Ukraine Military History Institute
The campaign that was supposed to change the shape of the war
In the spring, Ukraine's middle-strike campaign looked like it might do something strategic rather than merely tactical. The logic was clean. Push the strike envelope out past the immediate front, make the roads behind Russian lines too dangerous to use, and the Russian army stops being able to feed its own offensive. Francis Farrell admits he got carried away with it at the time, and he is candid about why the excitement was justified: the effects were visible in real time, not theoretical. Roads were genuinely being cut. The Crimea supply narrative was genuinely in play.
It did not work out that way.
"Putin has clearly dug his heels in," Farrell says. Russia escalated rather than bent. The strategic consequence the campaign seemed to promise, the one where pressure on logistics forces a change in Russian behaviour, did not arrive. That is worth stating plainly, because much of the commentary since has quietly moved on from the prediction without revisiting it.
The adaptation was never in doubt, only the timing
What followed was the part nobody serious disputed was coming. Russia learned to intercept.
Farrell frames it as a mirror of Ukraine's own learning curve. Ukraine faced Shahed drones, had no answer at first, then built one: interceptor teams, mobile fire groups, a working doctrine for shooting down cheap mass. Russia has now run the same process against Ukraine's strike drones, and it did not take long.
The uncomfortable half of that symmetry is what Ukraine faces next. Russia is fielding jet-powered Shaheds, and Farrell is blunt that this is "a much more difficult challenge" than the propeller-driven versions Ukraine learned to handle. The interception problem does not reset to zero with each new variant, but speed changes the arithmetic badly. A slow drone can be engaged by a man with a machine gun in the back of a pickup. A jet-powered one mostly cannot.
The campaign bites in the south and struggles in the east, and the reason is terrain
This is the most useful thing in the conversation, and the part that rarely survives into headline coverage.
Middle strike is not uniformly effective along the front. Farrell's assessment, built from asking commanders across different sectors, is that it works hardest in the south.
The reason is cover, or the absence of it. Approaching Crimea the ground is close to bare, with almost no vegetation. A Russian interceptor team or mobile fire group defending a stretch of highway has nowhere to conceal itself, which means the defenders become targets that can be hunted separately from the thing they are defending. Once the air defence can be killed, the strikes behind it get easier, and the problem compounds for Russia.
The east is the opposite case. There is no long land bridge to interdict, because Russian positions connect almost directly to Russia. There are dense urban areas. Donetsk sits there as a major hub. Supply lines are shorter, more numerous and easier to hide. Brigades fighting in that sector, Farrell notes, are correspondingly less likely to feel that middle strike is making much difference to their day.
So the same campaign, executed the same way, produces very different results depending on whether the ground behind the enemy is open steppe or built-up industrial country. That is a geography lesson, not a technology one.
A second kill zone, further back
There is a framing in this section worth holding onto. The tactical kill zone, the expanding band near the front where nothing moves without being seen and struck, is the one discussed constantly. Farrell suggests middle strike has been creating a second one of a different character, deeper in the Russian rear.
What that means concretely is unglamorous. Hitting logistics means hitting fuel and ammunition, which as he puts it are "all things that burn and explode very nicely," along with the people and crews who move them. It is not a decisive blow. It is a tax applied continuously to everything Russia needs to bring forward.
He is careful about the counterfactual, and right to be. Russia is still pushing toward Kharkiv, and still trying to get close to Zaporizhzhia because that city carries strategic weight. They are not succeeding. Whether middle strike is the reason is genuinely hard to prove, since nobody gets to run the war twice. Farrell's judgement is that it is probably a significant part of it, and he offers it as a judgement rather than a finding.
Starlink jammers are real, and not yet scaled
Rob Lee raises the technology that keeps surfacing in his conversations: Russian jamming aimed at Starlink, used to protect critical sites and infrastructure. The concern is obvious. If Starlink connectivity can be suppressed around high-value targets, an asymmetric Ukrainian advantage begins to erode.
The evidence from the front is more measured than the alarm suggests. Jamming has been used in Crimea, which was the priority. Units around Zaporizhzhia have felt it. Some in the Sloviansk direction have felt it occasionally. But it is not scaled, and it has not been pushed near the front line. One brigade's account is representative: they felt it three months ago, once, it had some effect, and they have not seen it since.
Lee's read is that this stays a cat-and-mouse problem rather than becoming a wall. A jammer that switches on is emitting, a thing that emits is observable, and a thing that is observable can be targeted. The advantage of turning it on is partly cancelled by what turning it on reveals.
What to watch
Three things follow from this section for anyone tracking the war rather than the headlines.
- Interception of jet-powered Shaheds is the capability gap that matters most in the near term. Ukraine solved the slow-drone problem. The fast-drone problem is a different one.
- Sector matters more than doctrine. Judgements about whether deep and middle strike "work," offered without specifying where they are being applied, are close to meaningless.
- Watch whether Starlink jamming scales forward toward the front line rather than staying concentrated on rear infrastructure. That transition, if it comes, is the one that would actually change things.