These are the “hardest days” for Ukraine, says Lisa Yasko, Ukrainian MP and member of its parliament’s committee for foreign affairs.
She hardly sleeps, she says, as air sirens blare warnings of the wave after wave of missiles Vladimir Putin is sending into her country.
Defence analyst Malcolm Davis makes a grim comparison: London, 1940.
“It is almost like a return to the days of the Blitz,” he said. “Russia is going to deliberately attack civilians as much as possible, to inflict as many civilian casualties as possible, to break the will of the Ukrainian people.”
And the news keeps getting worse: the White House has put a ‘speed limit’ on vital Starlink military communications, and the country has run out of the US Patriot missiles that fly up to intercept incoming attacks.
“All ballistic missiles reach their goals,” Yasko told LBC’s Andrew Marr on Thursday. “There are thousands of drones. We never have seen thousands before.
“We don’t have Patriots, we don’t have Starlink. We may not have enough information from intelligence, which means that every day it’s just survival, real survival. We don’t know whether we wake up tomorrow… and this is not just big words.
“This is the reality for most of us.”
Ukraine’s ability to block the Kremlin’s punches is hamstrung. But it can still throw punches of its own – and British missiles may be the key to proving the theory that attack is the best form of defence.
Storm Shadows
After meeting Andy Burnham on Wednesday, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky said they had agreed to “accelerate deliveries of British-made air defence systems”.
What wasn’t mentioned – but confirmed by Bloomberg and the Telegraph on Thursday – was a side deal for more Storm Shadow cruise missiles.
Storm Shadows, and their Scalp French equivalent, are Ukraine’s most precise long-range strike weapons. They have a range of 155 miles, launched from the air, enabling attacks beyond the front lines and into Russia itself.
They have classified anti-interception countermeasures, and a delayed-detonation feature that penetrates walls and bunkers before triggering the main warhead. Their GPS and terrain-matching navigation makes them a deadly “fire and forget” option.
The number of Storm Shadows sent to Ukraine since the first delivery in 2023 has never been made public, but most analysts put it at less than 100. They are expensive (at least £1m each) precision weapons, saved for the highest priority targets.
The UK considers Ukraine’s use of long-range weapons to target Russian sites involved in attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure to be “defensive”, anonymous sources told Bloomberg.
In May, Ukraine used them to destroy what it called “an important enemy command-and-control and communications post” in the occupied Luhansk region, and in April took out a drone launch facility near Donetsk. In March, multiple missiles identified as Storm Shadows hit an electronics plant in Russia described as a key producer of components for Russian missiles.
Last year, Storm Shadow/Scalps launched from Su-24 bombers were reportedly used to hit a Russian navy missile submarine and the Russian navy headquarters in Sevastopol, killing 34 commanders and staff, including the second-in-command of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.
“They go after high value targets, time-sensitive targets,” American strategy analyst Ian Williams told the Wall Street Journal. “They can’t just use them to go blast some random piece of Russian artillery behind the lines.”
‘Critical infrastructure’
Davis, a senior analyst in defence strategy at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, expects Ukraine to aim its Storm Shadows at critical Russia infrastructure, including energy infrastructure, oil and fuel infrastructure, logistics centres and data centres.
They can’t be aimed at mobile rocket launchers and there is limited value in attacking missile component factories directly, as “the Chinese are directly assisting Russia in providing all the technology needed to produce the weapons. Ukrainians can’t hit targets in China”, he said.
The best strategy is more indirect: take out the data centres running the Russian disinformation bots, and “take away the economic lifeline that Putin requires to continue the war.”
Former diplomat Jane Hardy, an ASPI senior fellow who has worked as an envoy with the US Indo-Pacific command, expects an “asymmetric” war over the winter months. Ukraine will take out critical Russian infrastructure, while “the Russians just bombard the place, over and over again”.
Ukraine has proven an innovator with drone attacks, she said, but “the drone part of the story is more of a nuisance or a disabler, not a complete destroyer”.
“Zelensky, in light of what he describes as [Donald] Trump’s unreliability, has signalled very clearly that he has begun again attacking Russian energy sites and infrastructure sites,” she said.
Without missile interceptors, she said, Ukraine is “back to square one”: Zelensky going “to NATO and the Western allies absolutely cap in hand, begging for air power”.
“I believe the next phase [of the war] we’ll see a return to focusing on very conventional warfare and offensive by Ukraine.”
“Deterrence by punishment” is hard to assess, she said, but conventional weapons could act as a viable deterrent and limit military action, by imposing a cost on Russian attacks.
‘Pain and misery’
But on Ukraine’s home front, the biggest concern is the lack of Patriot interceptor missiles. It means more damage, and more death.
“Russia striking Kyiv itself, over and over again, with conventional missile strikes, to me, tells you a lot about the direction this war is heading,” Hardy said.
Davis agreed.
“Ukraine has run out of Patriots, which means their cities are now much more vulnerable to Russian missile attacks,” he said. “The Russians understand this and they will double down on their ballistic and cruise missile attacks and their drone attacks.
“The Russians are not making any progress on the ground and if anything Ukrainians are pushing them back. But the Russians can continue to produce large numbers of weapons and continue to bombard Ukrainian cities and civilians right through the winter, destroy their electricity supplies, destroy their heating capabilities, to try and impose as much pain and misery on the Ukrainian people as possible.”
Civilian casualties in Ukraine have risen monthly throughout most of 2026.
“The Ukrainians just have to ride this out and try and survive the winter..”
Out of options (for now)
Nato has a “Prioritised Ukraine Requirements List” (Purl) under which European countries stumped up cash for 95 per cent of Patriots delivered to Ukraine in the year to July. In September, the UK announcd another £100m towards Purl, to purchase Patriot and other air defence equipment.
But there is a worldwide shortage of missile interception weapons, Davis said: the US itself is running low, Japan wants more as it eyes North Korea, the Middle East wants more as it eyes Iran and the Houthis, Israel wants more to keep its Iron Dome secure. There are fears Trump may start to reject Purl procurements.
And Europe is reluctant to draw much further down on its own stocks. Back in January, Germany’s defence minister Boris Pistorius said they had already given away a third of their supply.
Davis expects it to be “two to five years” before supply meets demand.
There are cheaper alternatives to the Patriot under development, such as Project Freya, a European anti-ballistic system that aims to have a viable product by the first half of 2027, and perform its first intercept by the end of next year.
Ukraine also hopes to win a licence to build its own Patriots, though that depends on Trump’s approval. And don’t count on that, Davis warned.
“Trump and his administration has decisively aligned to Russia and is now supporting Putin,” he said. “Hopefully the Europeans will step forward and fill that gap as much as they can, but that’s a shattering blow to Western unity and confidence in the United States leadership.”