Why Doesn't Ukraine Strike Moscow? Rob Lee on Accuracy

Ukraine does not go after important targets in Moscow because its long-range drones are not accurate enough, Rob Lee argues: GPS and INS-guided drones sometimes miss even large warehouses. Volume is not the obstacle: in June 2026 Lee said that in some cases Ukraine was sending more than 1,000 drones in a night.

Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, gives a third answer to a question usually settled by two. The ranked explanations are Western restrictions on striking Russia and the air defence ring around Moscow. Lee's is accuracy, and he sets it out across three recordings made between June and September 2026.

Why aren't Ukraine's long-range drones accurate enough for Moscow?

Many deep-strike drones fly on GPS or inertial (INS) guidance, and Lee's verdict, speaking in September, is that "they're actually not that accurate." If you want to hit a pinpoint target, "you really can't do that too effectively right now."

That shapes the target list. Ukraine hits refineries and warehouses because they are big targets, "and even with the warehouses, they're missing them sometimes." You do not want to hit things in the middle of a city, Lee says, "because you're probably going to miss", and because you do not want to hit civilian targets. Those two objections are really one: a weapon with a wide error cannot be aimed at a building surrounded by other buildings.

Lee had made the same point in early August 2026, in Russia Is Learning Faster Than You Think, with an example. He described a video of a deep-strike drone, an FP-1 or another type he was not sure of, missing a big factory. "They're not precision guided munitions, really," he said. Huge sites such as the Wildberries factories are hard to miss, and refineries are big, though hitting the right parts of them is difficult. How many of those drones reach a target at all is a separate argument, set out in Rob Lee and Dmytro Putiata on whether refinery strikes work.

Hear Rob Lee explain why important Moscow targets stay off the list at 57:46.

What did Russia's strike on the SBU building show?

The evidence Lee reaches for is Russia's own Shahed strike on the SBU building. Russia now has video guidance, so the drone can be manually guided onto its target. That is the difference between arriving in an area and arriving at a point.

His inference about the timing is the sharp part. He thinks the new capability is one reason Russia had not gone after that building before: the Hyatt is nearby, and there are embassies all around it. "If you miss, the cost of missing could be really, really significant." Without terminal accuracy, the target stayed off the list.

Read that in reverse and you have Ukraine's position. If Ukraine gains the same ability, "through Starlink, through whatever another technological system", it could go after important targets in Moscow as well. For now, Lee says, those are targets Ukraine is "probably not going after for a reason".

How did Rob Lee's view change between June and September?

The shift is from volume to precision.

Back from the front in early June 2026, in Back from the Front: Ukraine Closes the Deep-Strike Gap, Lee's theme was reach and numbers. Russia had a complete advantage early in the war, when Ukraine could not hit things deep in Russia. "Maybe there's not parity," he said, "but Ukraine has certainly narrowed the gap." On a daily and weekly basis larger and larger drone packages were going in, and "some of these cases, it's more than 1,000 drones in a night" (hear it at 39:41). Sam Cook noted that St Petersburg got hit during the economic forum, and Lee added "St. Petersburg, Moscow, um, you know, different refineries".

He also listed what was coming rather than what was fielded: Ukraine's own cruise missiles and ballistic missiles, the cheap American ERAM cruise missile that was "supposed to" be delivered that year, and, as Sam Cook added, a ballistic missile "supposedly coming out that can hit Moscow".

By September, in The Next Month Decides the Winter, the quantity question had been answered and the limit had moved. Ukraine could send the drones. It could not yet put them on a single building in a capital.

Can Ukraine's FP-2 drone hit Moscow?

Not in the role Lee describes for it. In June he drew the line himself: the FP-1 is the deep-strike drone, and the FP-2 is "the middle strike drone". Its value is payload. The FP-2 carries about a 250-pound munition, against roughly 10 pounds for a Hornet, so it can go after underground positions that an FPV or artillery will not destroy. "You can drop a building," Lee said.

That makes it a substitute for aviation Ukraine does not have. Ukraine lacks air superiority and cannot bring its fighters close to the front. It does use glide bombs, but because of Russian Su-35s, and also air defence systems, its aircraft have to release them far from the front, so they do not reach far past it. A heavy drone does the job those aircraft cannot safely do. It closes a gap at middle depth, not at Moscow's.

What would accurate strikes on Moscow cost Russia?

Lee's emphasis is less on what would be destroyed than on what Russia would have to move. Right now Russia can flood the Starlink jammers it produces into the occupied areas, because that is where the threat is. If all of Russia were open to accurate Ukrainian strikes, the priorities would change: "Moscow, St. Petersburg, Sochi, the priorities are there", and only then places such as Donetsk. If Starlink operated over Russia, he adds, Ukraine could run a similar middle strike campaign into border regions such as Bryansk and push Russian logistics further back.

He keeps the hedges on. This is "six months, a year from now", jammers and countermeasures will go through several cycles, and on the technology itself he says, "I don't understand the technical side of this at all. I'm an infantry guy."

Is Western permission the real reason?

Lee does not argue that restrictions explain the target list now. He notes how far the line has moved: in 2022, he says, the idea that US intelligence would help strikes on refineries "or things in Moscow" would have been seen as incredibly escalatory. Those strikes now happen. What keeps the most important Moscow targets off the list, in his account, is the error radius. How the shorter-range campaign has fared is in Ukraine's middle strike campaign.