Russia’s war in Ukraine is entering a new phase, with Ukraine inflicting increasingly serious damage on Russia’s energy infrastructure while its own ability to defend against Russia’s expanding ballistic missile campaign is being weakened by a shortage of Patriot interceptors that the U.S. and its allies cannot quickly replace.

Ukraine’s long range drone campaign against Russian oil infrastructure is producing measurable results, with Russian refineries processing about 3.6 million barrels per day in July, the lowest level since 2002 and roughly 1 third below normal seasonal levels, following strikes against facilities in Ryazan, Syzran, Volgograd, Krasnodar, Nizhnekamsk and other parts of the country.

The range of the campaign has also expanded considerably, with Ukrainian drones flying more than 750 miles into Russia and reaching industrial facilities in Tatarstan that Moscow had spent much of the war treating as effectively beyond Ukraine’s strike range, forcing Russia to defend an energy network spread across thousands of miles rather than concentrating air defenses around areas close to Ukraine.

The physical damage is only part of the problem because some Russian refineries rely on specialized foreign equipment that became significantly harder to replace after Western sanctions were imposed, meaning damaged components can require months to source through third countries or sanctions evasion networks while Ukraine can return to the same facility before repairs from the previous strike have been completed.

Ukraine has also expanded the campaign beyond refineries and into the infrastructure Russia uses to export crude, with Black Sea terminals and tankers increasingly coming under attack and Novorossiysk struck twice within a week, placing pressure on Russia’s ability to process oil domestically while simultaneously threatening the routes used to export crude that cannot be refined.

The effects are beginning to reach ordinary Russians through fuel shortages, rationing and higher prices in some regions, while Moscow has restricted exports of gasoline, diesel and aviation fuel in an effort to preserve domestic supplies and prevent disruption to the refining sector from becoming a broader economic problem.

For much of the war, the Kremlin has managed to keep daily life relatively insulated from the fighting for Russians living far from the Ukrainian border, but the expansion of Ukrainian strikes deep into the country is making that increasingly difficult as energy infrastructure is damaged, airports are disrupted and civilians are killed hundreds of miles from the front.

A strike on Nizhnekamsk killed 13 people, including a child, giving the Kremlin civilian casualties it can use to justify retaliation while also demonstrating that industrial centers previously considered secure are now within reach of Ukrainian weapons.

Russia cannot quickly eliminate that vulnerability by repairing individual refineries or placing air defense systems around every major industrial facility, leaving Moscow with another option it has repeatedly used during the war: increasing the cost imposed on Ukraine through larger missile attacks against cities, energy infrastructure and military targets.

Ukraine’s Patriot Problem

Ukraine’s success with long range drones does not solve its increasingly serious air defense problem because the weapons being used to damage Russian refineries cannot replace the Patriot interceptors required to defeat Russian ballistic missiles.

The Patriot shortage has become particularly severe following the U.S. and allied expenditure of interceptors during the war with Iran, with CSIS assessing that the U.S. possessed more than 2,300 Patriot interceptors before the conflict began on February 28, compared with an estimated inventory of roughly 800 now.

The scale of the expenditure became apparent during the opening phase of the conflict, when the U.S. and Gulf partners fired 943 Patriot interceptors during the first 96 hours alone, consuming in several days a stockpile that requires years of production to replace and drawing from the same limited industrial base that supplies Ukraine.

Ukraine is already seeing the consequences during Russian ballistic missile attacks, including one recent pre dawn barrage in which Russia launched 27 ballistic missiles, many toward Kyiv, killing 9 people and wounding more than 30.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukrainian forces intercepted only 1 ballistic missile during the attack and attributed the failure directly to the lack of available Patriot interceptors, while another Russian barrage against the capital region killed 17 people.

Ukraine still possesses Patriot launchers, radars and trained crews, but those systems provide little protection against ballistic missiles when PAC 3 MSE interceptors are unavailable, allowing Russia to exploit an ammunition shortage without first having to destroy the batteries themselves.

H2 Russia Is Expanding Missile Production Russia is increasing missile production at the same time Western interceptor inventories are being depleted, creating an industrial imbalance that is becoming more important to the course of the war than the number of launchers either side has deployed.

Ukrainian military intelligence assessed Russia’s monthly production target for the 9M723 Iskander ballistic missile at 60, but Russian factories exceeded that target in July by producing 65 Iskanders alongside 87 Kh 101 cruise missiles.

Russia has also more than doubled planned production of the RM 48U missile used by S 400 systems, with more than 480 expected to be manufactured in 2026 compared with slightly more than 200 in 2025, while Russian forces have increasingly used the missile against ground targets on ballistic trajectories despite it originally being designed as an air defense weapon.

Ukrainian military intelligence assesses that Russia can now manufacture more than 200 cruise and ballistic missiles each month and can launch roughly 100 ballistic missiles against Ukraine every month without reducing its overall stockpile, giving Moscow the ability to maintain a sustained strike campaign rather than relying primarily on weapons accumulated before the war.

Western production is moving in the opposite direction relative to demand, with Lockheed Martin working to increase PAC 3 MSE production to 650 interceptors annually by 2027 while Russia alone plans to manufacture as many as 700 Iskander ballistic missiles this year.

That comparison does not account for the Patriot interceptors required by the U.S. military, European allies, Gulf states and other operators facing their own missile threats, meaning Ukraine is competing for a limited supply of interceptors that must also replenish stockpiles depleted elsewhere.

The pressure is not confined to air defense, with the Kiel Institute finding that military assistance to Ukraine during the first half of 2026 remained roughly level with the previous year while financial and humanitarian support declined 41 percent.

Ukraine has therefore reached a point where its ability to strike increasingly valuable targets inside Russia is improving while its ability to absorb Russia’s retaliation depends on an interceptor supply chain that is struggling to match Russian missile production and simultaneous demand elsewhere.

The Risk Is Moving Beyond Ukraine

The implications extend beyond Ukraine because Western intelligence agencies are increasingly examining whether Russia could use the coming years to challenge NATO directly, particularly if Moscow concludes that European military readiness and U.S. commitments have created a temporary opportunity.

The Wall Street Journal reported on August 7 that U.S. intelligence assessments had shifted from the earlier assumption that President Vladimir Putin was unlikely to confront NATO while Russia remained heavily committed in Ukraine, with current assessments considering possible Russian action against a NATO member between this fall and 2029.

Poland and the Baltic states are considered among the most exposed, although the scenario Western officials are examining is not necessarily a conventional Russian invasion involving armored formations crossing a NATO border.

A confrontation could instead begin with cyberattacks, sabotage, unidentified armed personnel, attacks on infrastructure or a limited territorial incursion deliberately calibrated to create uncertainty over whether the incident warrants invoking NATO’s Article 5 collective defense clause.

The probability of a major Russian attack remains low, but incidents involving Russian weapons on NATO territory have already demonstrated how easily the war can cross national borders, including a Russian drone that struck an apartment building in Romania in May and cruise missiles that came down in Poland in July.

Germany’s foreign minister has said German intelligence believes Russia is building the capability to wage war against NATO by 2029, while the Czech military’s chief of the general staff said in March that NATO military leaders could no longer rule out a direct confrontation with Russia.

The timeframe matters because the warning now being discussed is not simply that Russia could move against NATO within the next 1 or 2 years, but that a period of elevated risk extends through roughly 2029 while several major European rearmament programs are not expected to close critical capability gaps until around 2035.

That leaves several years during which Russia could expand missile production, rebuild forces damaged in Ukraine and increase ammunition stocks while European governments are still rebuilding inventories and industrial capacity depleted after years of limited defense spending and large transfers of weapons to Ukraine.

Ukraine is therefore fighting 2 different industrial contests at the same time: one in which its drones are forcing Russia to spend more money protecting and repairing an enormous energy network, and another in which Russia is manufacturing the ballistic missiles Ukraine has fewer interceptors available to stop.

The next phase of the war will depend heavily on whether Western Patriot deliveries return at meaningful volume, whether Ukraine can field domestic ballistic missile defenses that work repeatedly outside controlled testing, how quickly Russia restores damaged refining capacity and whether Moscow continues expanding missile production faster than the West can replenish the interceptors being consumed in Ukraine and elsewhere.

The battlefield advantage will increasingly belong to the side that can replace weapons and infrastructure faster than the other side can destroy them.