What does Zelensky’s threat to ‘close Russia’s skies’ mean? And what targets could Ukraine hit next?

Ukraine continues its campaign of strikes on Russia’s rear, and its choice of targets keeps growing more varied. In recent days, drones have hit an oil terminal at the port of Ust-Luga on the Baltic Sea, a drone base in Oryol Region, unknown facilities in Tolyatti, a power plant in Belgorod, and air bases in Yeysk and Saratov Region. But the campaign still centers on the same types of targets, which absorb most of the drone stockpile: oil refineries and marketplace warehouses. On September 1, Volodymyr Zelensky warned that civil aviation infrastructure could become a new target as well. How effective are these strikes? Do they bring Ukraine closer to victory? What is the logic behind the choice of targets in the first place? And can that logic help predict what Ukraine’s military will strike next? Finally, is Ukraine capable of intensifying its strikes? Meduza’s Explainer desk looked for answers to these questions.

What logic drives Ukraine’s choice of targets inside Russia?

There’s no precise answer. What’s available are educated guesses and statements from Ukrainian officials that can be checked against the facts and either confirmed or disproven. Those guesses aren’t pulled from thin air — they come from matching the technical specifications of Ukraine’s drones and missiles to the kinds of targets being hit.

• The characteristics and quantity of Ukraine’s strike weapons limit its choice of targets. Not everything Kyiv might want to hit can be struck regularly and systematically with the drones and missiles it currently has.
• The types of targets Ukraine strikes regularly also offer clues to the goals behind its bombing campaigns — an attempt to understand what effect Kyiv is counting on when it picks targets for massed, sustained strikes.

Exactly how these decisions are made matters less than the fact that the target list is approved at meetings of the war council under President Volodymyr Zelensky. Analysts, Western military experts, or a specialized military AI agent can compile that list. Alex Karp, chief executive of Palantir, the American company that leads this industry, says its model helps select targets for Ukraine’s military, a claim Ukraine confirms. Palantir previously did similar work under a Pentagon contract ahead of the war with Iran.

What strike capabilities does Ukraine have?

By 2026, Ukraine had built up large numbers of two types of drones: ones for strikes deep behind the front line, hundreds or thousands of kilometers away, and ones for the medium rear, 20 to 150 kilometers (12 to 93 miles) back.

• With the first type, Ukraine expanded a campaign Kyiv has dubbed “bringing the war home” — onto Russian territory — or “long-range sanctions”. The strikes first hit the country’s largest oil refineries, then warehouses belonging to the e-commerce giants Wildberries and Ozon.
• Medium-range drones, equipped with video cameras to guide them onto moving targets, have attacked vehicles in the occupied territories — mainly, though not exclusively, on roads connecting the Rostov region with Crimea.
• These drones are hard to use against targets inside Russia proper. Their two-way video link relies on Starlink satellite terminals, most often mounted on so-called “mother” drones that relay a signal to the strike drones — but the Starlink signal is blocked over Russia. Kyiv’s requests to Elon Musk to unblock it for terminals owned by the Ukrainian military haven’t gone anywhere so far.
• Long-range drones are guided to pre-programmed coordinates, so they can’t hit moving targets, and they carry their own drawback: a small “payload,” meaning a warhead that isn’t very powerful. They can reliably destroy only fragile targets — even reinforced-concrete factory buildings are extremely hard to knock out with them. What’s needed are “softer” targets that can be destroyed with just dozens of kilograms of explosives.
• Ukraine still can’t regularly hit more heavily defended targets deep inside Russia — that would require missiles with warheads weighing hundreds of kilograms. The cruise and ballistic missiles Ukraine’s allies supply are limited in number, and using them often requires approval from cautious Western governments. None of these missiles has a range beyond 300 kilometers (186 miles), so they’re used only against targets in occupied and border territories.
• Ukraine’s own production of long-range missiles has clearly fallen behind schedule and hasn’t yet become a decisive factor. Over the past year, Ukraine’s military has carried out dozens of strikes with Flamingo cruise missiles made by Fire Point, the same company that makes the FP-1, the most widely used long-range drone. The results have been mixed at best: there have been clear successes, such as hits on military plants — mostly near the border — but also cases in which missiles were evidently launched yet no documented “impacts” were ever recorded.
• Ukraine likely still has few of these missiles, and they’re a relatively easy target for Russian air defenses. Overwhelming that defense would require much larger salvos — and for Russia to feel the threat in full, those salvos would need to come far more often.
• Ballistic missiles with ranges in the hundreds or thousands of kilometers, which Fire Point announced more than a year ago, still haven’t materialized; the company’s latest stated deadline is fall 2026.

For now, then, Ukraine remains constrained in its choice of targets.

• Every long-range drone costs tens of thousands of dollars, and fewer than half of those launched reach their target — so the target has to be expensive, both in the value destroyed and its impact on Russia’s economy, and hard to rebuild.
• The target should be lightly defended and free of a reinforced-concrete shell; ideally, the sensitive facilities are spread over a large area, which keeps Russia from concentrating its air defenses to protect them.
• The target’s coordinates also need to be known in advance.

Why did Ukraine settle on oil refineries and marketplace warehouses?

The most important reason is that these targets suit the mass strike weapons Ukraine has on hand. Oil-refining units, storage tanks for petroleum products, and warehouses full of goods stacked on wooden pallets all burn well, and none of them are encased in reinforced concrete. They’re also large-area targets, hard to defend against attacks coming from multiple directions.

These facilities are well suited to massed campaigns because inflicting maximum damage requires hitting only a small number of “targets.” Building alternative, distributed, protected, and camouflaged production and storage sites is difficult, and constantly repairing and restoring them is difficult if not impossible. What gets destroyed isn’t just expensive property — production and logistics chains break down too, inflicting harm on society at large, meaning producers, sellers, and consumers of goods, as well as on other sectors of the economy and public finances.

All of this applies above all to oil refining. Strikes on refineries in August triggered a second gasoline crisis, more serious than the one in spring and early summer. Summer vacations and the harvest are driving a seasonal rise in demand that is amplifying the fuel shortage’s effects. It’s hard to gauge the full scale of it, but the impact on public mood is clear.

Repairing refining units will naturally get harder as the campaign continues, but it’s still not easy to knock the industry out entirely with drones alone. That would require strikes to continue almost without pause, destroying facilities faster than they can be repaired.

Before August, though, Ukraine had paused its strikes on refineries, which allowed oil refining to partially recover by midsummer. During that lull, Wildberries warehouses became the main target. The impact of that campaign on Russian society is obvious, but it’s clearly smaller than the impact of strikes on refineries: those trigger a gasoline crisis that directly touches tens of millions of lives, while the Wildberries campaign has hit tens of thousands of sellers and, to a lesser extent, millions of buyers who’ve faced longer delivery times.

Ukrainian politicians and military officials have offered various explanations for targeting the warehouses. The most detailed explanation holds that it could trigger a systemic financial crisis in Russia: Wildberries owes hundreds of billions of rubles to VTB, one of the country’s largest state banks, which itself issued bonds to finance joint projects with the retailer. Under this theory, the retailer’s collapse would cause problems for the bank and for the country’s entire financial system.

But Ukraine’s military undercut that explanation itself by expanding the campaign to Ozon facilities in late August. Unlike Wildberries, which built its warehouses on credit, Ozon leases its space with its own funds — a different business model that means strikes on its infrastructure pose little risk to the banking system.

The impact of both campaigns — the “fuel” one and the “commercial” one — on Russia’s military capabilities, and on the resilience of its economy and budget, remains limited. Russia’s Defense Ministry gets top priority for petroleum products, along with other government agencies, and no reports of fuel shortages at the front have emerged so far — not even from troops stationed in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, where strikes on the medium rear have disrupted logistics along roads running near the Sea of Azov and through Crimea. Complaints so far have come only from agricultural producers, who aren’t first in line for fuel, and, naturally, from private car owners.

The strikes on refineries and warehouses haven’t seriously dented the federal budget either. Russia’s Finance Ministry reported that non-oil-and-gas revenue rose significantly over the first seven months of 2026 compared to the same period last year. Oil and gas revenue fell, but that decline predates Ukraine’s campaign — prices for Russian oil were already low at the start of the year. The budget’s real problems stem from rising spending, evidently mostly military spending, which is widening the deficit. Ukrainian strikes on the rear, and the need to counter them, may account for some of that increase, but the exact share can’t be established since most military budget line items are classified. What’s adding more pressure on the treasury is the need to spend on other war-related priorities — for example, buying drones and missiles for strikes on Ukraine’s own rear.

Kyiv has drawn one clear benefit from its strike campaigns: Russian society has genuinely “felt” the war far more acutely than in previous years. Whether that brings Ukraine closer to victory is hard to say — historical experience with bombing campaigns in other wars suggests that attacks on sensitive industries alone can’t achieve success.

What other targets might Ukraine’s military choose? And what does Zelensky’s threat to ‘close the skies’ over Russia mean?

Until Ukraine gets its hands on mass quantities of cruise and ballistic missiles, its choice of targets will follow the same principles as before: objects relatively vulnerable to small amounts of explosives, but whose destruction causes significant economic and social damage.

Zelensky announced one such broad category of target on September 1: civil aviation infrastructure. Ukraine’s president didn’t disclose details, but addressing foreign airlines that fly to and over Russia, he said Kyiv “isn’t threatening civil aviation as such,” even as drone attacks mean “Russian skies will de facto be closing.” Vladimir Putin has already called Zelensky’s remarks “a bid for state terrorism” and threatened to abandon the negotiating process entirely in response.

Experience with strikes on aviation infrastructure shows this isn’t the easiest target to hit hard. Iran, for instance, repeatedly attacked airports across the Gulf states and the broader Middle East, including Israel, but that produced only brief pauses rather than prolonged closures of the affected facilities and airspace. Even after direct drone hits, airports reopened to flights within a few days.

Ukraine also struck an important node of aviation infrastructure in May — a branch of the “Southern Russia Air Navigation” agency in the Rostov region, home to the “Rostov Control” air traffic controllers who manage airspace over the entire south of the country. That closed several airports, but only for a few hours, an effect not much stronger than the routine precautionary closures that happen whenever air defenses respond to drone attacks. A larger-scale effect would require a long-term campaign of strikes on aviation infrastructure.

It’s possible Zelensky is counting on the statement alone to reduce the intensity of flights to and over Russia. But it’s hard to say how foreign airlines — mainly Chinese, Arab, and Indian carriers — will respond to this threat if regular strikes that “de facto close Russian skies” don’t follow through on it. Today, these airlines profit handsomely from using Russian airspace, which remains off-limits to their competitors from the European Union and the United States.

The power grid is another sector where uninterrupted operation matters not just for public comfort and well-being but for other industries too. For several years running, Russia itself has made Ukraine’s power generation and distribution infrastructure the primary target of its own seasonal strikes each fall and winter.

Experience with these attacks shows that infrastructure — transformers at electrical substations, above all — can be knocked out, if only briefly, even by drones. A large-scale effect requires hitting many substations across different regions, but this kind of damage is repaired relatively quickly, provided there are spare transformers on hand, which Ukraine gets from its Western partners.

Drones with low-powered warheads are less suited to knocking out generation itself — power plants or heat-producing facilities — where a lasting effect requires missiles.

Russia is already preparing for the likelihood that its next campaign of strikes on Ukraine’s power grid will draw a symmetrical response: construction of physical protection for electrical substations has begun in Moscow.

Current Ukrainian drones are even less suited to strikes on military facilities. They lack a powerful enough warhead and the ability to hit mobile targets anywhere except the occupied territories, where Starlink service works — and even there, only for terminals registered with Ukraine’s Defense Ministry.

There have also been success stories. Ukraine’s military hit Russia’s only fiber-optic cable factory, in Saransk, with drones, and the plant was shut down at least through 2027 “due to equipment damage.” Its output is needed to produce fiber-optic drones, one of the most important components of Russia’s battlefield fire systems.

A striking counterexample: the many failed attempts to halt the assembly line for “Geran”-type drones in Alabuga.

Strikes on other targets — airfields hosting Russian tactical aviation, for example — have long produced, at best, isolated successes. Hangars, including reinforced-concrete ones, protect the aircraft, and when slow-moving drone attacks pose a danger, the planes are simply scrambled into the air.

It’s similarly hard to inflict serious damage on “drone ports,” the bases from which Russia’s military launches its own long-range drones. Destroying each launcher requires one drone, and even that doesn’t always succeed without the ability to “home in” on the target via a two-way video link. As a rule, the consequences of these attacks are not critical for the Russian side.

Can Ukraine expand its strike campaigns?

Zelensky said recently that Ukraine plans to increase its daily drone salvo targeting sites deep inside Russia to 1,000, up from an average of 300 currently — though Russia’s Defense Ministry reports “repelling attacks” by 500 or more drones every day. A two- to threefold increase in intensity would naturally give Ukraine’s military far more freedom to experiment with target selection and with its impact on the enemy country’s economy and society.

This expansion comes with major financial and organizational difficulties that officials in Kyiv acknowledge as well. Ukraine’s military has no room for error in planning its bombing campaigns — producing drones for strikes on the deep and medium rear eats up a significant share of a limited military budget that Western donors largely fund.

During a recent conflict between Ukraine’s Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov and Oleksandr Syrskyi, the commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces — a dispute that ended in both men’s resignation — Syrskyi said his rival had used funds earmarked for troop pay in the second half of the year to buy drones over the winter instead. After Fedorov left his post and announced his political ambitions, Zelensky blamed him for a $27 billion hole that had opened up in the Defense Ministry’s budget. Fedorov himself insists the projected shortfall during his tenure was $5 billion.

Either way, this isn’t the best moment for a multifold increase in strike capacity. The drones Ukraine uses to attack the Russian rear cost around $50,000 apiece on average, so an additional 500 to 700 drones a day would run $25 million to $35 million a day — $10 billion to $12 billion a year, assuming daily mass launches and not counting ground infrastructure, extra personnel costs, or drones lost on the ground to Russian strikes.

Even the lower estimate amounts to roughly 10% of Ukraine’s entire annual defense spending, on top of its current budgets. Such an expansion could well jeopardize not just military salaries but other programs too, including ballistic missile production.