Ukraine Military History Institute
The case for optimism rests on drones, not manpower
Rob Lee sets up this part of the conversation by separating the war into its key factors. Manpower is one, and the group had already covered it. The second is how each side employs drones, from the tactical level up through the operational.
On that second factor Lee is more optimistic than he was a year ago. His argument is that Ukraine has not just held on to its edge in unmanned systems but increased the upper hand, and he points to middle strike as the best example of it.
Deep strike is moving in the same direction. Russia had the advantage at the start of the war, but Ukrainian quantities are rising, and Lee suggests that in some months Ukraine may be launching more deep strike drones than Russia is. He adds that missiles are in development alongside foreign missiles and drone-missile hybrids, and says that part is developing quite well.
Russia had the operational strike advantage first
Lee is clear that middle strike was not Ukraine's idea to begin with. Russia has used Geran drones for operational strikes for some time, some ordered by the General Staff and some by the operational groupings. Dmytro Putiata adds that Russia also uses them tactically, against Ukrainian positions.
That capability supplements Russia's glide bombs, and Lee notes that Ukraine has never had a full solution to glide bombs. The Russian advantage at operational depth was layered, not a single weapon.
Then came Molniya and the BM-35, and the problem sharpened when Russia started fitting them with Starlink. Lee describes a very cheap operational drone capability that, in January, went after the main road from Pavlohrad, knocking out ordinary trucks. His warning was simple: if Russia could scale strikes at operational depth, Ukrainian logistics would be in serious trouble.
Starlink was then cut off, which Lee counts as one of the big developments of the period. Together with Ukraine's own middle strike capability, it is one of his two reasons for relative optimism compared with last year.
Nobody has fixed the depth band, including the people using it
What counts as middle strike is less settled than the confidence of the term suggests. Lee recalls that Fedorov defined it in a post as roughly 30 to 150 kilometres past the front line, and immediately adds that he might be wrong about the numbers.
His own working definition is broader: anything more than 30 kilometres past the line, including all of the occupied territory, and he would include Crimea too. He twice qualifies this as his view and allows that it may not be right.
The looseness matters. A campaign that covers everything from 30 kilometres to the Crimean peninsula is several different target sets under one name, and claims about what middle strike achieves depend on which band is meant.
The weapons are getting bigger and more numerous
Lee lists what Ukraine is now fielding. The FP-2 is a large kamikaze drone carrying a 100-kilogram warhead. Alongside it are the Bulava, the RAM2X, the Hornet and other middle strike types, some of which carry small warheads that can destroy a truck and nothing larger.
His point is that both quantity and quality are rising significantly, and that Russia currently has no good answer. Over the last five months, he says, a significant number of Russian air defence systems have been hit by FP-2s, Bulavas and similar drones at quite significant ranges.
He then widens the claim: hits on command posts, warehouses and logistics depots as well.
Putiata's correction: the command posts are out of reach
This is where the chapter becomes useful, because Putiata disagrees, and he is careful about how far.
He is not sure Ukraine is striking many command posts at all. He says plainly that this is his opinion and that he has no facts behind it. His reasoning is physical. Command posts, even at battalion level, are now deep underground, and with the warheads Ukrainian drones carry, FP-2 or otherwise, he does not think penetrating them is really possible.
His comparison makes the scale concrete. To destroy a regimental command post, Ukraine would need British or French cruise missiles, and at least a couple of them, before it could say the post was destroyed, seriously damaged or unable to operate.
He also marks how far things have moved. It is not 2022, he says, when Russians placed their headquarters in restaurants.
Why air defence is the target that makes sense
From that constraint Putiata offers an explanation for the pattern Lee described. If drones cannot reach buried headquarters, the high count of destroyed air defence systems may not be incidental. It may be the point.
Stripping air defence from an area opens it up, and in his reading that means Ukraine will be able to use its aviation more. The drone campaign, on this view, is not a substitute for heavier strikes on command. It is preparing the ground for them, clearing the cover so that aircraft and cruise missiles can do the work drones cannot.
That is a more modest and more precise account of middle strike than a list of everything it has hit. Drones with a 100-kilogram warhead are very good at killing things that sit on the surface: trucks, air defence systems, warehouses, depots. They are not bunker busters, and Putiata's point is that the headquarters that matter are no longer on the surface.
Lee's optimism and Putiata's correction are compatible. Ukraine can hold the upper hand in unmanned strike while that hand still has a ceiling, and knowing where the ceiling sits is what makes the targeting coherent.
What to watch
- Ukrainian aviation activity in areas where air defence has been hit. If Putiata is right about the purpose, the strikes should be followed by more use of aircraft in those sectors.
- Confirmed strikes on regimental or battalion command posts. If they are credited to drones rather than cruise missiles, his judgement about penetration is wrong.
- Whether Russian cheap operational drones return to the Pavlohrad road. Lee's warning was about scale, and it applies again if those drones regain the connectivity that Starlink gave them.