A Tale of Two Strategic Attacks: The Race to End the War in Ukraine

The trend of decreasing success of intercepting ballistic missiles appears to be getting worse in 2026. To date, since January 1, 2026, Russia has fired 167 ballistic missiles at Ukraine. Yet, the past trend shows that Russia generally ramps up its ballistic launches toward the end of the year. If this trend holds, Moscow is on track to fire up to 840 ballistic missiles in 2026 (Figure 2).

For Ukraine to successfully defend against Russian attacks, it must increase the rate at which air defenses intercept ballistic missiles. If only 10.2 percent of 840 ballistic missiles are intercepted, that leaves 754 devastating strikes that could alter the balance of resolve. Kyiv needs to limit the number of ballistic missile strikes that reach their target and buy time for its attacks on Russian energy infrastructure to change the decision calculus in Moscow.

How Ukraine’s International Backers Can Help

Ukraine’s international partners can address the increased use of Russian ballistic missile strikes to support the Ukrainian deep strike campaign along three lines of effort: revisiting sanctions evasion, increasing intelligence support, and accelerating coproduction.

• Revisit Sanctions Evasion: Since the start of the war, Russia has found ways to bypass sanctions and acquire important electronic components that support its long-range strike campaign. Recent reporting documents how Russia uses a special military intelligence unit, the 20th Directorate, to buy foreign electronics and evade sanctions. 

  To choke off the supply of foreign electronics feeding the Russian war machine, the United States and its allies must aggressively target the global networks orchestrating parallel trade. Russian military intelligence units like the 20th Directorate continually exploit gaps in customs enforcement, lax jurisdictions and shell companies to procure critical dual-use components. Washington should combat this illicit pipeline by rapidly declassifying and passing actionable intelligence on these front operations directly to partner enforcement agencies. Armed with this precise targeting data, the Treasury Department can then expand secondary sanctions against the specific third-country intermediaries and foreign financial institutions facilitating these covert supply chains. Synchronizing active intelligence sharing with expanded economic coercion will fracture the procurement hubs enabling Moscow and steadily degrade the sustainment capacity of the Russian defense industrial base.

• Increase Intelligence Support: International partners can blunt the lethal math of the Russian salvo campaign by expanding intelligence sharing to support Ukrainian deep strikes. Western agencies should provide actionable targeting packages that support attacking the ballistic missile threat at its source. High-priority target sets include mobile Iskander launchers, manufacturing plants deep inside Russian territory, and critical supply chain vulnerabilities like rocket motor production facilities. Disrupting these nodes before missiles enter the logistical pipeline reduces the immediate burden on Ukraine’s strained air defense network. Shifting a portion of Kyiv’s long-range strike capacity toward active ballistic missile launch platforms and component bottlenecks creates operational friction, forces Moscow to pull assets further back, and slows the overall generation of Russian firepower.
• Accelerate Coproduction: In 2024, Germany, Spain, Romania, and the Netherlands signed an almost $6 billion contract to manufacture Patriot interceptors (PAC-2) at a new facility run by defense company MBDA in southern Germany. During the July NATO summit, Under Secretary of Defense Michael Duffey signaled a willingness to explore additional coproduction in Europe outside of Germany. These efforts are in addition to calls to license Patriot production in Ukraine, an effort which, while crucial, could take years to materialize.
  
  Therefore, European states should tap European Investment Bank Group funding for additional production lines, both at the MBDA plant and in other areas. Accelerating PAC-2 production would allow European states to transfer additional Patriot interceptors to Ukraine without incurring significant long-term risk.

Benjamin Jensen is director of the Futures Lab and senior fellow in the Defense and Security Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C. Yasir Atalan is deputy director and data fellow in the Futures Lab at CSIS.