July 6, 2026: Recent Ukrainian drone offensive against major Russian cities like Moscow and St Petersburg has shaken Russian morale and contributed to the willingness to accept defeat in Ukraine. Russian cities were poorly protected against the drone attacks. That’s because most of the air defense systems had been moved to areas near the Ukraine border. Recent drone attacks on Russian cities have been virtually unopposed. Most of the drones hit their targets without any interference from the missing or inoperable air defense systems.

In the nine months between early March and June 2025, Ukraine sent 935 drones against Russian air defense systems and infrastructure. The damage inflicted by these attacks was supplemented by similar efforts through the end of the year and into early 2026. In addition to destroying most air defenses and military targets around Russian cities, this campaign revealed they had not developed promised interceptor drones which already Ukraine had Ukraine had enough of these drones to send Persian Gulf States for use again Iranian drones.

Ukraine developed its Sky Fortress acoustic detection system to spot incoming drones and send all reports from hundreds of acoustic sensors to a central reporting and planning facility so that air defense systems could be used and redeployed more efficiently.

For a long time, Russia depended on electronic warfare to disable drones. Since 2022 Ukraine has been using Starlink satellite communications for all their military systems. Russia tried to use smuggled Starlink receivers until SpaceX disabled the Russian Starlink equipment and gave the Ukrainian a substantial battlefield advantage as Russian units improvised other ways to communicate with each other.

All these Russian deficiencies culminated in the recent devastating drone attacks on Russian cities, military and economic targets. Now Russia is expected to admit failure and leave Ukraine before the end of the year. In the future, Russians will conclude that the lack of adequate air defense systems lost the war in Ukraine.

This is nothing new. Twenty-five years ago, Russia put into service the first S400 high-altitude long-range surface-to-air missiles near Moscow. The S400 could engage targets from 1 to 400 kilometers away, and from 5 meters above the ground to 30 kilometers altitude. The S400 can also intercept cruise missiles or ballistic missiles. As impressive as all this was on paper, these systems could be disrupted and deceived by Israeli, and NATO countermeasures. This was proven when Israel went after S300s in Syria and Ukraine disabled S300 and S400 systems over the last few years.