukrainian territory.

Assessing the military situation, John Helin of the Finland-based Black Bird conflict-analysis group echoed Biletsky in saying fatigue was a problem for Russian forces, while Ukraine’s war effort is hampered by a manpower shortage.

“It does seem like, four or five months into this year, it’s much more likely that the Russians will get exhausted before the Ukrainian problems come to a breaking point,” he told Reuters.

On Monday, the U.S.-based Institute for the Study of War said Kyiv’s forces were now “actively challenging the positional character of the war” and could soon be capable of staging limited mechanized assaults.

‘FORTRESS BELT’

Russian troops are bearing down on eastern Ukraine’s “Fortress Belt” where fighting is raging inside the strategic city of Kostiantynivka, its southern end.

The constellation of heavily fortified cities anchors Ukrainian defenses. Capturing it would position Russia to threaten the rest of the Donbas.

Biletsky, whose forces hold over one-tenth of the total front line, said his troops were firmly holding the flank around Sloviansk, the belt’s northern bastion, and forcing Russia to attack the city head-on.

Such costly assaults have helped drain Russian forces and led to heavy losses of field commanders, he said, in what he described as a professional degradation of Moscow’s military.

“The lack of personnel no longer allows them to advance the way they did, for example, a year ago,” said Biletsky.

Biletsky said it was too early to draw conclusions from Kyiv’s recent success, but that Ukraine could capitalize on it by continuing mid-range attacks and advancing “carefully”.

Moscow is “radically losing” in battlefield communications because of Musk’s crackdown on use of Starlink, Biletsky said.

But he described the sides at parity in evolving technology – with Ukraine leading in unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) and heavy bomber drones, and Russia winning the race for fibre-optic drones, which cannot be jammed.

A potential blueprint for a modernized Ukrainian army, his corps has led efforts to transform training and integrate new technology such as UGVs as an important part of its battlefield strategy.

Biletsky’s units lead the way in deploying stealthy kamikaze drones and robots armed with machine guns or rocket launchers to replace significant portions of infantrymen, aiming for 30% by 2027, he said.

The next “revolution” will allow commanders to stage more “creative” combined assault operations while conserving precious troops, Biletsky said.

“It will happen this year, and I think we’ll show how our corps is a vivid example of it,” he said.