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.
