Ukraine Wins Deep War but Struggles to Hold Skies

For two years the question hanging over Ukraine was whether it could hold. This week the question quietly changed. With occupied Crimea all but cut off, Russia's summer offensive stalled, and Ukrainian drones reaching factories a thousand kilometres inside Russia, the war Ukraine is now fighting is one it is winning — and the hard questions have become the ones that come with winning. What does Kyiv do about a losing Russia that refuses to lose? And can it keep its own cities standing long enough to find out?

The clearest proof came over Crimea. On June 23 Ukraine's Special Operations Forces, working with the Crimean resistance, destroyed the railway bridge over the North Crimean Canal near Rozdolne, a span the military said "no longer exists" — one of only two rail arteries feeding Russian forces in the south. It was the culmination of a forty-day campaign Zelensky had approved: drones burned the cable ships Volga and Vyatka and the ferry Petropavlovsk at the Zaliv shipyard in Kerch, destroyed an S-400 guarding the strait, and torched fuel and power infrastructure across the peninsula. Russian-installed authorities declared a state of emergency in Crimea and Sevastopol, halted petrol sales to civilians, and watched a fifteen-kilometre traffic queue build at the closed Kerch crossing. Ukrainian troops then raised their flag over the Kinburn Spit, abandoned by Russian forces, with a promise that "one day our tanks will reach Dzhankoi." A senior NATO official confirmed what Kyiv has been claiming for weeks: Russia can no longer effectively resupply the peninsula. Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov's phrase for the strategy — "isolating Crimea with drones" — is, by his ministry's count, working, with military cargo into Crimea down seventy-one percent. The Center for European Policy Analysis now calls it simply the siege of Crimea, and the Kyiv Independent, surveying the same evidence, judged that the drone blockade is starting to bite.

The same logic is being applied to Russia's war economy far beyond Crimea. Ukrainian strikes knocked a Moscow oil refinery offline until 2027, hit the Voronezh missile-electronics plant and the Dubna satellite centre, struck the Orenburg gas plant and Russia's only helium facility, and — in a quieter operation — pro-Ukrainian partisans sabotaged an electrical substation in Taganrog, disrupting drone production at the Atlant-Aero plant. Ukraine's defence ministry says its drones have hit more than 800,000 Russian assets since the start of 2026. Zelensky argues the campaign is forcing Russia to fortify Moscow and the Kerch bridge at the expense of air cover everywhere else, and that the whole effort is "carefully calculated" to push Russia toward peace if the West helps.

What makes this more than a raiding campaign is what is happening — or not happening — on the ground. The front has gone quiet by comparison. Russia's spring-summer offensive, the one that was supposed to break Ukrainian lines, gained just fourteen square kilometres in the whole of May. Pokrovsk remains the bloodiest sector — Ukraine logged 257 separate clashes there on June 26 alone, and Russia threw 44 attacks at the sector in a single day — but the assessment from ISW and others is that Russia can still attack and can no longer turn those attacks into anything operational; Ukrainian drones destroyed more than a hundred Russian artillery systems in May and are blocking the troop rotations Moscow needs to mass. One analysis this week put the larger truth plainly: Putin's invasion has inadvertently turned Ukraine into a major military power. The war's centre of gravity has moved off the trench line and into the deep rear, and that is the domain where Ukraine, not Russia, now sets the pace.

But winning the deep war has exposed where Ukraine is weakest, and it is in the sky over its own cities. The Russian bombs keep coming, and the shield against them is thinning. A guided bomb hit a Kharkiv apartment block; a drone killed three generations of a single family in Sumy; a combined strike on Zaporizhzhia wounded fifteen, including a child; the UN documented 29 civilians killed in Oleshky. The problem is arithmetic. Ukraine needs roughly sixty Patriot interceptors a month to hold off Russia's ballistic and cruise missiles, and the United States — which builds only about 650 a year — has just burned much of its stockpile defending Gulf bases against Iran's drone swarms. The Iran war, in other words, is draining the very missiles that keep Ukrainian apartment blocks standing. Kyiv has signed a contract with Germany for 600 air-defence missiles and is pressing Berlin for Patriots from its reserves, with 35 PAC-3 interceptors reportedly due in the coming weeks. A defence expert quoted this week was blunt that there is no quick fix: the only answers are to keep striking Russian missile production and to extend NATO's own air defences over Ukraine. The week's one humane note was the 76th prisoner exchange, 160 soldiers returned by each side.

The politics moved Ukraine's way, which is exactly why Moscow dug in. The drone successes are reshaping the diplomacy: Trump is visibly warming to Kyiv, Washington has dropped its pose as a neutral mediator and signed a G7 text backing Ukraine's territorial integrity, and Zelensky is using the leverage to argue the war can be ended on Ukrainian terms with enough Western help. Russia's answer was to harden. Putin restated his maximalist aims — ISW assessed that he is using Belarus as a "cognitive warfare" lever, with the Kremlin pressing Minsk to host more drone launches — and Syrsky warned that Russia is preparing to widen the front by some 160 kilometres, forcing Ukraine to raise new brigades. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov flatly rejected any freeze along the current line, and Russia's nationalist hardliners went further, urging Putin to abandon the US talks and consider tactical nuclear weapons after Ukrainian drones reached Moscow. Meanwhile Russia intensified its bombardment of Odesa's grain ports, threatening to cut Ukraine's most valuable export by a third.

That is the shape of Ukraine's summer. The strategy is working: the siege of Crimea is real, the front is holding, and the diplomatic wind has shifted. But the two things that will decide how the next months go are both, in their way, defensive. Can Ukraine keep its air shield stocked faster than the Iran war drains the world's supply of interceptors — and does the strangling of Crimea finally bend Putin toward a settlement, as Zelensky is betting, or toward the wider, more dangerous war his hardliners are demanding? Zelensky warned this week that Russia may try to drag the fighting out longer than the Second World War. Winning the interdiction war, he knows, is not the same thing as ending it.