The billowing clouds of smoke over Moscow after Ukraine’s drones hit the Russian capital’s largest oil refinery this week could not have made it clearer: Kyiv’s technological advances have left Vladimir Putin’s forces playing catch-up.
Since Russia’s president ordered the full-scale invasion in 2022, Moscow’s forces have relied on outmanning and outgunning Ukraine on the battlefield while using air strikes to hit cities and energy infrastructure far beyond the front line.
But Ukrainian innovations in mid- and long-range drones have destroyed air bases, army convoys and oil refineries hundreds of kilometres into Russian territory. Meanwhile, Moscow’s troops captured just 164 sq km of territory between February and May, against 1,151 sq km in the same period last year, according to Black Bird Group, a Finnish war monitoring group.
“The problem for Russia is that the current tactics do not provide the tools to enable larger successes, and the Russians haven’t been able to find new tools,” said Black Bird’s co-founder Emil Kastehelmi.
Russia’s offensive usually experiences a lull in the late winter and early spring before picking up in May. But its advances have shown no sign of resuming across the frontline in June.
Russian commanders still order small groups of soldiers to assault a battlefield saturated with drones, in often deadly attempts to find gaps in Ukrainian lines.
But Kyiv’s advances in drone warfare have turned the tables on Moscow.
“Robotification has made troop numbers much less important, which has changed the fortunes for the Kyiv regime,” said a “person involved in the war effort. “You need 10 or 20 thousand drone operators, not hundreds of thousands of men sitting in trenches. So the face of the war is changing.”
The drone war has also cut significantly into the Kremlin’s manpower advantage. According to Ukrainian officials, Russia has lost more men on the battlefield than it can recruit to replace them for nearly half a year.
Russian budget data indicates it recruited 71,216 men in the first quarter of 2026, compared with 89,601 over the same period last year, according to Janis Kluge, a Russia expert at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.
“The Russian state is either struggling to find belated answers to the enemy’s innovative new solutions or not finding them at all,” a person involved in back-channel talks said.
Where Ukraine has expanded its drone and missile strikes, isolating the Kremlin’s forces on the front lines and cutting off supply chains, Russia’s elite Rubikon drone unit has failed to master the same capabilities, the person added.
“They’re technically backward, can’t scale it up and don’t have [connectivity],” the person said. “It’s very telling. You can’t get by using the ‘gunpowder empire’ methods [of artillery and gunfire] anymore.”
Ukraine’s new, relentless drone campaign is built around strikes at a so-called “middle-range” depth of about 150km beyond the frontline.
Since May, hundreds of drones of all types have flown towards the land corridor to Crimea, a crucial highway Russia’s forces use to resupply the Ukrainian peninsula Moscow annexed in 2014, as well as the troops deployed on the southern front.
“At this point, we’re hitting trucks every day,” said Artem Bielienkov, a former executive in the agriculture business now serving as chief of staff in Ukraine’s 412th ‘Nemesis’ drone brigade. Russian troops wait longer for resupplies of fuel or ammunition and logistics units are resorting to smaller, less visible trucks or are travelling through rougher village paths rather than the smooth R-280 highway.
“It’s not critical, but it is painful” for the Russian military, Bielienkov said.
Moscow is attempting to respond to the new challenges by launching a major campaign to attract recruits to drone units such as Rubikon.
But the shift has come with its own growing pains. Russia’s defence sector is operating at close to capacity, with record-low unemployment making it more difficult to attract more skilled workers to cutting-edge technologies including drone production, according to three western intelligence officials.
Production has largely stagnated outside unmanned systems and long-range weapons, the areas where Russia is devoting the most resources, the officials said.
While output has increased, “the military industry has plateaued”, one of the officials said. “They maxed out all their capacity. There’s no way to step it up without investment and that takes years.”
Putin and his top officials have been reduced to insisting Russia still has the upper hand in the war while playing down the increasingly damaging effects of Ukraine’s strike campaign.
The Russian president spends most of his time micromanaging the war effort and receives briefings from Valery Gerasimov, his top commander, sometimes as much as twice a day, said two former senior Kremlin officials.
“He thinks it’s a question of time. It might be faster or slower but he’ll get it,” one of the former senior Kremlin officials said. “Putin’s very much under the influence of the military, who are really good at stringing him along. He understands that, but he really believes them and lets them do it. If I were listening to Gerasimov’s reports three times a day from dawn until dusk, I’d perceive reality differently too.”
During a national holiday earlier this month, Putin met a group of servicemen in the Kremlin who repeatedly asked him when Russia’s forces would develop an answer to Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite network, which Ukraine uses to guide attack drones on the frontline.
One of the servicemen said: “The adversary is introducing swarms of strike drones controlled by AI systems. We need to surpass the adversary in this competition, not lag behind.”
Putin — to the servicemen’s apparent bewilderment — insisted Russia had already developed and introduced its own answer to Starlink, which he said worked but would take time to scale. Defence minister Andrei Belousov then told him only 16 units had been launched, which Putin said was “absolutely insufficient”.
Asked a third time when Russia would catch up to Ukraine’s technological advances, Putin complained Moscow was facing the collective might of Nato countries in a long rant that included historical references to Napoleon and Hitler. “There are a lot of things the adversary doesn’t have, and we do, and it’ll be bigger and better,” he concluded.
But Russia still retains the capacity to inflict significant damage on Ukraine.
On the frontline, gliding bombs launched by Russian jets have been relentlessly pounding Ukrainian dugouts, tree lines and apartment buildings in record numbers. Ukraine’s shortage of anti-air systems also allows Russian planes to launch the Soviet-era bombs from closer to the frontline and to hit Ukrainian positions with frightening accuracy.
“They hit anywhere they think a Ukrainian position may be,” one Ukrainian drone pilot operating near the stronghold of Sloviansk told the FT.
“They raze everything with KABs [gliding bombs] and then infiltrate soldiers one by one. We’ll destroy a dozen and one will manage to hide,” the soldier said.
The tactic has helped Russian units grind forward inside Kostyantynivka, a city of about 65,000 residents before 2022 that now serves as the southern tip of a string of cities forming a crucial defensive belt for Ukraine in the Donetsk region. Ukrainian troops deployed in the city have not been able to prevent Russian squads from infiltrating within the town “from all sides”, the Ukrainian war monitoring group DeepState wrote on Tuesday.
But Russian advances have been nearly absent outside of Donbas, with Ukrainian troops managing several localised counter-attacks across the frontline.
Russia is projected to launch more than 75,000 guided bombs this year compared with about 60,000 in 2025, according to a report by a Ukrainian military research institute.
Gliding bombs “are still a problem that Ukraine hasn’t managed to find a solution for”, acknowledged Oleksiy Melnyk, a former Ukraine air force lieutenant colonel and now co-director of the Razumkov Centre think-tank in Kyiv.
Massive waves of drones and missiles have also been launched at Kyiv on three separate occasions in the past month alone. Ukraine’s air force has in particular struggled to deal with ballistic and hypersonic missiles amid a persistent shortage of sophisticated anti-air munitions.
The new pace of attacks “could be a response” to Russia’s problems on the battlefield, according to Konrad Muzyka, director of Rochan Consulting, a Polish analytical group monitoring the war.
Russia “will seek different ways to influence Ukrainian decision-making but, apart from nukes, I don’t think they can really do much to change the course of how the fighting is going to develop over the course of the next months, unless they announce another partial mobilisation”, he said.
In Moscow, the stagnant war effort has made it obvious that “raising the level of mobilising human, industrial and economic resources is the only way out”, the person involved in back-channel talks said. “The question is what form it takes and how they dress it up.”
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