The Ukrainians have a term for the barrage of missile strikes they have landed on Russia’s oil and military infrastructure in recent weeks: they call them “long-range sanctions”.
In part this is gallows humour – a response to Russia’s grim euphemisms such as “special military operation”, the official term for an unprovoked war of aggression, occupation and acquisition that has cost so many lives.
But it’s also a mild jibe at the West, which loves to talk of using sanctions to penalise Russia’s mass-murdering imperialism. Sanctions in the formal sense mean restrictions on trade and finance intended to constrain Russia’s capacity to wage war and punish its decision to do so.
While the West’s official sanctions have had an impact on Vladimir Putin and his henchmen, it’s an open secret that they are widely evaded. Russian elites and industries may not legally buy luxury goods and high-tech components from the West, but mysteriously they still obtain them – and equally mysteriously, Western exports to central Asian countries bordering Russia have boomed since the sanctions were introduced.
By contrast, the “sanctions” Kyiv is imposing on Russian industry are more hard-hitting and far harder to dodge. They fly in at hundreds of miles an hour, tipped with a high explosive warhead, and no amount of legal trickery or shell company manoeuvring will let you negotiate with them.
What’s more, they’re working: Russia’s oil and gas refining is nosediving, civilians and industry are subjected to formal rationing and enormous queues, and there are even reports of fuel shortages reaching elements of the military. Zelensky recently claimed that nearly 40 per cent of Russian primary oil refinery capacity has been put out of action. Yesterday, the Ukrainians struck the refinery in Omsk, the biggest in Russia, over 1,500 miles from the border.
Nor is fuel production Ukraine’s only target. Air defences, weapons component factories, and military infrastructure have all come under fire, too – particularly in occupied Crimea, which is verging on a state of siege. The Russian air force is compelled to deploy the last of its (hard to replace) airborne early warning planes to try to defend against the onslaught, which will hopefully expose them to greater danger in due course.
This is a hugely positive development for Ukraine strategically. Behind that lies a telling story about logistics, manufacturing and technology, which has the potential not only to change the course of this war but Britain and Europe’s future security.
While Ukraine’s bombardment of Russian targets still involves Western tech, like the British Storm Shadow missile or the French SCALP equivalent, this recent upsurge is founded upon homegrown Ukrainian drones and missiles, such as the FP-5 “Flamingo”, the product of an extraordinary story of innovation and determination.
The FP-5 has been designed since Russia’s invasion, and can now be seen flying across the Moscow skyline – through supposedly one of the world’s heaviest concentrations of air defences – to blow Putin’s war machine to kingdom come. The Flamingos are only the most visible peak of a wave of Ukrainian drone manufacturing: over 4 million autonomous systems were built domestically in 2025, a number which will rise to between 5 and 6 million this year.
Ironically, this flourishing of Ukrainian domestic defence capacity is the result of restrictions and reluctance on the part of its Western allies. Whether it was German nervousness or American hostility, at every step of the last four years Ukraine was either denied cutting-edge weapons, or given them with onerous conditions forbidding their use beyond certain limits. Their solution, understandably, is that if weapons from other people come with costly strings attached then they must develop weapons of their own.
This probably wasn’t what Donald Trump and JD Vance had in mind when they obstructed and delayed the vital military aid on which Ukraine’s survival rested. But while you can choose how you act, you can’t choose how other people respond to your actions. The West’s go-slow came at a sizeable price in Ukrainian blood and lives, which Kyiv would never have chosen, but the unintended outcome is a Ukraine which is imbued with a stronger punch and much greater operational independence.
There are major implications for Britain. With the United States pulling the rug on its Nato security guarantees, and Donald Trump declaring that we and other European nations must fend for ourselves in future, we must look to Ukraine for the shining example of what that looks like in practice.
Where we have been able – so far – to afford the naivety of addressing this issue as a hypothetical, they have dealt with what “fend for yourselves” means in harsh, non-negotiable reality.
All the lessons Ukraine has been compelled to learn the hard way are highly relevant to our own future security; it is far less costly and painful to learn from them today than to leave it too late and repeat their experience in a future life or death crisis.
We all remember that this country opened its doors to Ukrainian troops, providing them with training at Ministry of Defence sites across Britain. That relationship must now be reversed, and we must learn from them to ensure our future security.
Ukraine has the most battle-hardened modern military in the world, one of the largest and most innovative military drone industries, and now an extensive and effective domestic cruise missile sector, with the experience of how to use it to greatest impact. Where once they needed Nato, now the tables are turned and we need them. Standing by our friend in the East was and remains the right thing to do. In the future, that relationship may also save our lives.
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