Ukraine can defeat Russia – or so Donald Trump apparently now believes. In a recent post on Truth Social, the US president declared that Ukraine ‘is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form… and, who knows, maybe even go further than that!’. Kyiv’s trump card, according to Trump, is that ‘Putin and Russia are in BIG Economic trouble, and this is the time for Ukraine to act’.

Perhaps unwittingly, Trump echoed a point that Ukraine’s chief of military intelligence Kyrylo Budanov made over a year ago – that Russia had to win to win the war by late 2025 or early 2026, otherwise they would start to face serious economic issues in summer 2025, and ‘lose their status as a superpower’. In the event, it’s been Ukrainian long-range drone attacks targeting oil refineries deep inside Russia that have helped make Budanov’s prediction of economic crisis, if not exactly collapse, come closer.

Since January, according to a recent BBC investigation, 21 of Russia’s 38 major refineries have been hit – half as many again as in the whole of 2024. Some of those strikes, such as two attacks in September on Gazprom’s Neftekhim Salavat refinery in Bashkortostan, were more than 1,100 kilometres from the Ukrainian border. As a result, up to a million barrels a day of petrol and diesel has been taken off the market – fully 38 per cent of Russia’s refining capacity. The result has been long queues at petrol pumps nationwide and petrol rationing. Instead of exporting refined oil products, Russia has begun importing emergency shipments from neighbouring Belarus and China. In a country that prides itself as an energy superpower, enemy attacks have made gasoline shortages a reality.

So, Trump is correct that Russia is in economic trouble. Russia’s latest state budget showed military and security spending eating up 40 per cent of government expenditure, while GDP growth is expected to slow to under one per cent, real incomes to stall, and inflation unlikely to fall below seven per cent. Fatally, though Ukrainian raids have disrupted domestic markets rather than exports, Russia’s oil and gas revenue is due to hit its lowest level since the pandemic due to low global prices. As a result, the Russian state expects to collect 22 per cent less tax revenue than in 2024.

Unsurprising, then, that Putin has increased the budget for domestic police and security services, while spending on propaganda is increasing by 50 per cent to feed more and bigger lies to the population. But does that signal that Russia is on the verge of economic crack up, as Trump appears to believe?

The problem with Budanov’s economic implosion argument is that Russia is just so large, physically and economically; hopes that Ukrainian attacks can bring the Kremlin to its knees may be over-optimistic. The reality of the war is undoubtedly coming home to ordinary Russians as long lines form for gasoline nationwide, drones appear in the skies over Moscow’s airports and, across a swathe of south Russia, strikes on refineries, factories and electricity infrastructure are becoming a regular occurrence. But is there evidence that they are damaging civilian morale, or conversely strengthening it? Most Russian regions have experienced a boom thanks to military spending, so the hardship of gasoline shortages is unlikely to suddenly turn people against Putin. Take city-wide air raid warning drills launched in several Russian cities last week, including in Moscow. The number of civilians killed by Ukrainian drones inside Russia remains in the double digits – yet local authorities went ahead with air raid drills nonetheless. Could the motivation be, perversely, to deliberately alarm the people and remind them of the Kremlin propaganda line that their motherland is under threat from NATO and its proxies?

Though Russia continues to grind slowly onwards at great human cost, the war on the ground has for some time now essentially been a bloody stalemate. ‘There is no such thing as “frontline” anymore’, according to Ukrainian soldier and filmmaker Volodymyr Demchenko. ‘Instead of a clear border there is a “killzone” – a strip from 500m to 10km where Ukrainian and Russian positions are mixed together.’ Any advance in this area, swarming with drones and filled with mines, is near-suicidal.

That makes the current and future dynamic of the war primarily about drone and missile strikes against the opponent’s rear, their infrastructure and their economy, which does not necessarily favour Ukraine. In this new war of attrition, two things matter: the ability to project and defend against airborne missile assault; and the size of the target. Moscow’s forces are systematically chewing up Ukraine’s electricity, transport, oil refinery and communications systems much faster than Ukraine is able to do the same.

For reasons of necessity, Ukraine has made impressive leaps in every aspect of drone warfare, both in terms of range, production capacity and technical sophistication. A stealth attack on Russian strategic bomber bases deep in Siberia earlier this year, using drones concealed in the roofs of prefabricated houses driven close to the airbases, was a triumph of ingenuity and imagination. In July, Ukraine revealed a new ‘Flamingo’ cruise missile with a range of 1,800 km. Trump has even spoken about the possibility of supplying Kyiv with Tomahawk cruise missiles with a range of over 2,000 kilometres at a cost of $1.3 million each, though targeting such missiles, even if they were ever supplied, would require US operational guidance – which is a significant step beyond the general satellite intelligence that Washington already supplies to Kyiv. In short, Ukraine is closing the long-range firepower gap – but is it doing so fast enough?

Unlike Ukraine, Russia is amply supplied with medium- and long-range cruise and ballistic missiles as well as a variety of long-range drones and drone decoys. Moscow’s problem is that US-supplied interceptors such as the Patriot, as well as home-grown Ukrainian drone-intercepting drones, typically knock out over 90 per cent of incoming projectiles. But according to a recent US report seen by the Financial Times, Russian engineers have upgraded their ground-launched Iskander and air-launched, hypersonic Kinzhal ballistic missiles to evade Patriot fire – and to target the $1 billion Patriot batteries themselves. Thanks to the latest adjustments, interception rates for these ballistic missiles have dropped to six per cent. That’s already having a devastating effect on Ukraine’s energy and transport infrastructure – and at least four drone manufacturing plants in Kyiv and its surroundings have been seriously damaged this summer.

In a war of deep strikes by drones and missiles, destroying Ukraine’s ability to defend its skies is likely to be more strategically significant than Ukraine’s strikes on Russian refineries. Futhermore, Russia has already permanently destroyed over 50 per cent of Ukraine’s non-nuclear electricity generating power. In retaliation for strikes on refineries, the Kremlin has now begun striking at gas infrastructure, too, and Putin last week threatened to target the transmission infrastructure around Ukraine’s nuclear reactors.

With the US seemingly resigned from the peace process, this war ends either when Ukraine runs out of manpower and its infrastructure is destroyed – or Russia runs out of money. But Ukraine is 28 times smaller than Russia, with less than a quarter of the population and a tenth of Russia’s economy. Under present circumstances, a Ukrainian economic and military collapse still remains likelier than a Russian one. Ukraine’s allies should heed the warning.