Fire at a plant in Russia. Stock photo: Astra Telegram channel
Ukraine is conducting increasingly successful airstrikes on targets inside Russia, and Ukrainian drone and missile attacks are likely to continue causing progressively greater damage as pressure on Russia’s air defence systems grows.
Source: Ants Kiviselg, Head of the Estonian Defence Forces Intelligence Centre, as reported by European Pravda, citing Estonian public broadcaster ERR
Quote: “The constantly rising intensity and expanding geographical scope of Ukraine’s drone and missile attacks, along with the increasing number of attack weapons and wider ranges of those weapons, is certainly likely to pose more and more serious problems for the Russian Federation in the near future.”
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Details: As examples from the past week, Kiviselg pointed to Ukrainian strikes on a missile and artillery ammunition depot in Russia’s Kostroma Oblast and on a defence plant in Lipetsk Oblast.
Quote: “The Russian Federation has stated in publicly available sources that Ukraine has attacked targets in Moscow Oblast on a daily basis so far this year.”
Details: Kiviselg said that given the number of high-value targets and their wide distribution across Russia, as well as the volume of air defence munitions expended by the Russian armed forces during the war and the number of air defence systems that have been destroyed, “it can be estimated that in 2026, the activity as well as accuracy of Ukraine’s long-range strikes will rise, and damage to the Russian armed forces and economy will increase even further”.
Quote: “This, in turn, reduces Russia’s ability to both continue the war and develop the Russian narrative that it has inexhaustible resources and therefore the ability to wage war for as long as necessary. In other words, we can see that both the Russian Federation’s defence capabilities and its resilience to these types of attacks against Ukraine are likely to decline in 2026.”
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