The Other War Over Ukraine - Can Ukraine Last for Two More Years?

 

The Other War Over Ukraine

Can Ukraine Last for Two More Years Under Russia's Evolving Air Offensive?

Most reporting on Ukraine understandably follows the front line: Russian advances, Ukrainian defenses, territorial gains and losses, and the continuing struggle for soldiers and weapons.

But another war is developing above and behind that front.

It is fought over Kyiv, Odesa and other cities; over power stations, railways, ports and factories; and increasingly over the daily functioning of Ukrainian society. Russia is combining ballistic and cruise missiles with mass-produced attack drones while introducing faster and more difficult-to-intercept variants.

Ukraine is adapting. Europe and NATO are supplying weapons, financing production and beginning to build a broader air-defense architecture around lessons learned in Ukraine.

This creates two urgent questions.
- Can Ukraine and Europe develop and manufacture defensive systems quickly enough when Russia is setting much of the technological and production tempo?
- And can Ukrainian civilian society withstand another two years of an intensifying air war?

A Second War Above Ukraine

Russia's air campaign is not new. The same strategy of attacking Civilian Infrastructure and Civilians as they did in Cheniya and Syria. Ukrainian cities and infrastructure have been attacked since the full-scale invasion began in 2022.
What is changing is its scale and composition.

The Iranian-designed Shahed drone, produced in Russia as the Geran, helped transform the economics of long-range attack. Instead of relying only on expensive missiles, Russia could send relatively cheap one-way attack drones in large numbers.

Ukraine adapted with electronic warfare, mobile gun teams and increasingly interceptor drones. The principle was simple: do not use an expensive surface-to-air missile if a much cheaper weapon can destroy the same target.

Russia is also adapting and faster...

During 2026 it has increasingly introduced faster jet-powered Geran variants. These sharply reduce the defender's detection and interception time and make some inexpensive Ukrainian countermeasures less effective.

The ballistic threat is evolving as well. Russia has modified missiles in the Iskander family to make interception more difficult, including through terminal maneuvering and other countermeasures.

More important than any individual weapon is how Russia combines them. Slow drones, faster jet drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles can arrive as part of the same attack. Ukraine must identify them, determine which present the greatest danger and allocate scarce defensive weapons accordingly.

Russia therefore does not need to invent an unstoppable weapon. It can make successful defense increasingly difficult, by the numbers and by the costs.

The Economics of Air Defense

A less visible contest behind the explosions over Ukrainian cities.
A defender that destroys a relatively inexpensive drone with a million-euro missile may win the engagement while gradually losing the economic competition.

Ukraine therefore needs layers.

Electronic warfare and guns can deal with some drones.
Interceptor drones can destroy others.
Short-range systems deal with more demanding targets.
IRIS-T and NASAMS provide another layer.
Patriot and SAMP/T must be preserved for the most difficult threats, particularly ballistic missiles.

The objective is to match the cheapest effective defensive weapon to each incoming threat.

That makes mass production of inexpensive defensive systems almost as important as acquiring additional Patriots. If Russia can manufacture attack weapons faster and more cheaply than Ukraine and its partners can replace interceptors, even an effective air-defense system can eventually be exhausted.

Ukraine Has Become Europe's Air-Defense Laboratory

This is also changing Ukraine's relationship with Europe.
For much of the war the direction appeared straightforward: Europe and the United States possessed advanced weapons; Ukraine needed them.

Ukraine still urgently needs Western systems and interceptors. But knowledge is increasingly travelling in both directions.

No European NATO military has Ukraine's experience of defending a large country against years of mixed drone and missile attacks. Ukraine has learned to combine sophisticated missile systems with electronic warfare, cheap interceptors, mobile units and rapid technological innovation while under continuous attack.

That experience is becoming directly relevant to Europe's own defense.
European-Ukrainian cooperation increasingly connects battlefield experience with European financing, research and industrial capacity.

The relationship is gradually changing:  Europe → Ukraine  to  Europe ⇄ Ukraine.

Ukraine needs Europe's industrial depth.
Europe needs Ukraine's combat experience and extraordinarily rapid cycle of adaptation.

Europe Is Building a Shield — But It Is Not There Yet

Europe's response can appear confusing because it consists of overlapping national, EU and NATO programmes.

The German-led European Sky Shield Initiative remains an important part, encouraging participating countries to acquire and coordinate layered air- and missile-defense systems.

But a larger architecture is emerging around it.

The EU's European Air Shield is intended to strengthen integrated air and missile defense.
The European Drone Defense Initiative addresses the mass UAV threat. Eastern Flank Watch is intended to combine surveillance, electronic warfare, counter-drone and defensive capabilities along Europe's most exposed frontier. NATO's Integrated Air and Missile Defense system provides the broader command, sensor and interoperability framework.

European-Ukrainian industrial cooperation adds another component: producing drones, interceptors and other systems while incorporating lessons from Ukraine.

These programmes show that Europe increasingly understands the nature of the threat.
But announced capability is not the same as operational capability.

The EU envisages initial Drone Defense and Eastern Flank Watch capacity by the end of 2026, full Drone Defense functionality by the end of 2027 and Eastern Flank Watch by the end of 2028. Other elements of Europe's future air and missile defense extend towards 2030.

Russia's weapons are arriving now. That creates a dangerous transition period.

Concern One: Russia Is Setting the Speed

Russia has an important advantage in this competition: it can continuously test weapons against a real defensive system.

The technological cycle is increasingly measured in months.
Where traditional European defense procurement is measured in years.

Russia has simultaneously made mass production part of its strategy.
The challenge for Europe is therefore not simply to purchase more air-defense systems. It must shorten the entire cycle between Ukrainian battlefield experience, European research, industrial development, procurement and mass production.

Otherwise Europe faces a moving target: a defensive program designed around the Russian threat of 2024 may arrive in 2028 to confront the Russian threat of 2028.

The critical question is whether Europe's much larger economic and technological resources can be converted into military capability quickly enough.

Concern Two: Civilian Ukraine

There is a danger in discussing this contest mainly in terms of weapons and interception percentages.

People live underneath it.

Even if Ukraine destroys most incoming weapons, larger attacks mean that some get through. Damage accumulates.

An electricity substation can be repaired. Repeated attacks on the electricity network create a different problem. The same applies to heating, water, railways, factories, ports, hospitals and housing.

Behind infrastructure stands human behavior.

Families decide whether to remain in Ukraine. Refugees decide whether to return. Businesses decide whether to invest. Workers decide whether they can continue living in vulnerable cities. The government must divert resources into repair. Soldiers have families living under the same attacks.

Air defense therefore protects much more than military installations. It protects economic activity, employment, population retention, public morale and ultimately national resilience.

This is why the next two years matter.

Russia does not have to collapse Ukrainian society to achieve strategic effects. Making everyday life progressively harder can produce cumulative costs: additional migration, declining investment, enormous reconstruction expenditure and greater fatigue after years of war.

Protecting civilians is therefore not separate from sustaining Ukraine's military effort.
It is one of its foundations.

Can Ukraine Last for Two More Years?

There is no simple answer, and current evidence does not justify either confidence or fatalism.

Ukraine has demonstrated extraordinary adaptability and continues to receive substantial European support. European defense spending and production are increasing. Cheap interceptor drones and other new technologies could substantially improve the economics of air defense.

But Ukraine's sustainability increasingly depends on four connected races.

There is a production race: can Ukraine and its partners replenish defensive weapons as quickly as Russia produces offensive ones?

There is a cost race: can cheap attack drones increasingly be defeated by cheap defensive systems, preserving sophisticated missiles for sophisticated threats?

There is an infrastructure race: can Ukraine repair, protect and disperse essential systems faster than Russia can degrade them?

And there is a human-resilience race: can Ukrainian society continue living, working and maintaining confidence under another two winters of repeated attack?

The first two are principally military-industrial problems. The latter two turn them into a strategic European problem.

If Ukrainian air defence weakens because interceptor supplies cannot keep pace, the consequences will appear not only on military maps but in electricity supplies, industrial production, civilian casualties and migration—and eventually in Ukraine's capacity to sustain the land war.

The Race to 2028

There are reasons for cautious confidence. Europe is no longer treating drones as a secondary battlefield phenomenon. Air and missile defence has moved towards the centre of European defence planning. Production is expanding, and Ukraine is increasingly becoming a partner in European technological and industrial development rather than simply a recipient of Western weapons.

But the timing remains uncomfortable.

Russia is already deploying the evolving threat. Much of Europe's comprehensive response will mature between 2027 and 2030.

The gap between those two realities is the vulnerability.

It also makes the distinction between protecting Ukraine and preparing to protect Europe increasingly artificial.

Ukraine is confronting the missile, drone, electronic-warfare and saturation tactics that European planners must assume could one day threaten NATO's eastern members. Its engineers and air-defence crews are discovering in combat what works, what becomes obsolete and what must be produced cheaply in enormous quantities.

Europe's task is to turn those lessons into industrial capability faster than Russia can create the next problem.

Summary

Alongside the front-line war, an increasingly important air war is being fought over Ukraine's cities, infrastructure and population. Russia is combining mass-produced drones, faster jet-powered variants, cruise missiles and improved ballistic missiles to make defense harder and more expensive.

Ukraine has responded with layered air defense and rapid technological adaptation. In the process, it has become an important source of knowledge for Europe's own defense. European Sky Shield, the European Air Shield, Drone Defense, Eastern Flank Watch, NATO integration and European-Ukrainian industrial cooperation are beginning to form a much larger defensive architecture.

But much of that architecture is still being built.

For the next two years, two concerns dominate.

Russia is setting much of the speed. Europe must shorten the distance between battlefield lessons, technological development and mass production.

Civilian resilience is becoming part of military sustainability. Electricity, housing, employment, migration and people's willingness to remain in Ukraine ultimately affect the country's ability to continue fighting.

Europe has begun building the right kind of shield.

The question for 2026–2028 is whether Europe and Ukraine can build it fast enough to last.