Four years after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Russian economy is showing clear signs of structural exhaustion. The contours of a genuine economic endgame are coming into view for Russia. This is the finding of a new Kiel Report published by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy and the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics.
The number of missiles and drones launched by Russia has been fairly steady since last year, sure there are some peaks here and there, but on average the numbers don’t go up, rather they’ve been going down slightly for the past few months. Ukraine’s countermeasures have become much more effective though with less than 10% of drones making it through.
I specifically said ballistic missile attacks, which have gone up drastically
From a previous comment, I understand that they are being forced to use the significantly more expensive ballistic missiles, which use up fuel they can’t afford to use, specifically because their drone success ratio is so far down lately.
All other military options they have are removed: artillery, infantry and armor get killed by drones. Russian drones get shot down before reaching target. They are hoping they can force a better settlement with the current terror bombings before they run out of fuel entirely
Let’s hope that’s the case, but they have surely been benefitting off the fact that Ukraine’s anti-missile defences are down
It’s not quite “more every week”; the numbers seem to be roughly stable since April. Of course it’s still a lot.
One question that occurs to me is whether they can actually sustain this. Missiles aren’t that cheap or fast to produce so it’s possible that they’re throwing out more than they can sustain in an attempt to wear down Ukraine at the last moment.
I’m not an expert on the weapon systems involved so maybe I’m way off base.
The past week we’ve seen 2 massive attacks on Kyiv, the first was the biggest yet for the whole war, and the 2nd was almost as big.
But my guess is they were panic attacks by Putin, because he has nothing else he can do. And he wanted to retaliate for the attacks on refineries in Saint Petersburg and Moscow. That were both a very strong demonstration of power from Ukraine.