Russia needs to learn that missile bombardment is a game that two can play

Ukraine has been bombarding Russia since early in Russia’s wider war on Ukraine beginning in February 2024. But the scale of Ukrainian attacks on strategic targets inside Russia is minuscule – especially relative to the scale of Russian attacks on Ukraine.

That could change – and soon. Ukraine is developing more and more munitions it can use against targets inside Russia. And there’s a chance, as early as this week, Ukrainian forces will finally get permission to also use the best American- and European-made munitions on Russian territory.

All that is to say, Ukraine may have a chance to chip away at Russia’s deep-strike edge.

The wider Russian invasion began on Feb. 24, 2022 with a powerful wave of Russian missile attacks on Ukrainian military bases. A few months later, the Russians also started hitting cities. By September 2024, Russian forces had fired around 10,000 cruise and ballistic missiles as well as several thousand long-range explosive drones at cities across Ukraine, killing thousands of civilians and badly damaging the country’s power grid.

And in early 2023, the Russians added a key munition to their arsenal: a satellite-guided glide bomb that travels 25 miles or farther under pop-out wings. Russian warplanes lob as many as a hundred of the “KAB” bombs every day, usually targeting front-line towns.

The Ukrainians struck back within days of the wider invasion. Like the Russians, the Ukrainians exclusively targeted military bases at first – and usually within a few tens of miles of the Russia-Ukraine border.

But the target set widened as the war ground on. Today Ukraine’s long-range drones frequently strike Russian headquarters, airfields, industrial sites and oil refineries as far as 1,100 miles from the border. The Ukrainians also deploy ballistic and cruise missiles as well as saboteurs against some targets closer to the border.

The problem with the Ukrainian strike campaign isn’t reach – it’s capacity. Where the Russians hit the Ukrainians with around a hundred bombs, 10 or so ballistic and cruise missiles and several long-range drones every day, the Ukrainians hit back with just a small handful of bombs, missiles and drones. The Russian bombardment is probably 10 times bigger than the Ukrainian bombardment – and 10 times as damaging.

The problem, for Ukraine, is twofold. Its capacity to produce its own deep-strike weapons is limited. And while Ukraine has received thousands of missiles and glide bombs from its allies, these same allies – fearing escalation – restrict where the Ukrainians can use the munitions. Generally speaking, Ukraine is barred from striking targets more than a few miles inside Russia with any foreign-supplied weapon: the suggestion is that letting Ukraine strike back would be in some way “escalatory”. In fact, of course, it is the Russians who have already escalated.

Desperate to circumvent the restrictions, Ukraine has been developing new strike weapons. Since 2022, it has introduced the Neptune and Palianytsia cruise missiles as well as a bewildering array of long-range strike drones. And earlier this month, the first video appeared online depicting a new made-in-Ukraine glide bomb undergoing a test flight under the wing of a Ukrainian air force Sukhoi Su-24 bomber.

Between its homemade drones, missiles and glide bombs, Ukraine can strike targets farther than a thousand miles inside Russia. But not very often. It’s possible to count the number of Neptune strikes in the last 30 months on 10 fingers. There’s been just one confirmed Palianytsia raid, in August. The new glide bomb is still in testing.

Can Ukraine scale up production of these new weapons? It’s unclear, but it’s imperative the Ukrainian government tries. With targeted injections of capital from the Ukrainian and allied governments, Ukrainian industry managed to build, from scratch, a sprawling network of small workshops that now produce more than 100,000 short-range explosive drones every month.

Duplicating that feat, but for cruise missiles and bombs, is difficult. It’s one thing to piece together a two-pound FPV drone using parts anyone can order online or produce with a 3D printer. It’s another to build a satellite seeker head for a glide bomb or assemble a miniature turbojet engine for a cruise missile.

Ukraine might get some relief as it struggles to establish large-scale production of new deep-strike munitions. In early September, a shipment of 200 Iranian-made Fath-360 ballistic missiles arrived at a Russian port on the Caspian Sea. This first consignment of Iranian missiles represents a “dramatic escalation” of the war in Ukraine, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said.

And it’s set to be a major topic of conversation as Blinken and his UK counterpart, Foreign Secretary David Lammy, travel to Kyiv this week. Blinken hinted that looser restrictions on Ukraine’s foreign-made weaponry are in the cards. “We’ll be listening intently” as Ukrainian officials plead their case, Blinken said.

With permission to strike targets deep inside Russia with American and European munitions, Ukraine could intensify its bombardment now. And then further intensify it once it’s producing significant numbers of locally-designed munitions.