Back when the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was in its early stages, the cry from the West was to supply Ukraine with enough artillery shells and tanks to blunt the Russian onslaught. Now, well into the war’s fifth year, this is a far different fight, one that Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, says has become a decisive “battle in the sky.” It is a decisive moment, too, for the West.
The ground war is at a stalemate. Russia is still clawing away at Ukrainian territory, but at a snail’s pace and extraordinary cost. Ukraine says it inflicted almost 40,000 Russian dead and wounded in June, or about 1,300 casualties per square kilometer “seized or infiltrated,” according to the Institute for the Study of War — an attrition rate 19 times what it was a year earlier. “Ukrainian forces are becoming increasingly effective at simultaneously slowing Russian advances and inflicting heavier losses,” the institute said.
The battle in the sky, by contrast, is not for territory: It is a grinding duel of attrition, destruction and death, intended to erode the enemy’s ability and will to carry on.
Russia is pummeling Ukraine with salvo after deadly salvo of drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles; Ukraine is using ever more sophisticated and longer-range drones to drive Russia’s fleet away from Ukraine in the Black Sea, starve Russian-occupied Crimea and, most effectively, strike oil facilities and military installations deep inside Russia. Long lines for gas in Moscow and black smoke billowing from a refinery in distant Omsk, and images of victims being pulled out of demolished apartment blocks in Kyiv, tell the rest of the story.
“If you stop the enemy on the battlefield, if you stop the war on land, and if you deny him dominance at sea … then the next battlefield becomes the sky,” Mr. Zelensky said in a recent interview with The Financial Times. “And frankly, in that contest it matters far less whose territory is larger.”
What matters, he made clear, is to have the means to block the Russian fusillades, and there lies the current crunch. After America’s large-scale expenditure of crucial missiles against Iran, including the prized Patriot interceptors, precious few Patriots remain to share with Ukraine. Mr. Zelensky said that in the intense Russian attack on July 6, Ukraine shot down drones and cruise missiles but did not have enough interceptors to stop a single ballistic missile. Ukraine simply doesn’t have enough Patriots to do the job. Russia, meanwhile, is producing about 60 Iskander missiles — the one most often fired at Ukraine — per month, according to Ukrainian military intelligence.
So interceptors, and specifically Patriots, have replaced artillery shells as the indispensable weapon for Ukraine in what may well be the end game of this war. That was at least part of the thinking behind Mr. Zelensky’s government reshuffle announced on Sunday; the “most important” matter for the new government to address, he said, was the procurement and production of Patriot missiles.
The money is there — NATO has pledged $80 billion in military aid for Ukraine, and individual NATO countries have allocated billions more. President Trump also seems to be shifting his favor back toward Ukraine after its recent military successes.
At the NATO summit meeting in Ankara, Turkey, last week, he called Ukraine’s leadership “ingenious,” and said he’d license Ukraine to produce the Patriot missiles it so urgently needs. Mr. Zelensky, reflecting the hard lessons of a rocky relationship, told The Financial Times, “President Trump wants to be where there’s success.”
Mr. Trump acknowledged that he hadn’t yet raised the license matter with the two main manufacturers of the missiles, Lockheed Martin and RTX. And even if they were to agree, it would take years for Ukraine to start full production. In the meantime, Ukraine has to compete with U.S. armed forces and 16 other foreign clients waiting for Patriot deliveries, and these fancy weapons take time to put together.
Each $3.9 million missile takes about two years to make, and Lockheed currently produces only about 600 a year. In the 39 days of bombardment before the cease-fire with Iran began, the United States used up about half of its inventory of 2,330 Patriots, so just replacing them would take three and a half years, according to an estimate by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
That is not what Mr. Zelensky wants to hear. “It is simply absurd that, in the modern world, production has still not been scaled up to the level actually required to protect people from ballistic terror,” he said in one of his nightly video addresses. But even if Ukraine were to receive all the interceptors Lockheed turns out, it would not be enough to block all the ballistic missiles Russia throws at Ukraine.
That does not mean Ukraine is doomed. Far from it. The Ukrainians have displayed remarkable ingenuity in adapting to new forms of warfare, most notably in the development of sophisticated, inexpensive and lethal drones. Following the old precept of “shoot the archer, not the arrow,” Ukraine has been increasingly targeting military-industrial facilities deep in Russia with considerable effect, as evidenced by Russia’s recent ban on the export of diesel fuel. Ukraine’s relentless drone attacks on Crimea and Russian shipping in the Sea of Azov have also been highly effective.
Authorities in Crimea have declared a state of emergency because of acute fuel shortages and power outages. In addition to drones, whole battalions of tracked and wheeled robots fight on the ground, conducting thousands of missions every month to haul ammunition, evacuate the wounded, lay mines and hold land.
It is what David Petraeus and Clara Kaluderovic, writing in The Wall Street Journal, called “adaptation warfare,” and for now, Ukraine is doing it better. As Mr. Zelensky put it, “Today, I believe victory in this war belongs to whoever is smarter.”
Overall, it is difficult to fathom how Russians have put up for so long with Vladimir Putin’s maniacal mission to destroy Ukraine, given the growing pain of Ukrainian strikes, a battlefield death toll of about 450,000, deteriorating living standards and the revival of a Soviet-style police state.
Yet Mr. Putin continues to believe that he can bring Kyiv to its knees with regular barrages. That makes it imperative for Ukraine, at this critical juncture of the war, to find ways of surviving the dearth of Patriot missiles while it hammers away at Russia. The Ukrainians are working with various European partners to develop their own missile defense systems and have already deployed an electronic warfare weapon called Lima, which messes with satellite navigation signals.
In the meantime, it is imperative for the United States and Europe to do what they can to help Ukraine protect itself. In his last undertaking before his death, Senator Lindsey Graham had traveled to Ukraine. From there, he said he had reached agreement with the White House on a bipartisan bill to sanction buyers of Russian oil. That bill should be quickly advanced. Mr. Trump also should urgently act on his pledge to grant Ukraine a license to produce Patriots, and also to accelerate production at home and in Europe. Europeans, too, should share as many air-defense missiles as they can and redouble their efforts to help Ukraine develop new systems. That may not block Russian missiles right away, but it would be a powerful message to Mr. Putin that his time is fast running out.
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