What changed on the ground
Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced on Wednesday that the Dnipropetrovsk operation had ended as planned, liberating 26 settlements and recovering 745 square kilometres this year. The Institute for the Study of War, which assesses control from geolocated open-source material, put the recovery conservatively at 627 square kilometres, and assessed Russia at a net loss of 233 square kilometres across the whole front this year. The distance between 745 and 627 is the honest width of the claim.[1]
That result rests on a supply Ukraine controls. It now fields 16 short-range first-person-view drones for every 10 Russia puts up, and more than 70 per cent of Russian losses in June and July are attributed to such drones. Its defence ministry says it downed more than 40,000 Russian drones in July, close to one and a half times the May figure. Output and crew numbers decide that exchange, and both sides can read the rate directly.[1]
What changed in the air
Vadym Skibitskyi, deputy head of Ukraine's military intelligence, told RBC Ukraine that Russia stopped building the missiles Ukraine had learned to shoot down and moved the components into Iskander-M ballistic missiles and S-400 rounds reprogrammed onto steep ballistic trajectories. The monthly launch count follows that retooling: 61 in April, 107 in May, 134 in June, 198 in July. Russia now builds more than 100 of them a month, and fired 56 in the first week of August, which Skibitskyi read as a draw on stock.[1]
Against those two types Ukraine has only ever had one answer, the Patriot. Zelenskyy says allies delivered almost three times fewer interceptors this year than in 2025, and the stock is now empty. Combined drone and ballistic strikes hit Kyiv on August 8 and 11, left Odesa without power on August 9 and reached Zaporizhzhia on August 11. A defence with no rounds left stops working as a defence.[1]
A single night shows what the two rates buy. Russia's defence ministry said it struck the railway station at the Danube port of Izmail and two tugboats off Mykolaiv; Leningrad's governor said Ukrainian drones started a fire at the Ust-Luga oil export port and that more than 50 drones were downed overnight around St Petersburg. Ukraine reaches Russian export infrastructure and does so nightly. Russia reaches Ukrainian cities with a weapon that no longer meets an interceptor. The reasonable alternative reading is that July's 198 was a planned surge drawn partly from stock rather than a durable production floor, and Skibitskyi's own note about the first week of August supports that caution.[1], [2]
The assumption winter will test
On 7 August this column measured July by the ratio between munitions spent and the ground ISW could confirm. The ground side of that ratio has since improved for Kyiv. The munitions side has not. Skibitskyi says Russia is holding missiles back for a winter campaign against the energy grid, and last winter that campaign did as much as 70 billion dollars of damage and came close to blacking out Kyiv. The ratio still works as a way of reading the war; what changed is which side of it is moving.[1], [3]
A count settles this. If the monthly ballistic and hypersonic launch totals reported for October and November hold at or above July's 198, the retooling is a floor, and Ukrainian cities go through the winter with no interceptor line to meet it. If the totals fall back toward May's 107, July was a surge. That figure will be public by the end of November.[1]