How Ukraine’s drone strikes are wreaking havoc in Russia
In this photo from a social media video, a fire at the Omsk oil refinery in Omsk, Russia, on July 6, 2026, where the regional governor said the province came under attack from Ukrainian drones.
Reuters
Ukraine’s drone strikes dominated headlines about its war with Russia and upset NATO’s investment thesis.
Ukraine, which has increased its drone production and capabilities over the four-year war, has stepped up attacks on Russian energy infrastructure and military assets, targeting high-profile oil refineries in major cities as part of a sustained effort to cut off Russia’s energy revenues.
Defense experts and strategists have called the drone campaign crucial to helping halt Russia’s military momentum, while also warning that Kiev’s deep strike successes greatly increase the risk of escalation.
Earlier this week, Ukraine launched one of the deepest incursions into Russian territory so far in the war.
Clouds of black smoke were seen rising from a major oil refinery in the city of Omsk on Tuesday, prompting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to take action. declare He said the country’s advanced drone capabilities make Siberia “attainable.” The Omsk facility is located approximately 2,500 kilometers (1,553 miles) from Ukrainian territory and close to Russia’s border with Kazakhstan.
Ukraine’s battlefield advances reveal how the rapid adoption of drones is reshaping modern warfare as warfare becomes more autonomous, connected and data-driven.
How drones are changing the Russia-Ukraine war
According to Bob Tollast, a research fellow in land warfare at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based defense and security think tank, two things have changed that have allowed Ukraine to step up long-range drone strikes deep inside Russian territory.
Joint efforts by Ukrainian forces to increase production and improve inertial navigation, software and machine vision have helped increase resilience when satellite navigation gets jammed, Tollast said.
Oil refineries and terminals are big targets, he said, adding that foreign support for Ukraine also likely played a role.
In this pool photo distributed by Russian state agency Sputnik, Vladimir Putin of Russia addresses the audience at the 23rd Congress of the United Russia party on June 28, 2026 in Moscow.
Yekaterina Shtukina | Afp | Getty Images
“We’ll see how Russia responds, they’ve had limited success with the kind of networks and drone interceptors that Ukraine uses, and have for some time deployed air defense systems on towers and even high-rise buildings recently,” Tollast told CNBC via email.
“However, the picture is quite ugly for Moscow, as Ukraine’s domestically produced cruise missiles such as Flamingo hit industrial zones (including air defense production),” he continued.
“Ukraine’s counter-refining campaign is currently a barrage of blows, but it may be too early to tell whether Russia will suffer permanent damage as the sector has long had spare capacity,” Tollast said.
Russia has also responded by scaling up its own drone production and further integrating them into its overall military.
NATO forms ‘drone-ready alliance’
Beyond the frontlines, Ukraine’s drone campaign also appears to have affected NATO’s defense spending plans.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte in question On Tuesday, he said drones had “fundamentally changed” the character of modern warfare and become a “decisive factor” on the battlefield, citing the Russia-Ukraine war as an example.
Rutte’s comments came as the alliance announced the launch of the NATO Drone Edge initiative, a plan for allies to invest more than $40 billion in counter-drone capabilities over the next five years.
Turkish Vice President Cevdet Yılmaz looks at the Bayraktar drone model at the Defense Industry Forum at the NATO Summit in Ankara on July 7, 2026.
Nurfoto | Nurfoto | Getty Images
“Together we are building a drone-ready Alliance. We are leveraging the latest innovative technologies, investing in our transatlantic defense industries and learning real-world lessons from the battlefield in Ukraine,” Rutte said.
Ukraine’s drone strikes are designed to cut off Russia’s energy revenues as well as force Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the war.
Ukraine’s success on the battlefield led to a change in perspective on the country and its relations with NATO and the EU. Security analysts and world leaders have emphasized that Ukraine increasingly has something to offer its allies and should not be seen as a country that benefits solely from military support and donations.
Ukraine won because they became good at drones and counter-drone systems, technologies that other NATO allies were not so good at, Ulrike Franke, senior policy expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told CNBC.
Ukraine holds all the cards, he said, adding that they have “drones and counter-drone systems and actually data on how to fight the Russians.”
Warfare is going through a major shift where expensive, more traditional technology is being challenged by a more agile, decentralized model, often led by startups and informed by what’s happening in Ukraine.
Morningstar analyst Loredana Muharremi said Ukraine has become the global leader in drone warfare out of necessity. “Facing a larger and better-equipped military, it was unable to compete symmetrically, forcing it to quickly innovate with low-cost, commercially available drones adapted for military use.”
“The real innovation was not the technology itself, but the purchasing model,” he added in emailed comments to CNBC.
Over the four and a half years of war, Ukraine has built an innovation cycle much faster than the innovation cycle of legacy defense companies, which often took years.
People refuel their cars at a gas station in Moscow on June 24, 2026.
Alexander Nemenov | Afp | Getty Images
Muharremi said cooperation between the military, domestic startups and the private sector allows new technologies to be deployed in just a few weeks and drones to continually evolve based on feedback from the battlefield.
“The greatest [financial] “This impact is expected to result from higher order intake and backlogs over the next two to three years, with a more meaningful contribution to revenues and earnings from 2028,” Muharremi said.
Finnish Stubb: Ukraine has a new trump card
Finnish President Alexander Stubb said Ukraine’s Zelenskyy now “has the cards” to carry out long-range drone strikes; This is something the Trump administration is doing in question He did not approve it in October last year.
“There are two separate problems here. They have cards for long-range strikes, namely drones and missiles hitting Russian oil refineries, which he says reduces their production and export capacity by 40%,” Stubb told CNBC on Tuesday.
“And it’s actually changing the course of the Russian people, who for the first time were against the war. So that must have an impact on Russia’s strategic thinking.”
But Finland’s president warned that “we shouldn’t laugh it off”, saying Ukraine needed air defense to support its war effort.
US President Donald Trump held separate talks with Russia’s Putin and Ukraine’s Zelenskyy over the weekend and said on Monday that a resolution to the dispute was “closer than people think.”
