Key Points and Summary – Ukraine has shifted strategy from the front to Russia’s rear, using long-range drones and missiles to hit refineries, depots, and industry—2,000 km deep in some cases.
-The campaign is generating fuel shortages, airport shutdowns, rolling blackouts, and rising costs that rattle Russian citizens and elites.
President Donald J. Trump participates in a bilateral meeting with the President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin during the G20 Japan Summit Friday, June 28, 2019, in Osaka, Japan. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)
-Kyiv aims to crack “deathnomics” by attacking the revenues and comforts that sustain the war.
-As defenses stretch to protect refineries and cities, Russia faces shrinking oil income, tax hikes, and a tightening budget.
-With Ukraine scaling domestic strike systems and navigation that beats GPS jamming, the pressure inside Moscow will grow—and the Kremlin can’t ignore it.
Ukraine Is Bringing the War Home to Moscow
The last thing Vladimir Putin expected from his bunker in Moscow in early 2022 was that his army would be ground down fighting for mere inches of territory more than three and a half years into the full-scale invasion. Now, Ukrainian drones buzz across Russia, as Kyiv strikes oil refineries, including one 2,000 kilometers away on Putin’s birthday. For the past two years, Kyiv has increasingly brought the war home to Moscow’s elites.
Ukraine On the March
In the days leading up to May’s Victory Day parade, Ukrainian drones were already buzzing near Moscow. Kyiv said China asked Ukraine not to strike the Kremlin while Xi Jinping was in attendance, likely because it doubted Moscow’s ability to protect him.
For years, both Russian and foreign observers saw Putin as a shrewd, calculating statesman—a leader whose luck and timing always seemed to favor him, until his army met the Ukrainians on the battlefield.
President Donald J. Trump welcomes Russian President Vladimir Putin to Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Anchorage, Alaska, August 15, 2025 (DoD photo by Benjamin Applebaum)
Putin’s rise to power in the early 2000s coincided with a surge in global gas prices that filled Russia’s coffers. Throughout his presidency, a social contract has existed: Putin could pursue his imperial ambitions, as long as ordinary Russians didn’t suffer too extensively, and as long as the rent-seeking elites could pillage the country’s resources. Putin thought it all too easy after his 2014 invasion of Crimea, when the West was too scared to act.
The 2022 invasion proved a nightmare for the Kremlin. Bogged down in a war of attrition, Russia resorted to “meatgrinder” assaults against Ukrainian defensive positions, and the bodies began piling up. Kyiv realized that killing Russian soldiers en masse would not be enough to stop them.
As long as there was money to be made, Russians would keep fighting. So Ukraine invested heavily in a long-range drone fleet, striking at the oil revenues that fund the Kremlin’s war machine.
Deathnomics
Kyiv understands that increasing pressure on both the Russian public and the elites is key to ending the war. “That is why only pressure can stop this war,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a televised evening speech in early October.
A phenomenon that Russian economist Vladislav Inozemtsev calls “deathnomics” has created a new artificial middle class in Russia, as for many, the war is a way to earn income they wouldn’t have otherwise received. Mothers and wives sometimes encourage loved ones to sign up rather than fall into unemployment or alcoholism, as death payments and battlefield wages can enrich a family. Over time, many Russians became comfortable with the war’s costs.
Putin, speaking to Russian women who had lost their sons in the war in November 2022, told one mother: “Some people die of vodka, and their lives go unnoticed. But your son really lived and achieved his goal. He didn’t die in vain.”
Yet that uneasy stability is starting to crack. Relentless drone strikes from Ukraine are beginning to reverse that complacency. Attacks on fuel depots and energy infrastructure have produced widespread fuel shortages; a thriving black market for gasoline has emerged in some regions. First, people complained about rising prices, then about empty pumps across Russia.
In late September, stations in Moscow and the surrounding region ran dry of Russia’s most popular 92- and 95-octane gasoline grades, forcing drivers to hunt across multiple stations as prices soared above 100 rubles per liter.
The Russian People are Bracing
Russian media recently reported that older Russians who remember the collapse of the Soviet Union are now stocking up on shelf-stable foods in anticipation of further shortages driven by the fuel shortages.
Cities such as Belgorod have endured rolling blackouts after Ukrainian strikes on energy sites. “They cannot be allowed to feel comfortable. And when they no longer feel comfortable, they will begin to raise questions with their leadership,” Zelensky said.
In Moscow and other regions throughout 2025, airports have repeatedly shut down or delayed flights due to Ukrainian drone attacks. Between January and May, Russian airports were shut down 217 times due to Ukrainian drone attacks – more than in all of 2023 and 2024 combined – disrupting tens of thousands of passengers and costing airlines over 1 billion rubles. On September 22, The Moscow Times reported that more than 200 flights were delayed or canceled in the Russian capital following a mass drone strike.
Kyiv’s long-range drones often rely on Russian mobile networks for navigation and reconnaissance, prompting the Kremlin to impose widespread blackouts across dozens of regions. These outages have tripled since June, costing Russia an estimated $557 million per hour in lost productivity, with a $115 impact in Moscow alone.
Moscow’s military budget is also shrinking for the first time since 2022, dropping from $163 billion to $156 billion amid inflation and sanctions. Putin is raising taxes and cutting spending to keep the war going. Russia’s oil and gas export revenues fell by about 25% in September compared with the same month last year. Speaking on October 19, Zelensky said he expects Russia to face a budget deficit of nearly $100 billion by 2026.
Meanwhile, Ukraine is scaling production of long-range missiles and strike systems designed to further squeeze Russia’s logistics and energy lifelines, which will intensify the economic pain for the Kremlin.
At the same time, Ukraine’s defense firms are rapidly innovating. Denis Shtilerman, chief designer at Fire Point, the company behind the FP-1 drone, responsible for about 60% of deep strikes on Russian territory, and the domestic FP-5 Flamingo cruise missile, said it remains “very difficult to reach Moscow” because of its dense air-defense ring and helicopter patrols. Yet Fire Point is developing drones that can navigate without GPS, using a low-altitude night map-matching system to help overcome electronic warfare defenses.
However, the balance is already shifting. In a May interview, Putin said, “We have enough strength to bring what was started in 2022 to a logical conclusion.” Buoyed by overconfidence, he dismissed repeated, at times desperate, attempts by Trump to negotiate a peace deal. But throughout 2025, Ukraine was growing stronger technologically. Now it is Zelensky who cautions Russian leaders to “know where the bomb shelters are.”
Following Trump’s last attempt to meet with Putin in Budapest, which was called off after Russia refused to soften its hardline stance on the war, The Wall Street Journal reported that Washington had quietly lifted a key restriction on Ukraine’s use of Western-supplied long-range missiles. The White House denied the report. Yet on October 22, Kyiv used Western-supplied Storm Shadow missiles to strike an explosives plant in Bryansk, penetrating Russian air defenses.
If Ukraine continues deep-strikes at factories that support the Kremlin’s war effort, Russia will be forced to stretch its already-thin air defenses even further. That, in turn, would allow larger waves of Ukrainian drones to increase pressure on Moscow and even St. Petersburg, forcing the political and economic elites there to confront the threat of war at home.
And if history is any guide, once the war’s pressure intensifies on the Muscovites, even the Kremlin’s walls cannot stand unshaken.
About the Author: David Kirichenko
David Kirichenko is an Associate Research Fellow at the Henry Jackson Society. His work on warfare has been featured in the Atlantic Council, Center for European Policy Analysis, and the Modern Warfare Institute, among many others. He can be found on X/Twitter @DVKirichenko.
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