EDITORIAL: Striking Moscow is not escalation — it is coercion, and Ukraine is right to use it

EDITORIAL: Striking Moscow is not escalation — it is coercion, and Ukraine is right to use it

Introduction: The drone campaign that is changing the logic of this war

Kapotnya, Kerch, and the architecture of coercion

On June 16 and 18, 2026, Ukrainian drones struck the Kapotnya refinery in Moscow — one of the largest refining facilities in Russia and a direct supplier of fuel to the capital's civilian and military infrastructure. On June 25 and 26, Ukrainian drones struck the cable-laying ships Volga and Vyatka in the Kerch Strait — the narrow waterway connecting the Black Sea to the Sea of Azov, and the logistical lifeline of Russia's occupation of the Crimean Peninsula. These were not random acts of desperation. They were carefully selected strikes against infrastructure whose damage imposes real economic and military costs on Russia — costs that accumulate, compounding each other with each successful operation. This is the architecture of coercion, and Ukraine is executing it with increasing precision and scale.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has approved a 40-day deep-strike operation against Russian infrastructure. The operation is explicit in its logic: to bring the costs of the war inside Russia's borders, to force a recalculation among the Russian decision-making class about whether the war's continuation serves their interests, and to degrade the energy and logistics infrastructure that sustains Russia's war economy. According to Ukrainian and Western analysts, approximately one third of Russia's refining capacity is now offline or operating at reduced capacity as a result of cumulative drone strikes. Russia intercepted over 660 drones in the same period — a number that testifies to the scale of Ukraine's drone campaign as much as to Russia's air defense efforts.

The narrative battle: escalation or legitimate strategy?

Every major Ukrainian strike on Russian territory triggers the same reflexive response from certain Western commentators and officials: the language of escalation, of "provoking" Russia, of "crossing lines" that will produce unpredictable consequences. This framing needs to be examined critically rather than accepted as the default analytical starting point. Russia initiated a war of aggression against a sovereign state. It has systematically targeted Ukrainian civilian infrastructure — power grids, water systems, hospitals, residential areas — throughout the conflict. It occupied foreign territory and annexed it in violation of international law. In this context, asking whether Ukraine's strikes on Russian military and economic infrastructure constitute "escalation" is a question that deserves a more careful answer than the reflexive warning usually given.

The concept of escalation in wartime is not simply about which side fires the largest weapon or conducts the most dramatic strike. It is about the logic and trajectory of the conflict. A Ukrainian strike on a Moscow oil refinery that serves the Russian war economy is, in the logic of armed conflict, a legitimate military action against an economic target that contributes to the enemy's capacity to make war. Calling it escalation implies a symmetry of responsibility that does not exist when one party is the victim of an illegal invasion and the other is the aggressor. The language of escalation, applied without this context, functions as a form of moral equalization that serves Russia's interests more than Ukraine's.

The Kapotnya strikes: what was hit and why it matters

The strategic logic of targeting energy infrastructure

The Kapotnya oil refinery processes approximately 12 million tonnes of crude oil annually — making it one of the primary suppliers of refined petroleum products to Moscow and the surrounding region. Its products include fuel for military vehicles, aviation fuel, and heating oil for civilian use. The refinery's output is directly relevant to Russia's military logistics: military fuel supply chains for operations in Ukraine include refined products from facilities like Kapotnya. Degrading this facility does not just impose economic costs — it creates logistical friction in the supply chains that keep Russian forces in the field.

The choice of a Moscow refinery — rather than a more geographically remote facility — is also psychologically significant. The war has been, from Russia's perspective, something that happens in Ukraine and at a safe distance from the capital. Strikes on Moscow change that perception. They make the war visible to the Russian population in a way that state media cannot entirely suppress, and they impose costs on the metropolitan elite whose support — or at minimum, passive acceptance — sustains Putin's political position. The fires at Kapotnya, visible from residential areas of the capital, carry a political message as well as a military one.

The damage assessment and its significance

According to reporting by Militarnyi and confirmed by satellite imagery analysis, the Moscow Kapotnya refinery is unlikely to resume operations before 2027. The damage to key processing units — the primary distillation column and associated cracking units — is assessed as severe enough to require reconstruction, not simply repair. The Reuters assessment, cited by military analysts, is that the facility will require at minimum six to twelve months of reconstruction work before it can resume meaningful production. Applied across the multiple facilities that have been struck in the cumulative drone campaign, the aggregate impact on Russia's refining capacity represents a significant degradation of its energy infrastructure — the same infrastructure that provides the state revenue that funds the war and the supply chains that sustain the military's operational tempo.

The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) has documented in its daily assessments how the cumulative impact of Ukrainian infrastructure strikes is beginning to impose measurable constraints on Russian military operations — not dramatic collapses, but the kind of incremental friction that, over months, reduces operational capacity and forces resource allocation decisions that have their own cascading effects. This is the logic of a sustained coercive campaign: not a single decisive blow, but a systematic degradation that compounds over time and eventually forces the adversary to choose between catastrophic battlefield costs and negotiated terms. Ukraine's deep-strike campaign is executing this logic.

The Kerch Strait strikes: cutting the logistical lifeline of Crimea

Why the Kerch Strait matters strategically

The Kerch Strait, which separates the Crimean Peninsula from the Russian mainland, is the primary logistical corridor for Russia's occupation and administration of Crimea. The Kerch Bridge — already struck and damaged multiple times by Ukraine — and the maritime routes through the strait are the main supply lines for fuel, ammunition, food, and military equipment to Russian forces stationed in Crimea. Crimea's strategic importance to Russia's war effort extends beyond its role as an occupied territory: the Black Sea Fleet's operational base at Sevastopol — already significantly degraded by Ukrainian attacks — and the military airfields in Crimea have been central to Russia's ability to threaten Ukraine's southern coast and project naval power in the Black Sea.

The cable-laying ships Volga and Vyatka, struck on June 25 and 26, represent a specific category of naval asset with dual-use characteristics: they can lay undersea cables for civilian telecommunications but also for military communications and sensor networks. Their presence in the Kerch Strait at this stage of the conflict suggests they were involved in military infrastructure work related to Russia's communications and sensor networks in the region — making them legitimate military targets under the laws of armed conflict. The precision of the strikes — targeting specific vessels in a narrow waterway — demonstrates the increasing capability of Ukrainian long-range drone and maritime drone operations.

The progressive degradation of the Crimean logistics system

The strikes on the Volga and Vyatka are part of a sustained campaign to degrade the military and logistical infrastructure that sustains Russia's hold on Crimea. Ukraine has struck the Kerch Bridge multiple times, reducing its vehicle capacity. It has attacked fuel depots, ammunition storage facilities, and military airfields across the peninsula. The Black Sea Fleet has lost multiple vessels — including the flagship Moskva — and has been forced to relocate significant portions of its remaining assets to ports in Novorossiysk on the Russian mainland, effectively ceding operational control of large portions of the Black Sea to Ukrainian naval forces that, at the beginning of the war, had virtually no surface fleet to speak of.

The cumulative effect of this campaign on Russia's ability to sustain its forces in Crimea and to use the peninsula as a staging area for operations in southern Ukraine is one of the more significant strategic developments of the war's middle phase. The degradation of Crimean military infrastructure does not eliminate Russia's hold on the peninsula — that would require a ground offensive that Ukraine is not currently positioned to conduct at the scale required. But it significantly increases the cost and difficulty of maintaining that hold, and it creates conditions that could, under different political circumstances, make a negotiated resolution of Crimea's status more conceivable. Strategy works in long timelines. Ukraine is playing the long game.

The 660 drones: what the interception numbers reveal

Russian air defense under sustained pressure

Russia's air defense forces intercepted over 660 Ukrainian drones in the period covering the strikes described above. This number is frequently cited as evidence of Russia's effective air defense capability — and it is, in part, evidence of exactly that. Russia's layered air defense system — combining long-range S-400 and S-300 systems with medium-range Buk variants and short-range Pantsir systems — has genuine capability against the drone types that Ukraine has been deploying. The high interception rate reflects this investment and the sustained attention that Russia's military has devoted to improving its air defense performance as the drone campaign has scaled.

But the same number — 660 drones intercepted — reveals something equally important about Ukrainian strategy. A campaign that requires the interception of 660 drones is a campaign that is imposing significant costs on Russia's air defense resources: the missiles used for interception are expensive and finite; the radar systems and operators are under sustained stress; the command and control resources required to manage such a volume of simultaneous or near-simultaneous threats are being continuously stretched. And in a campaign calibrated for persistence rather than for a single decisive strike, the attrition of Russia's air defense resources is itself a strategic objective — creating progressively more permissive conditions for the strikes that get through. The fact that some did get through — the Kapotnya fire and the Kerch strikes are evidence of this — demonstrates that the strategy is working.

The drone production race and Ukraine's industrial capacity

Ukraine's ability to conduct drone campaigns at this scale reflects a rapid and remarkable development of domestic drone production capacity, supported by Western technology transfers and a domestic defense industry that has adapted with extraordinary speed to the demands of modern warfare. By mid-2026, Ukraine was producing tens of thousands of drones per month across a distributed network of manufacturing facilities that have been designed for resilience against Russian strikes. The decentralization of production — across hundreds of small facilities rather than a small number of large, vulnerable factories — has made it difficult for Russia to significantly degrade Ukraine's drone production capacity through its own strikes.

This industrial development is one of the war's most important structural changes. At the beginning of the conflict, Ukraine's ability to conduct long-range strikes was entirely dependent on Western-supplied missiles — HIMARS, Storm Shadow, ATACMS — whose delivery was controlled by political decisions in Washington, London, and Paris. The domestic drone capability that Ukraine has built over three years has substantially reduced this dependence — giving it a long-range strike capacity that does not require constant political authorization from allied capitals. This strategic autonomy is not only militarily significant. It also changes the political calculus in Western capitals about the risks of continued support, by reducing the risk that any single political decision will decisively affect the campaign's scale or sustainability.

The nuclear bluff: why Putin will not escalate to nuclear weapons

The structure of nuclear deterrence and its limits

The single most common argument against Ukraine's deep-strike campaign — and against Western support for it — is the nuclear argument: that strikes on Russian territory risk provoking a nuclear response. This argument requires careful unpacking, because it rests on assumptions about Putin's rationality and risk tolerance that deserve scrutiny. The use of nuclear weapons — even tactical nuclear weapons — against Ukraine or NATO countries would trigger a response that would be catastrophic for Russia: isolation, potential military retaliation, the destruction of the economic and political relationships that Russian elites depend on for their own interests. The threshold for nuclear use is therefore genuinely high, not because of ethical constraints, but because of the rational calculation of costs and benefits for the decision-makers involved.

The history of Putin's nuclear rhetoric over the four years of the war supports this analysis. Nuclear threats have been made repeatedly, and repeatedly not followed through on — most clearly during the provision of successive categories of Western weapons that Russia had previously claimed would constitute a red line provoking nuclear response. Long-range missiles. F-16s. ATACMS. Each provision was accompanied by Russian warnings; none produced the threatened escalation. The pattern is consistent with a regime that uses nuclear rhetoric as an instrument of psychological warfare against Western decision-makers — exploiting escalation anxiety in allied capitals to slow the provision of military support to Ukraine — rather than as a sincere declaration of intent. Recognizing this pattern is not recklessness. It is the accurate analysis that effective policy requires.

The real risks of not striking: strategic passivity as a form of defeat

The debate about the risks of Ukraine's deep-strike campaign tends to focus exclusively on the risks of action. The risks of inaction — of a war strategy confined to the territory of Ukraine, that allows Russia to conduct its war effort from the safety of its own territory without meaningful cost — are less discussed but equally real. A Ukraine that cannot strike Russian military and economic infrastructure is a Ukraine fighting at a permanent asymmetric disadvantage: absorbing the full cost of the war on its own territory, against an adversary whose homeland is a sanctuary.

Sustained coercive pressure on Russia's energy and logistics infrastructure is not a strategy for a quick victory. It is a strategy for altering the cost-benefit calculation of the Russian leadership and the Russian economic elite over a longer time horizon. The evidence that it is working — the degradation of refining capacity, the disruption to Kerch logistics, the forced relocation of the Black Sea Fleet, the measurable increases in Russian military fuel costs — is accumulating. The strategy requires patience and Western political will to sustain. What it does not require is the abandonment of the only leverage that can change Russia's calculations: the ability to make the war costly inside its own borders.

Zelenskyy as war leader: the 40-day operation and its strategic logic

The decision and its significance

Zelenskyy's approval of a 40-day deep-strike operation reflects the maturation of Ukraine's strategic conception of the war. In the early phases, Ukraine's strategy was necessarily reactive — responding to Russian advances, defending territory, and seeking Western weapons to close the most urgent capability gaps. As the war has evolved, Ukraine's strategic leadership has developed a more sophisticated offensive doctrine — one that recognizes that tactical defense on the front lines is insufficient to produce a favorable outcome and that pressuring Russia's war economy and decision-making through deep strikes is an essential complement to the ground campaign.

The 40-day timeline is not arbitrary. It represents a period of concentrated, sustained pressure on a specific set of targets — primarily energy and logistics infrastructure — designed to produce measurable degradation before a natural pause for assessment and adjustment. This kind of phased, purposeful campaign design is a significant departure from the improvised, resource-constrained operations of the war's earlier phases. It reflects the development of a genuine strategic culture in Ukraine's military leadership — one that thinks in terms of campaigns, not just battles, and that understands coercive strategy as a complement to ground warfare rather than a substitute for it.

Zelenskyy's moral authority and the weight of his decisions

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has spent four years making decisions that carry consequences he lives with directly — the deaths of Ukrainian soldiers, the suffering of civilians, the impossible trade-offs of a war fought against an adversary with vastly greater resources. His authority as a war leader is not only political. It is moral — built on the decision to remain in Kyiv when every intelligence assessment told him to leave, on the personal exposure to risk that he has maintained throughout the conflict, and on the consistent clarity of his public communication about the nature of the war and Ukraine's objectives. That moral authority matters when he makes decisions like the approval of the 40-day operation — because it comes from a leader who is accountable for the consequences in a way that no external commentator is.

The decision to authorize deep strikes on Russian territory is not taken lightly by Zelenskyy or by his military commanders. It is taken after careful calculation of military utility, risk of escalation, and impact on Western political support. The fact that the campaign is being conducted — and being conducted at scale — reflects their judgment that the calculation favors action. Western commentators and officials who second-guess this judgment from a position of safety, without bearing the consequences of the alternative, deserve less deference on this question than they typically assume. Ukraine's leaders are accountable. Their judgment, tested by four years of wartime decision-making, has earned a level of trust that reflexive escalation anxiety too often displaces.

The West must hold: the conditions for strategic success

The political prerequisites for Ukraine's strategy to work

Ukraine's deep-strike strategy can only produce the coercive effects it is designed for if it is sustained over a sufficiently long period to accumulate the damage that changes Russia's cost-benefit calculation. Sustaining it requires two things from Ukraine's Western allies: continued weapons supply, including the precision munitions and drone components that make the strikes effective, and continued political will to maintain economic pressure on Russia through sanctions and other instruments. Neither is guaranteed. Both are being contested in the political environments of key allied states.

The risk is not that Ukraine's strategy is wrong — the evidence of its tactical effectiveness is accumulating. The risk is that Western political will deteriorates before the strategy produces the strategic effects it is designed for. Putin's political strategy for the war — exhausting Western support through the grinding patience of a larger economy and population — has been remarkably consistent and has achieved real effects in the political dynamics of several key allied countries. Managing this risk requires Western political leaders to be honest with their publics about what is at stake, about what the costs of Russian victory would be, and about why the support for Ukraine is a strategic investment, not a charitable impulse.

The sanctions architecture and its untapped potential

The economic pressure on Russia through Western sanctions has been significant but not yet decisive. Russia's economy has adapted — through trade rerouting via China, India, and Central Asian intermediaries, through the development of parallel financial systems, and through the mobilization of domestic resources for war production. The sanctions regime has imposed real costs — the Russian ruble has depreciated significantly, inflation is elevated, and the forced military mobilization of the economy has crowded out civilian investment. But the costs have not yet been severe enough to force a recalculation at the highest levels of the Russian state.

The most significant gap in the sanctions architecture is the continued purchase of Russian energy by non-Western buyers — primarily China and India — at discounted prices that provide Moscow with the hard currency revenues that fund the war. Closing this gap would require secondary sanctions on the purchasers — a step that the US and EU have been reluctant to take because of its implications for bilateral relationships with major economies. The reluctance is understandable. It is also a choice with consequences: every barrel of Russian oil sold to China or India at a discount is revenue that sustains the war effort. The completeness of economic pressure is, like the completeness of weapons supply, a political choice that Western governments have not yet made fully.

The ISW assessment: what the daily data tells us

The intelligence value of systematic daily analysis

The Institute for the Study of War (ISW), which publishes daily battlefield assessments of the Russia-Ukraine war, represents one of the most valuable analytical resources in the public domain for understanding the conflict's evolution. Its June 26, 2026 assessment documented the tactical and operational effects of the drone campaign in terms of specific infrastructure damage, the redeployment of Russian air defense assets in response to the drone campaign, and the measurable effects on Russian fuel supply chains. The granularity of this analysis — drawing on satellite imagery, Ukrainian military communications, Russian operational reporting, and open-source intelligence — provides a level of battlefield transparency that was not available in previous major conflicts.

The ISW's assessment consistently shows two things simultaneously: that the drone campaign is imposing real and cumulative costs on Russian military and economic infrastructure, and that the overall strategic situation remains contested — that the damage is significant but not yet decisive. This honest double-entry accounting — acknowledging both the effectiveness of Ukrainian operations and the resilience and adaptation of Russian forces — is a model for the kind of analytical rigor that public debate about the war too rarely achieves. Policy decisions should be based on evidence of this quality, not on the motivated reasoning of those who want the war to end quickly on any terms or those who want to believe Russia's defeat is imminent.

The operational picture: what matters beyond the headline strikes

Beyond the headline strikes at Kapotnya and in the Kerch Strait, the cumulative operational picture documented by ISW and other analytical organizations shows a war that is imposing increasingly severe costs on Russia's military capacity. Ammunition consumption rates that exceed production; personnel losses that require drawing on reserve populations with decreasing military experience; logistics chains that are increasingly strained by the combination of battlefield consumption and infrastructure degradation from drone strikes; equipment losses that have required the deployment of decades-old armored vehicles that were designed for a different era of warfare. These pressures do not guarantee Ukraine's success — wars are not decided purely by logistics — but they accumulate in ways that create the conditions for the kind of strategic pressure that changes political calculations.

The Russian military's demonstrated capacity for adaptation and endurance should not be underestimated — it has survived and adapted to pressures that most Western analysts did not expect it to sustain. But adaptation has costs. The Russian military of mid-2026 is not the same instrument it was in February 2022, and not only because it has suffered casualties. Its quality — the technical proficiency, the doctrine, the leadership at operational levels — has degraded under the sustained pressure of a war it did not expect to last this long or cost this much. Ukraine's strategy is designed to exploit and deepen this degradation. The evidence suggests it is working.

The international law dimension: targeting and legitimacy

Military targets and the laws of armed conflict

The legal framework applicable to Ukraine's strikes on Russian territory is clear in its principles, if not always in its application to specific cases. The laws of armed conflict — embodied in the Geneva Conventions and their additional protocols — permit attacks on military objectives, defined as those objects whose partial or total destruction offers a definite military advantage. Economic infrastructure that directly contributes to an adversary's war-fighting capacity — fuel refineries, logistics hubs, military communication systems — falls within this definition. The Kapotnya refinery, which supplies fuel to military logistics chains, and the cable-laying ships Volga and Vyatka, which were conducting work related to military communications infrastructure, are legitimate military targets under this framework.

The principle of proportionality — requiring that the expected civilian harm of an attack not be excessive in relation to the anticipated military advantage — applies to all strikes, including those by Ukraine. The available evidence from the described strikes suggests that they were directed at specific military and economic infrastructure rather than civilian populations, and that the strikes were calibrated to maximize military effect while minimizing civilian harm. This is consistent with the standards that international humanitarian law requires and that Ukraine's military has, on the whole, sought to apply. The contrast with Russia's consistent targeting of Ukrainian civilian infrastructure — hospitals, schools, power grids, residential areas — is stark and legally significant.

The sovereignty argument and the right of self-defense

Ukraine's right to conduct military operations against the state that is conducting an ongoing armed attack against it is firmly established in international law. Article 51 of the UN Charter recognizes the inherent right of individual and collective self-defense against armed attack — a right that the UN Security Council has been unable to vindicate through collective action because of Russia's veto power. A state exercising its right of self-defense is legally entitled to strike the military and military-economic assets of its attacker, including on the attacker's own territory, provided that the strikes comply with the laws of armed conflict. Ukraine's deep-strike campaign is legally grounded in exactly this framework.

Critics who argue that striking Russian territory is an illegal or illegitimate escalation need to engage with this legal framework rather than bypassing it. The alternative framing — that Ukraine is obliged to confine its military operations to its own territory, allowing Russia to conduct its war from a territorial sanctuary — has no basis in international law and would represent a fundamental inversion of the self-defense principle. A victim of aggression does not forfeit its right to self-defense at the aggressor's border. This is not a controversial legal position — it is the unambiguous reading of the applicable framework. The discomfort it causes for those who prefer a different policy outcome does not alter its legal validity.

The energy war: Russia's oil revenue and Ukraine's counterstrategy

Oil revenue as the lifeblood of Russia's war economy

The Russian state's ability to fund its war in Ukraine depends fundamentally on energy revenue — oil and gas exports that, even at the discounted prices imposed by Western sanctions and the price cap mechanism, provide the bulk of the federal budget resources allocated to military spending. The International Energy Agency has documented that Russia's energy revenues, while lower than the pre-war peak, have remained sufficient to sustain the military campaign at its current scale. Degrading the refining infrastructure that processes this crude oil — both for export and for domestic military logistics — directly attacks this revenue base and the logistical system it sustains.

The strategy of targeting oil refineries is therefore doubly effective: it degrades military logistics in the short term and reduces export revenue in the medium term. The Kapotnya refinery's offline status not only tightens fuel supply chains for Russian military operations — it also reduces the volume of refined petroleum products available for export, and the domestic civilian market must be supplied from other sources at higher cost, generating inflation and popular discontent. The economic feedback loops from a sustained campaign against refining infrastructure are more complex and more far-reaching than the physical damage to a single facility. This is the full-spectrum logic of the energy war that Ukraine is conducting.

The oil price cap mechanism and its enforcement

The G7 oil price cap — established in late 2022 to limit the price that Russia can receive for its crude oil sold to Western and third-party buyers using G7 financial and shipping services — has been partially effective but is widely acknowledged to be imperfectly enforced. A shadow fleet of vessels operating outside G7 jurisdiction has allowed Russia to sell oil at prices above the cap to buyers willing to accept the reputational and legal risks of operating outside the mechanism. The enforcement of the cap — through designations of shadow fleet vessels, secondary sanctions threats, and diplomatic pressure on third-party buyers — has been inconsistent and has left significant leakage in the mechanism.

Closing the enforcement gaps in the price cap mechanism would do more to reduce Russia's war revenue than most other economic policy options currently on the table. It would require secondary sanctions against financial institutions that facilitate above-cap transactions and against third countries that serve as transit hubs for shadow fleet operations. The political cost of this enforcement — primarily in terms of bilateral relationships with India, China, and several Central Asian states — is real but manageable. The alternative — a price cap that is formally in place but systematically circumvented — is both economically ineffective and diplomatically damaging, signaling that Western resolve can be overcome through creative compliance evasion. The enforcement of the cap is not a technical matter. It is a political decision.

The path forward: what sustained coercion can achieve

The realistic outcome space

The realistic outcome space for the Russia-Ukraine war in the current phase is not a clean Ukrainian military victory resulting in the full restoration of Ukraine's internationally recognized borders, including Crimea. Nor is it a Russian victory resulting in the conquest of Ukraine or the installation of a compliant government. The most likely trajectory — absent a dramatic collapse of either side's capacity or political will — is a prolonged period of attrition in which cumulative costs on Russia eventually generate the conditions for negotiations under terms that are less favorable to Russia than its maximal ambitions require. Ukraine's coercive strategy is designed to accelerate this trajectory by maximizing those cumulative costs.

This is not a satisfying outcome from the perspective of international law and the principles at stake — the full restoration of Ukraine's sovereign territory and the full accountability for Russia's aggression would be the morally correct resolution. But wars end on the basis of military and political realities, not only on the basis of what justice demands. The question that Ukraine's strategy is trying to answer is what reality can be created through sustained pressure that gives Ukraine the strongest possible position in the negotiations that will eventually occur. The 40-day deep-strike operation is one answer to that question: it is building the leverage that the diplomatic endgame will require.

The West's obligation: to stay in

The most important thing that Ukraine's Western allies can do right now is to sustain their support — political, military, and economic — for the duration of the campaign that Zelenskyy has approved. This means continuing to supply the precision munitions, drone components, air defense systems, and ammunition that allow Ukraine to maintain both its deep-strike capability and its front-line defensive capacity. It means maintaining and strengthening the sanctions architecture, including pushing harder on the enforcement gaps that have allowed Russia to continue earning energy revenue above the price cap. And it means resisting the temptation to condition support on a negotiating process that Russia would design to benefit itself — demanding that Ukraine accept terms under pressure that it would not accept from a position of strength.

The history of this war is, in part, a history of Western decision-making that responded to Ukrainian resilience with successively greater levels of support, each delayed longer than it should have been, each accompanied by the same warnings about escalation that the previous provision had disproved. That pattern should inform the current moment: the support that Ukraine is requesting is the support that its strategy requires, and the consequences of withholding it — a Ukraine denied the capacity to impose costs on Russia — are worse than the speculative risks of providing it. The West has an obligation to stay in. Not as charity. As the strategic interest that it is.

The Pravda Ukraine source: first-hand reporting from the front of information

Ukrainian journalism under fire

Ukrainska Pravda — one of Ukraine's most respected independent news organizations — has covered the strikes and the strategic developments surrounding them with the combination of immediacy and precision that comes from journalism conducted under direct threat. Ukrainian journalists covering the war face not only the general dangers of conflict reporting but the specific risk of being targeted by a Russian state that has demonstrated willingness to kill journalists. The continued operation of independent Ukrainian media throughout the conflict — maintaining coverage standards, sourcing claims responsibly, and providing the information basis for the international understanding of the war — is itself a form of resistance that deserves recognition.

The reporting of Ukrainian media on the deep-strike campaign has been, overall, more careful and more accurate than Western commentary — unsurprisingly, given that Ukrainian journalists are embedded in the reality they are covering and cannot afford the luxury of abstract strategizing from a distance. The combination of Ukrainian primary reporting, ISW daily assessments, and the analytical work of Western think tanks and academic institutions provides a reasonably complete picture of what is happening on the ground and what its strategic significance is. The problem is not a lack of information. It is a lack of will, in some Western capitals, to act on the information that is available.

The information dimension: why narrative matters in this war

The information dimension of the Russia-Ukraine war has been a consistent front on which both sides have invested heavily. Russia's disinformation operations — targeting Western publics, Ukrainian civilian morale, and the international perception of the conflict — represent a sustained campaign designed to undermine Western support and create a narrative that justifies Russia's position as a reasonable actor responding to Western provocation. The accuracy of this narrative has been consistently refuted by evidence, but evidence does not automatically win information wars — the resources, sophistication, and reach of Russian information operations ensure that false narratives maintain traction in significant portions of Western public opinion.

Countering this requires not just factual correction but the kind of moral clarity that this editorial is attempting to provide: naming what the war is, who is responsible for it, and what is at stake if Russia is allowed to achieve its objectives. The drone strikes on Kapotnya and the Kerch Strait are not events that can be neutrally described without a moral context. They are acts of self-defense by a country that has been attacked, conducted against legitimate military and economic targets, in the service of a strategy aimed at ending a war that Russia started. That context should be present in every account of these events. When it is absent, the narrative serves Russia's interest more than the truth's.

Diplomacy and the negotiators: who can play which role

Turkey as a contested mediator

Erdogan's Turkey has played a mediating role between Ukraine and Russia since the start of the conflict — notably by negotiating the Black Sea Grain Initiative of 2022 and maintaining communication channels between Kyiv and Moscow. This mediation is valuable but deeply ambivalent: Turkey is a NATO member but refuses to fully apply Western sanctions against Russia and continues trading with both belligerents. This equivocal position makes Turkey acceptable to both parties as a mediator, but also unreliable as an impartial arbiter.

In 2026, ceasefire negotiations involve several platforms: direct contacts facilitated by Turkey, European channels through the OSCE and EU envoys, and informal discussions via Gulf states. This multiplicity of channels creates a risk of contradictions and mixed signals. What Turkey says about a Russian proposal can differ from what Germany says. This diplomatic cacophony weakens Ukraine's negotiating position. Stricter Western coordination of negotiating positions is a precondition of diplomatic effectiveness.

What a just peace concretely requires

Beyond diplomatic formulas, what does a just peace for Ukraine require in concrete terms? First, Russian withdrawal from all internationally recognized Ukrainian territory, including Crimea and the four partially occupied oblasts (Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson). Second, reparations for the destruction caused by Russian aggression, estimated at more than 500 billion dollars by the United Nations. Third, credible security guarantees — either NATO membership or bilateral defense agreements with the major Western powers.

These demands are those of international law and the logic of lasting peace. Not all of them are immediately achievable through negotiation. But they define the spectrum of the acceptable — below which any agreement would be nothing more than a pause before the next aggression. Zelenskyy carries these demands with resolve. The West must support him by maintaining pressure on Russia until these conditions are at least partially met. Pressure is not war — it is the condition of peace.

The post-war: rebuilding Ukraine and reforming European security

The Ukrainian Marshall Plan

Rebuilding Ukraine after the war will be one of the most complex and costly projects in modern European history. Infrastructure destruction is estimated at more than 500 billion dollars according to assessments by the World Bank and the United Nations: housing, hospitals, schools, factories, roads, bridges, energy networks, ports. Reconstruction will not only be expensive — it will also be an opportunity to build differently, integrating standards of energy sustainability, resilience to future shocks, and economic modernization.

The European Union launched the Ukraine Facility in 2024, a fund of 50 billion euros over four years to support Ukrainian reconstruction and institutional reforms in connection with the EU accession process. That is a start — largely insufficient given the scale of the needs, but representing a concrete commitment. Additional financing mechanisms, including the use of frozen Russian assets (approximately 300 billion dollars in Western central banks), are under discussion. Rebuilding Ukraine must begin before the war ends — and must be financed primarily by Russian assets, not Western taxpayers.

Rethinking European security architecture

The Russo-Ukrainian war has definitively buried the post-Cold War European security architecture. The idea that collective security could be founded on political agreements without credible military capacity — the hope of the 1990s — died on the plains of eastern Ukraine. NATO is stronger, more united, and more relevant than it has been since 1991. Finland and Sweden, traditionally neutral, have joined the Alliance. European military spending has increased across most member states.

This revitalization of NATO is positive. But it does not resolve everything. Ukraine is still not a NATO member. The security guarantee that membership represents has not yet been granted to it. And the ambiguity over post-agreement security guarantees is precisely what makes Zelenskyy reluctant to accept a ceasefire without solid commitments. Ukraine's accession to NATO, or equivalent bilateral security guarantees, is the condition of a peace that is not merely a pause.

Conclusion: the coercive logic is sound — the West must not flinch

Why striking Moscow is the right strategy

Ukraine's deep-strike campaign against Russian infrastructure is, in the strategic sense that matters, the right approach for this phase of the war. It imposes real and accumulating costs on Russia's war economy. It degrades the logistics and energy infrastructure that sustain the military campaign. It demonstrates to the Russian decision-making class that the war has costs for them, not only for Ukraine. It builds leverage for eventual negotiations. And it does all of this without triggering the nuclear escalation that Russia's rhetoric has long threatened and never followed through on — because the conditions for nuclear use that would be rational from Russia's perspective do not exist, and the threshold for their creation is higher than the deep-strike campaign approaches.

The assessment that this strategy is working is not wishful thinking. It is supported by evidence: the offline status of Kapotnya and multiple other refining facilities, the degradation of Crimean military infrastructure, the forced relocation of the Black Sea Fleet, the measurable fuel supply constraints on Russian military operations. These are real effects with real strategic implications. The strategy requires patience, continued Western support, and the refusal to accept Russia's nuclear bluff as a reason to limit Ukraine's military options. None of these requirements is beyond the capacity of Ukraine's allies. The question is whether the political will exists to provide them consistently, without the periodic crises of confidence that have characterized Western support throughout the conflict.

The moment of decision

The fires at Kapotnya, visible from Moscow's apartments, and the disabled ships in the Kerch Strait, carry a message that Putin's Russia needs to receive clearly and without equivocation: the war that Russia started has costs inside Russia's borders, and those costs will grow as long as the war continues. The decision about whether those costs reach the level that changes Putin's calculus is one that Ukraine and its allies are making together. It requires the West to hold — to sustain support, to resist escalation anxiety that Russia deliberately cultivates, and to maintain the moral clarity that the situation demands. The alternative — a Ukraine abandoned to fight without the tools its strategy requires — is not a de-escalation. It is a different kind of catastrophe. One that is avoidable, if the West chooses to avoid it.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist

Columnist's transparency note

Editorial positioning

This editorial reflects the columnist's clear editorial position in support of Ukraine's right to self-defense, including through deep strikes on Russian military and economic infrastructure. The columnist is pro-Ukraine and considers Zelenskyy's leadership exemplary. This position is declared as a source of editorial bias that readers should take into account. The analysis is based on open-source reporting from Ukrainska Pravda, Militarnyi, ISW, and other publicly available sources as of June 26, 2026.

Limitations of the analysis

Military assessments of infrastructure damage are based on open-source information including satellite imagery analysis and Ukrainian military communications. Precise damage assessments may differ from classified intelligence assessments. The analysis of Russia's decision-making regarding nuclear use is the columnist's interpretation of available evidence, not a formal risk assessment. Readers should consult specialized security analysis organizations for more technical assessments of escalation dynamics.

Sources

Primary sources

Ukrainska Pravda — Ukraine's 40-day deep-strike operation: strategic objectives and progress — June 26, 2026

Militarnyi — Moscow refinery unlikely to resume operations before 2027 after drone strikes — June 2026

Institute for the Study of War — Russian offensive campaign assessment, June 26, 2026

Secondary sources

Euromaidan Press — Ukraine's drone campaign against Russian energy infrastructure — June 2026

Foreign Policy — Ukraine's coercive strategy: striking Moscow and the logic of deep warfare — June 2026

Kyiv Independent — Ukraine drone strikes Kapotnya refinery, Kerch ships in 40-day operation — June 2026