1/27
Without air defence missiles Ukraine can't shoot down Russian ballistics: the West must act NOW
Overnight into August 1, Russia launched one of its now-familiar layered strikes on Ukraine: 35 missiles, including 27 Iskander-M/S-400 ballistic missiles fired from Bryansk and Kursk, four Zircon and Onyx anti-ship missiles, and four X-31 and X-59/69 aviation missiles launched over the Black Sea, alongside 185 attack drones, a mix of Shaheds (some jet-powered), Gerberas, Italmas loitering munitions, Banderol munitions, and UAV decoys built to burn through air defenses before the real threats arrived.
Kyiv was the primary target, though strikes also hit Dnipropetrovsk, Sumy, Kharkiv, and Poltava regions.
In the capital itself, fires broke out across seven districts. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said 18 residential buildings were damaged, along with a school, energy infrastructure, and Lithuania's embassy, and that 9 people had been confirmed killed as of his latest update, with dozens more wounded and still being treated.
By mid-morning, Ukraine's Air Force reported confirmed hits from four anti-ship missiles, 26 ballistic missiles, and 23 attack drones across 21 separate locations, with falling debris causing further damage in two more, and three missiles that simply failed to reach their targets on their own.
The most telling number from the night is not the death toll but the intercept rate. Of 35 missiles fired, Ukraine's air defense brought down two: one of the 27 ballistic missiles, and one guided aviation missile, a roughly 6% success rate against missiles on a night when drone interception held near 83%.
The President of Ukraine was blunt about the reason: Ukraine has run out of interceptors for the Patriot batteries that are the only system in its arsenal capable of reliably stopping ballistic missiles like the Iskander.
That shortage is not a technical footnote. It is, in Zelenskyy's own framing, an active incentive for Russia to keep launching exactly these kinds of strikes, since a defense that can stop drones but not the ballistic missiles flying alongside them leaves the deadliest part of any given barrage essentially unopposed.
His appeal to partners was correspondingly direct: these interceptors are not needed in a warehouse against some hypothetical future contingency, they are needed now, and every package of anti-ballistic capability that arrives late arrives after, not before, the night it was needed.
A single missile stopped out of 27 is not a rounding error in a large air defense system. It is closer to a system that, for the ballistic threat specifically, was barely operating at all.
The energy infrastructure hit alongside the residential buildings is also not incidental. Russia has spent years trying to strip Ukrainian cities of power and heat, and striking energy targets in the middle of summer heat makes little sense as anything other than positioning for the season still to come: another autumn and winter spent trying to leave Kyiv and other cities without electricity through the coldest months, for the fourth year running.
Each of those previous winters followed the same pattern, strikes on generation and transmission timed to coincide with falling temperatures, and there is no indication in this summer's targeting that Moscow has abandoned the approach. That is not a military campaign against military targets.
It is a deliberate strategy of making civilians cold and in the dark a recurring feature of Ukrainian life, renewed on a yearly schedule regardless of how the front line itself is moving.
That is not a hypothetical concern: days before this strike, a Russian cruise missile crossed roughly 100 kilometers into Poland during another mass attack on Ukraine, coming down in a field in Lublin Voivodeship after more than an hour in which Polish forces could not account for where it was.
Thin out Ukraine's ability to intercept missiles over its own territory, and incidents like that stop being rare, deniable accidents on NATO's own soil and start becoming the routine cost of geography for everyone downrange of Russia's launch sites, Ukrainian and allied alike.
Therefore, supplying Ukraine with more interceptors is, at that point, both a moral and a strategic question, and it is hard to separate the two.
The moral case is watching civilians die in their own apartment buildings because the one system that could have stopped the missile aimed at them had nothing left to fire.
The strategic case is that a Russia which learns it can breach a NATO-adjacent country's skies this cheaply, this repeatedly, and pay no real price for it, has no reason to believe its ambitions should stop at Ukraine's border either.