Ukraine’s drones are wrecking Russia’s economy on a massive scale — oil refineries, the enormous warehouse complexes of Wildberries (Russia’s Amazon), ports and grain export facilities — posing a grave threat to Russia’s ability to sustain its war of aggression. I discussed this in depth in Ukraine War (44): A Summary of the Current State of the War and Ukraine War (45): The Relationship Between Ukraine and NATO Is Quietly Changing — Ukraine is turning the tables on its attacker.
But at the same time, because Vladimir Trump has completely cut off the supply of Patriot missiles to Ukraine (which doesn’t surprise me in the least), Russian ballistic missiles are killing Ukrainian civilians in ever greater numbers. In the coming winter, they will destroy Ukraine’s power and heating systems, threatening the country’s very survival.
Now the whole world is asking the same question:
“If Ukraine’s drones can inflict such devastating losses on Russia and the latter has no counting measure, why can’t they take out Russia’s missile factories?“
No media outlet, and none of the military experts they interview, has given a clear answer.
What makes Ukraine’s drones so hard for Russia to counter is not advanced technology like stealth or speed. They are slow, they fly low, and they have no stealth features or infrared-signature reduction of any kind. Russian air defence missiles can easily shoot down anyone of them. But precisely because there is nothing high-tech about them, they are dirt cheap — a small fraction of the cost of a Russian anit-air missile, so Ukraine doesn’t care how many get shot down. Quite the opposite: the more Russia shoots down, the faster its treasury bleeds. Ukraine’s strategy is to launch drones in overwhelming numbers, so that, after Russia’s air defence missiles run dry, and after subtracting the drones downed by direct-fire weapons around the target, enough still get through to hit it.
But drones like these are no threat to a Russian missile factory.
The buildings that house Russia’s production of expensive missiles are nothing like an ordinary factory, with a roof of corrugated sheet metal a few millimetres thick over a layer of insulation — the kind that a drone carrying a few kilograms of explosives can blow open and set on fire. Most of the missile factories are built of military-grade, blast-resistant reinforced concrete. Even hundreds of kilograms of explosives detonating outside a building like that would not do meaningful damage. Every munition designed to defeat hardened facilities of this kind has an extremely tough casing, substantial weight and a delayed-action fuze; it must strike the target’s critical point with pinpoint accuracy, at very high speed and at exactly the right angle, punching through the hardened layer before detonating inside.
And once an aircraft has to weigh hundreds of kilograms or even several tonnes, fly at very high speed, and deliver that kind of precision and angle of attack, it no longer costs merely 50 thousand dollars. Its price jumps to hundreds of thousands — approaching that of a Russian air defence missile. With drones like that, Ukraine could no longer launch 500 a day, shrug off the losses, and count on 5% getting through. It could launch no more than twenty or 50 a day — and Russian air defences could shoot down every last one.
Ukraine’s overall technological base and industrial scale are far smaller than Russia’s. If Ukraine went down this road, it would be pitting its weaknesses against the enemy’s strengths — and it would inevitably lose the war.
If these weapons are to survive Russian air defences, they need stealth and low infrared signatures — like Storm Shadow — at which point they cost even more than the Russian missiles. Ukraine today has neither the technology nor the money for that.
This is why Ukraine’s drones have set Russia ablaze with smoke rising everywhere, yet leave its missile factories untouched.
All Ukraine can do now is strike at the root: bring Russia’s economy to collapse, until it can no longer sustain the war.
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