The war in Ukraine heads into yet another winter. So where do things stand after Europe’s long and hot summer?

With August drawing to a close and Europe’s cohort of diplomats and officials folding up their beach umbrellas and returning to their desks, a top question on everyone’s mind is: where do we stand with the war in Ukraine? Does the situation still look more positive for Kyiv, as it did at the beginning of the summer when Ukrainian missile and drone strikes on oil production and energy infrastructure were exacting a heavy toll on the Russian economy? Has Moscow made any significant battlefield gains or are cracks now showing in Russian society and the Kremlin’s determination to continue the war until all its maximalist demands are met? Have prospects for peace talks and a negotiated settlement improved or worsened over the summer months? And in a war where the balance of relative advantage has constantly shifted between Moscow and Kyiv, who now would seem to have the upper hand?

In my years as a NATO policy planner, we called this type of comparative exercise a “net assessment”. The analysis helped us to measure the relative significance of different trendlines and to distinguish between purely short-term and tactical impacts and the longer term, more strategic ones; and thus, to assess the likely future direction of a conflict or dispute, while comparing the costs versus the gains for the various parties involved. So, what does this approach tell us about who is winning or losing at this stage of the war between Russia and Ukraine?

The first dimension: military operations

Let’s take military operations first. This is not only because the Kremlin is still seeking a military victory and the conquest of more Ukrainian territory in the East, but because it is also the easiest metric to measure being largely about territory gained or lost. Here the summer has not brought many changes. The Ministry of Defence in Moscow has put out weekly statements claiming Russian forces have captured this or that small village or settlement in the Donetsk or northeastern Kharkiv regions, but the principal objective of the Kremlin’s spring offensive – the town of Kupyansk – is still disputed, despite claims by Russia to have captured it. Kupyansk is important because it opens the route towards the strategic hubs and transport nodes of Slovyansk and Kramatorsk and thereby to total Russian control of Donetsk, as well as possible Russian thrusts deeper into Ukraine beyond Kyiv’s fortified defensive line in the East and to its key nuclear power plant at Zaporizhzhia (currently in Russian hands). What seems clear is that if indeed the Russian army has captured some additional if limited territory, it has lost too many casualties and equipment in the process to be able to rapidly exploit its successes and move on to the next major objective.

Russia is also clearly experiencing manpower shortages. President Zelensky has claimed that North Korea is sending 50,000 of its soldiers to fight alongside Russian forces in eastern Ukraine, on top of the 14,000 that it sent two years ago. There have also been reports that North Korea has delivered fresh supplies of ballistic missiles to Russia, some of which have been used already to strike Kyiv and other cities. Now, according to Zelensky, North Korea is setting up its own missile batteries inside western Russia with six launchers each and 120 missiles. In Moscow, there is much speculation regarding a new round of conscription after the elections to the Duma in September. Putin will no doubt use yet another victory for his United Russia party as a pretext to claim widespread public support for his “Special Military Operation” against Ukraine and thus as a legitimate basis to call up more conscripts, even though his Deputy Head of the Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, has claimed that Moscow has been successful in recruiting 200,000 more contract soldiers and thus does not need to pursue more conscription. The Duma elections might have been the occasion to test anti-war sentiment in Russia, particularly in the wake of opinion polling and street interviews by the BBC and other western media that point to increasing war weariness and the desire for a negotiated solution. But the Russian courts, no doubt directed by the Kremlin, have banned the one anti-war party, Yabloko, from participating in the elections, save for a limited number of directly elected districts.

Although Yabloko won only 3% of the votes at the previous elections, not enough to reach the 5% threshold for seats in the Duma, its participation would have provided a useful bellwether as to how public attitudes towards the war and Putin’s leadership are evolving. Yet although the Russian public is increasingly turning against the war, and aware of its mounting impact on society and the economy, the Kremlin’s machine of repression has prevented thus far that opposition from finding an organised voice and capacity for street protests. Russians continue to be routinely jailed for even the mildest forms of dissent. For good measure, a Russian court last week sentenced the Deputy Leader of Yabloko, Lev Shlosberg, to 11 years in a penal colony. So even if the military situation on the battlefield is largely a stalemate and Russia’s casualties continue to stack up, the Kremlin can continue its military operations even if they go nowhere.

Ukraine has also experienced its problems on the military front, but these were more concerned with command and control from Kyiv than the immediate situation on the battlefield. The sacking of the young and highly popular Defence Minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, by Zelensky in July provoked large scale protests in Kyiv and other cities. Fedorov is a proponent of the new technologies such as drones, battlefield robotics and AI which pitted him against the more traditional approach of the Ukrainian Chief of the Armed Forces, General Oleksandr Syrskyi, who was kept in post by the Ukrainian President despite accusations that his attrition strategy on the battlefield was leading to heavy losses among the frontline troops. But faced with the strength of the protest movements (which resembled those seen in Kyiv a year previously when the government had sought to crimp the powers of the Anti-Corruption Authority), Zelensky backtracked and sacked Syrskyi, replacing him with a new Commander-in-Chief, Major General Mykhailo Drapatyi, who is more aligned with the reformers.

A new Acting Defence Minister, Major General Yevhenii Khmara, was also appointed as Zelensky sought to propitiate the protestors while avoiding to simply re-instate Fedorov, which probably would have been too big a blow to his political prestige. Fedorov was offered a different, advisory post in the government but (so far) has refused anything other than a return to the Defence Ministry. Fedorov has now openly challenged Zelensky’s leadership by calling for elections to be held in Ukraine in wartime although the government says that this would not be practical and is under no constitutional obligation to do so as long as wartime conditions prevail. We must wait and see if Fedorov’s clear political ambitions resonate with the Ukrainian electorate as much as his calls to fight corruption and modernise the country’s military establishment.

All these shifts in senior command positions come on top of constant sackings of those in charge of individual units, of a previous Chief of the Armed Forces (General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, now Ukrainian Ambassador in London), of the National Security Advisor and long-time Zelensky aide, Andriy Yermak, and of officials involved in military procurement who were accused of corruption. Several Ukrainian ambassadors suffered a similar fate.

Ukraine has had 12 Defence Ministers since 2014. On the one hand, this rapid churn in personnel can be a good thing. Wars have a habit of quickly revealing the inadequacies of some and the talents of others. It is not for nothing that Napoleon wished to have “lucky generals”. It is essential to root out incompetence fast and to promote those who demonstrate success. But wars are also won by closely knit civilian and military leaderships which learn to work together successfully and to tolerate a culture of speaking truth to power, even if this must be done privately and away from the television cameras.

During World War II, the Germans and Japanese had arguably the best armies but Britain and the United States ultimately prevailed because they had a more stable and better integrated civil-military leadership where most of the key figures remained in post throughout the conflict and stuck doggedly to a long-term strategy for victory.

By contrast the German and Japanese high commands were rife with rivalries, constant bureaucratic infighting and divisions with leaders. They could not rectify bad decisions and unsuccessful strategies before they proved disastrous.

There is a lesson here for Ukraine. It is not encouraging that more than four years into the war, the country’s war leadership has proven to be so unstable and divided with still so much internal corruption in recruitment and procurement. Even last week we witnessed another major government scandal when Zelensky sacked the Deputy Head of the Presidential Office, Iryna Mudra, following allegations of money laundering and searches of her office by NABU, the state anti-corruption watchdog.

The constant churn also means that the implementation of policies and decisions is delayed as new ministers and officials need to learn the ropes and build relationships across government. Not to speak of trust and credibility within NATO and EU circles. Supporters of Ukraine can only hope that this latest shake up in the war leadership will be the last (or at least bring more durable battlefield benefits than the previous ones).

Kyiv has launched some smaller attacks of its own which, according to the Presidential Office in Kyiv, have succeeded in retaking about 750 square kilometres of territory since January, bringing some 26 settlements in the Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk regions back under Kyiv’s control. This is the biggest Ukrainian advance since the early stages of the war in 2022, if we discount Kyiv’s short and ill-fated incursion into Russia’s Kursk Oblast.

The second dimension: targeting supportive sectors and supply chains

Yet stagnation on the frontlines has shifted the focus of the war to the reciprocal targeting of economies, supply chains and logistics. Here the summer has witnessed a sharp intensification of the strikes that both sides have carried out against each other’s oil and gas production, storage facilities, transport and energy and other sectors essential to the economy.

Ukraine has certainly built on its success last spring in striking targets across Russia, including Moscow and Saint Petersburg. Zelensky even joked that it would be too dangerous for him to visit Moscow for peace talks with Putin because of the Ukrainian drone attacks. One particularly big attack was on the Yaroslavl oil refinery north of the capital. Kyiv now claims that there is no target within the vastness of Russia that is not within its reach. Ukrainian drones have repeatedly hit the massive Taneco oil refinery and storage tanks in Tatarstan (1,000km from its border with Russia) and extended as far away as Orsk in Siberia (3,000km away). The Orsk refinery had to be shut down for six months after being attacked.

Given the impact on Russian oil refining, Moscow has been forced to import diesel and petrol from India and long queues of frustrated Russian motorists have formed outside service stations. They are facing restrictions on the amount of fuel they can purchase. Drivers are reported by the BBC to be speeding at over 150km per hour along the roads of the Russian capital and other cities as they believe that this will make them safer from ubiquitous Ukrainian drone strikes.

Kyiv has also continued to disrupt Russian oil exports by attacking loading platforms and tankers in ports such as Ust Luga in the Baltic and Novorossiysk in the Black Sea. It has been so successful at Novorossiysk that the White House has stepped in to force Ukraine to stop its strikes after US oil majors, Exxon Mobil and Texaco, complained that their trade with Kazakhstan through the Caspian Petroleum Consortium was being disrupted. In the wake of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the White House has been particularly sensitive to accessing as much foreign oil as possible and keep oil shipments flowing where it can.

One particularly smart move by the Ukrainians has been to target the very large warehouses maintained by the Wildberries online retail group, Russia’s equivalent of Amazon. Kyiv has explained its strikes on a dozen or so Wildberries warehouses across Russia thus far by the fact that Wildberries supplies drone components, clothing and equipment to the Russian military. Be that as it may, online retail now makes up 9% of Russia’s GDP and Wildberries is a major employer as well as being at the fulcrum of a large network of suppliers involving all sectors of the country’s economy. Attacking Wildberries is certainly an effective tactic to bring the reality of war home to the average Russian citizen while also directing impacting the livelihoods and household supplies of millions. The Russian Central Bank has asked Russian banks to extend credit to those small and medium-sized enterprises affected by the knock-on effects of the strikes on Wildberries. Yet in striking Wildberries, Kyiv has also had to accept the possibility of civilian casualties which have been reasonably limited in Ukrainian attacks thus far (for instance against oil refineries) – although these pale in comparison to Ukrainian civilian deaths attributed to Russia.

Yet Ukraine has suffered too, and the corollary of its success in striking Russia is that Putin is incentivised to hit Ukraine even harder with his ballistic missiles and drones. Hundreds of these are now being launched by Moscow against Kyiv and Ukrainian civilian casualties have risen sharply as a result. According to the United Nations, July was the deadliest month since the beginning of the war in February 2022 with nearly 500 civilian deaths.

Moscow has dropped any pretence of attacking only military or security-related targets. Its missiles and drones ram into apartment buildings, trains and buses, and schools and hospitals. To further make daily life as miserable as possible for the average Ukrainian, the Kremlin has selected petrol service stations as a priority target with 200 of them hit (mainly in eastern Ukraine) in July alone. In a particular act of sadism totally unconnected to any war aim, Russian troops near Kherson have been sending small drones armed with explosives to harass and kill Ukrainian street vendors and any other innocent civilian that they happen to dislike. Perhaps most disturbing of all is Russia’s use of an AI-driven self-targeting autonomous drone to kill three Ukrainian civilians at a petrol station, the first recorded incident of this use of AI.

Russia has focused its strikes on the Black Sea port of Odesa, setting ablaze ships, loading facilities and storage silos to disrupt Ukrainian grain exports, the principal source of its foreign exchange revenue. It has also struck the Danube port of Izmail used by Kyiv to export grain across Romania. The Ukrainian Minister of Agriculture, Taras Vysotsky, has told Reuters that Russian attacks on Black Sea port infrastructure could cost the country’s farm sector between USD$1.5 to $3bn this year. He added that the volume of grain exports could fall to 38mn metric tons from the 43mn initially forecast for 2026.

Indeed, experts have estimated that Ukrainian and Russian drone strikes on each other’s grain loading terminals along the Black Sea and Sea of Azov coastlines have reduced their combined exports by 97%. Only the Russian port of Tuapse is still operating. This raises again the spectre of higher food prices and hunger across Africa, the Middle East and Asia as we approach winter and importers must switch to higher priced grain from the US and Australia.

Ahead of winter, when temperatures in Ukraine typically go under -20C, Russia has singled out thermal power stations and electricity generators across Ukraine. The Kremlin has seen how its adversary has increased drone and missile production tenfold since the beginning of the war and so is trying to locate and destroy the manufacturing plants and storage warehouses of the major Ukrainian defence companies.

One reason why Russia has stepped up its ballistic missile attacks is that Ukraine is having more and more difficulty defending against them. It has almost run out of its stock of Patriot PAC 3 interceptors, the only equipment able to shoot down Russian hypersonic missiles. During a recent attack, Kyiv was unable to shoot down any of the 28 ballistic missiles fired by Russia in a single night. In July alone Russia launched 450 missiles against Ukraine, more than half of them ballistic.

Russia has also used its missiles to inflict destruction beyond the purely physical. In one strike against a Kharkiv warehouse belonging to the children’s book publisher, Ranok, eight million school textbooks in the Ukrainian language were burned. Another publisher, Book Chef, lost 800,000 books when its Kyiv warehouse was struck on 2 July. Unsurprisingly, publishers see these Russian strikes as a deliberate attack on Ukrainian identity and culture. The publishing sector will take years to recover and printing costs are already 40% higher than before the war.

As we exit the summer, both Ukraine and Russia have demonstrated their increasing capacity to inflict damage on each other. Ukraine has certainly succeeded in bringing the war home to the average Russian citizen in a way that was inconceivable when Putin started his invasion in 2022. But what is not clear is ultimately who will gain the most from this battle of economic endurance in terms of building a decisive and war-winning strategic advantage over the other? Can Ukraine inflict enough damage to drive Moscow to the negotiating table in a more conciliatory mood before it itself suffers irreparable harm forcing it to sue for peace on Putin’s terms? It is still difficult to do the net assessment of gains and losses here.

This said, it is clear that the balance could well swing towards Moscow if Kyiv cannot solve its air defence problem quickly and get back to the level of interception that it enjoyed in the early stages of the war (when it was shooting down 80% of incoming Russian projectiles). It has made enormous strides in counter-drone technologies, including airborne drone interceptors as well as lasers and jammers. It also knows that Patriots are not the long-term solution given the dependence on US production and supply and the fact that each PAC3 interceptor, manufactured by Lockheed Martin, can cost between USD$3mn to 5mn.

Ukraine must produce its own missile defences, and far more cheaply. In July the Ukrainian defence company, Firepoint, launched the Freyja consortium with a number of European industrial partners (Eurosam, Leonardo, Thales, Saab and Hensoldt) to build an open system architecture for the integration of radars, sensors, firing batteries, interceptors and software for a European anti-missile system. The question is how quickly Freyja can produce a workable operational capability. In the meantime, there is no alternative to more Patriots.

Zelensky has been to Washington and toured European capitals in search of more PAC3s. He has revealed that Ukraine received 675 Patriot missiles in 2023 but expects to receive only 264 this year, and has called for 300 more.

As a sign of improving relations between Kyiv and the Trump administration, the US indicated that it would allow Ukraine to manufacture Patriot interceptors within the country under license from the US contractors, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. However, US President Trump has now backed off from this proposal, leaving its future uncertain. In any case, it was never a panacea given the long lead times involved in completing the legal and regulatory framework and in setting up the factories and supply chains in Ukraine to build the Patriots. So Zelensky has redirected his efforts towards seeking more PAC3s from residual stocks in the US and Europe in the hope that countries will prioritise Ukraine over their own military needs.

Germany has indicated that it will try to deliver 600 PAC2 and 3 missiles between now and the end of 2028, but that will not see Ukrainians through the forthcoming winter. A better solution lies in giving Kyiv more European made anti-missile systems so that Ukraine can quickly bring them up to Patriot performance levels through frontline testing and evaluation. President Macron has promised Zelensky delivery of the upgraded Franco-Italian SAMP-T missile made by the Eurosam consortium and on his recent visit to Kyiv, UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham said that the UK would hand over the blueprints for its Storm Shadow cruise missile (SCALP in French version) so that Ukraine could produce them domestically. This is undoubtedly the best approach to follow.

Meanwhile Zelensky has said that just 10% of current US Patriot stocks will be sufficient for Ukraine to be able to neutralise the Russian missile threat. But even this is far from certain given Moscow’s current missile production rates.

Russia has already met its annual target for Zircon and Oniks missiles in the first seven months of 2026 and overall has increased production by 20% vis-à-vis 2025. It manufactured 65 Iskander M ballistic missiles in July and is assessed to have 130 Iskanders in its arsenal currently. Another piece of sobering news for Kyiv is that Russia is developing an alternative to Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet system faster than Ukraine and its western partners had anticipated. When Kyiv convinced Musk to disconnect Russia from access to Starlink, it gained a significant battlefield advantage. But now the Russian military has launched its own Rassvet system which aims to have 300 satellites in orbit by 2027 and 924 by 2035. This would give the Russian military 24/7 coverage of Ukrainian territory as well as secure internet communications. Consequently, a Ukrainian priority has been to strike the Progress Space Centre at Samara where Russia is making the Soyuz rockets needed to launch the Rassvet satellites.

The third dimension: diplomacy and international support

With the US embroiled in its war with Iran (which has now gone on for over six months despite Trump’s promise of a quick campaign) and Putin showing no sign of retreating from his maximalist territorial demands, there has been predictably little progress in the peace talks. This said, Trump has spoken to Putin and shown some interest in reviving the talks by proposing to send his two special envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, back to Moscow. But the on again/off again ceasefire negotiations with Iran have kept Washington’s attention focused on the Strait of Hormuz, and not the future of the Donbas.

As a result of this deadlock, Ukraine and Türkiye have proposed a moratorium on strikes against civilian vessels in the Black Sea and the respect of safe navigation routes for grain and other foodstuffs and agricultural products. This proposal comes on top of previous ones made by Ukraine for a moratorium on reciprocal strikes against electricity grids and generators. Türkiye brokered the initial grain transit deal in the Black Sea back in 2023, and President Erdoğan has maintained close ties to both Kyiv and Moscow and tried to periodically pursue his mediation efforts.

But the Kremlin has shown no interest in partial deals beyond a few very short ceasefires to coincide with Christmas or Easter (which were in any case violated) and has stuck to its guns that only a comprehensive peace settlement that tackles “the root causes of the war” (read: Ukraine’s wish to be an independent country tied to the West) will enable it to stop fighting. The most Russia has agreed to is periodic exchanges of prisoners of war.

Before the summer break European governments were discussing how they could participate more in the peace talks and whether to appoint an EU envoy, notwithstanding the Kremlin’s objections to this idea. Given the haphazard attention of the Trump administration toward Ukraine, despite the recent warmer atmosphere, more European involvement in the diplomacy (and not only the implementation) of a peace agreement will no doubt be essential. EU foreign ministers will need to put this on their agenda and decide whether to appoint a Special Envoy or not as they define their priorities for the autumn.

With no peace in sight, and stalemate on the ground offset by an intensified war in the air, there is no alternative to continuing European financial and military support to Ukraine. The continuing war, and intensified Russian strikes on the country’s infrastructure, have taken their toll on Ukraine’s economy. Growth is stalling. According to a survey conducted by the Kyiv-based Centre for Economic Strategy (published on 3 August), the forecast for growth in 2027 is now 1.1%, down from an earlier estimate of 2.4%. Ukraine’s economic output at USD$215bn per annum is one-fifth of its pre-war level. The defence sector is one of the few growth areas. In 2026, 60% of state spending will go to defence and the Ukrainian Central Bank estimates that defence production will contribute 1.4% of the 1.8% overall growth forecast for this year. The government has reported to the Rada that overall, it needs €47bn in external budgetary support in 2026 and €52bn in 2027.

On the brighter side, international financial support for Ukraine has held up well in 2026. In particular, and according to the Kiel Institute for Economics, European military aid in July was the highest it has been since the United States stopped funding Kyiv in February 2025, reaching €7.2bn. This was largely due to the EU releasing the first tranche of its €90bn Ukraine Support Loan for an amount of €4.3bn in direct military assistance. But Ukraine also received €700mn from Germany, €600mn from Denmark and €500mn from the Netherlands.

However, despite a good summer in terms of military financing, the bleaker news for Zelensky and his government is that the average level of military support for Kyiv from its European partners is declining. When the United States was still participating before February 2025, it stood at €3.46bn each month on average. Today that level has fallen to €2.94bn and beyond the current EU loan, given the political climate in Europe today and mounting debt in many countries, the longer-term future for assisting Ukraine is highly uncertain.

New threats and opportunities

So what in conclusion is the net assessment that results from all these various developments in the war in Ukraine?

Some observers may judge that this is all “same old, same old”. The issues are familiar and have not moved significantly nor decisively over the past year. We are still dealing with Ukraine’s air defence vulnerabilities, its large financing needs, with the challenge of how to make the international sanctions against Russia bite sufficiently to force a change of direction in the Kremlin, and with frozen peace talks not giving any hope of a ceasefire, let alone a resolution of the war anytime soon. Neither Kyiv nor Moscow have yet found the magic formula which will give them the decisive advantage leading to victory. We seem to be stuck in an endless war of attrition and endurance. So returning to their desks, European diplomats and officials may well conclude that there has not been a change in the situation of sufficient magnitude to necessitate giving Ukraine more or greater attention.

Yet this supposition would be wrong. The summer has produced changes in three particular areas, presenting both new threats and new opportunities. All three areas must now be urgently revisited.

The first is that war in Ukraine is increasingly producing war in Europe. The summer months have witnessed an escalation in Russia’s hybrid warfare against European partners of Ukraine with activities that are riskier and more dangerous.

Military drones have been flying more frequently into European airspace. Germany reported drone flights over a Patriot missile repair base in Nord Rhein Westphalia where spare parts destined for Ukraine are stored. An armed drone landed in August next to a Ukrainian Antonov cargo plane at Leipzig-Halle airport. NATO fighter jets had to shoot down drones over Latvia. Russia has been using electro-magnetic devices to divert drones out of Ukraine’s airspace and toward NATO territory. Russian drones have landed in Romania and Bulgaria testing NATO’s early warning systems and reaction times. Finland has been obliged to close part of its airspace and the Gulf of Finland to civilian traffic. Two weapons storage sites have been set ablaze. Sweden has unmasked a major Russian spy ring. A Russian warship has fired live ammunition in the English Channel. NATO countries have reported increasing aggressive Russian espionage activity and disinformation campaigns, most recently Poland where the Kremlin is interfering in its bilateral disputes with Ukraine.

In July and August, European publics have been seeing the issue of resilience through a different lens: the impact of extreme temperatures and drought, unprecedented forest fires across southern Europe but even as far north as the UK and the Netherlands, the stress on health services from temperatures that have stayed in the upper 30s °C for weeks on end, coping with water shortages and restrictions and the risks to critical infrastructure, such as railway lines, from heat overstress.

Yet even if firefighters and health workers have received more attention from the public than the police, military and intelligence services in recent weeks, governments have had to worry also about Russia’s hybrid warfare campaigns. They are increasingly blurring the line between war and peace, using more physical and military instruments not just to intimidate but to inflict also sabotage and destruction. The UK Telegraph newspaper has recently reported that Russia is building ten drone launch sites along the Ukraine-Belarus border each equipped with 59 launch rails capable of firing 1,000 drones into NATO European territory. The problem for Europe is that as the war in Ukraine goes on and on, and Europe continues to give Kyiv more and more assistance, Russia increasingly views it as a belligerent and uses more calculated military means against it. Thus, the risk of actual military clashes, and significant casualties resulting from miscalculation by either side, is increasing rapidly. Ukraine and Europe are progressively merging into a single operational theatre where Ukraine serves as the eastern front of Europe itself.

European governments need to recognise this new reality and up their game. Fortunately, the summer has shown that if Ukraine is no longer mainly a consumer of Western finance and weapons but can also provide its technology and battlefield experience to help Europe improve its drone capabilities. Once countries like Germany, the UK and the Nordics begin to mass produce their own drones, these can be sent to Ukraine to help it sustain constant and major attacks on Russia, upping the pressure on the Kremlin.

In August, Kyiv was able to launch 620 drones against Moscow in single salvo. UK-made drones have been used for the first time to strike targets deep inside Russia, a move that has provoked a sharp reaction from the Foreign Ministry in Moscow. Last June, the UK said that it would provide 150,000 drones to Kyiv in 2026 costing £752mn. During Zelensky’s visit to the UK to meet the new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, the UK offered its Stone Cloak electronic drone jamming system to help the Ukrainians to improve their air defences. Joint ventures between European and Ukrainian defence companies like these show that exchanging technology, supplying instant battlefield experience to support upgrades and modifications, and giving Ukraine access to the scaled-up production that Europe can provide, can quickly feed back into Ukraine itself. It is win/win for both sides. It is of course for companies to decide who they wish to partner with, but governments can help to remove barriers such as licensing production abroad or easing technology transfer and intellectual property rules.

The second new concern is Ukraine’s current vulnerability to ballistic missiles. Beyond the greater numbers of casualties and the level of physical destruction, the problem for Europe is that if Russia can take out Ukraine’s military production plants and storage sites, the burden on European countries to do even more to help Kyiv will become intolerable. And Europe will also lose the ability to manufacture drones and other advanced military technologies cheaply in Ukraine. So, there is an urgent need to strengthen Kyiv’s ballistic missile defences.

European diplomats and officials need to step up their efforts to track down Patriot interceptors still available on global markets. They need to see how their own orders for Patriots with US defence contractors can be diverted towards Kyiv and re-prioritised. Europe does have its own missile interceptors such as the Franco-Italian SAMP-T and the German IRIS 2. These need to be produced in much greater quantities and upgraded to perform better against Russian ballistic missiles.

At the same time, the Ukraine Defence Contact Group, which meets at NATO Headquarters every six months to coordinate weapons deliveries to Kyiv, needs to look harder at how to frustrate Russian missile production. We know from Ukrainian feedback that these missiles still contain a large number of electronics components made in the West so clearly sanctions enforcement must be tightened and Russia’s supply chains overseas disrupted. There is clearly a need to synchronise Ukrainian strikes on Russian missile factories with Western intelligence and targeted sanctions and actions against the Russian military industrial complex. NATO countries also should help Ukraine more with satellite-based early warning of Russian ballistic missile launches. Because Ukraine will never win the war as long as Russia can manufacture missiles faster than Kyiv can acquire interceptor rockets to shoot them down.

A third development is also an opportunity. There is hardly a major oil refinery in Russia that has not been struck by Ukrainian drones and missiles. The Russian government has now publicly acknowledged the seriousness of the fuel shortages although expressing confidence that its mitigation measures (for instance price capping to discourage profiteering) will deal with the problem. But rather than operate along parallel tracks, Ukraine and the EU must coordinate their respective squeezes on Russia’s oil and gas production to maximise the impact. How can EU and other international sanctions against Russia interact with Ukraine’s own efforts to disrupt Russia’s fossil fuel production and exports? This is an avenue that is at least worth exploring. Squeezing the Kremlin further will not be easy for the EU as the dispute with Greece over banning Russian LNG imports during the last round of sanctions demonstrated. But so far, across more than 20 packages of sanctions the EU has imposed sanctions, and asset freezes on 3,000 Russian banks, companies and individuals. The EU High Representative, Kaja Kallas, has indicated a desire to go further this autumn. So, the EU institutions could examine how their own sanctions could specifically exacerbate the impact of the Ukrainian strikes on the oil and gas sector from which the Kremlin obtains the revenues to finance the war.

More curbs on the Russian shadow fleet of oil tankers would also be a natural priority. Success here would require a concerted campaign across the board rather than the ad hoc and infrequent boarding and seizure of individual shadow fleet vessels by EU governments and the UK that we have witnessed thus far. The sharp reaction from Putin himself, who has threatened retaliatory seizures of European ships by the Russian navy, shows how sensitive this issue is for him. Through this, Putin is suggesting that he is prepared to accept greater risk and the possibility of open confrontation with those European countries bold enough to support Ukraine. He may be bluffing but those European countries participating in the Coalition of the Willing would need to focus their military planning on how to deter Russian attempts to interfere with European commercial shipping and to protect their own vessels sailing in international waters. Ironically the closure of the Strait of Hormuz may increase international demand for Russian oil, thereby leading the Kremlin to rely more on its shadow fleet and to try to find more ships to operate it. Can the EU help here with issues like insurance or registration to make this more difficult and costly for Russia?

In conclusion

As they begin preparations for the next EU Summits and meetings of foreign, defence and other ministers, our diplomats and officials may be forgiven for feeling overwhelmed by the weight and number of dossiers piling up. Climate change has turned into a reality for Europe with the hottest summer on record, whole regions experiencing no rain for more than two months and Europe heating faster than any other part of the planet. With extreme weather every summer the new normal, Europe, together, must look again at its capacity for weather forecasting, early warning of abrupt temperature changes and its preparedness to deal with the multiple impacts of extreme heat from water rationing to strengthening its fire services and helping evacuated communities to potential food shortages and health issues.

On top of this comes the unravelling of the Memorandum of Understanding between Iran and the US with Tehran now seeming to wait out the Trump administration while asserting its control over the Strait of Hormuz which could be closed to commercial navigation for months or even years. The Houthis are now trying something similar in the Gulf of Aden, making Europe’s supply chains and future energy security look even more hazardous. Moreover, Israel is blocking the peace plan for Gaza and illegal migrants from Morocco and sub-Saharan Africa are storming into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, threatening to revive Europe’s migration crises of 2011 and 2015. Out of the camera eye, bitter conflicts are continuing in places like Sudan and Yemen, adding to the humanitarian disasters that Europe will have to respond to.

In such a context of policy overload, diplomats and officials might wish, along with Henry Kissinger, that “there can’t be a crisis this week; my agenda is already full”. Unfortunately, crises do not adapt to our capacity to deal with them. Finding time and the right amount of policy attention for Ukraine at the highest political levels is going to be more difficult this autumn and winter than it was in the first four years of the war. But the outcome of the war in Ukraine will still determine Europe’s future security and so somehow Europe’s leaders will need to find enough time and political will for it.

The views expressed in this #CriticalThinking article reflect those of the author(s) and not of Friends of Europe.