The Complete History of Air Power in the Russia-Ukraine War (So Far)

February 24th, 2022. As Russian troops amassed along and then poured over the borders of Ukraine, observers bet that we would soon see a Russian tricolor fly over the presidential palace in Kiev. But that is not what happened. Far from it. Ukraine took the war to Russia, and less than five years later, Zelensky was declaring that he will decide whether Moscow's airports are allowed to be open. But we did not get there overnight. Ukraine had to survive some precarious moments before it could assert itself on the international stage. And the result was no miracle either. It was the product of smart bets and clever engineering. This is the complete history of the evolution of airpower in the Russia-Ukraine war. Ah, so far. Prologue. Legacy drone systems. Now that we are buried up to our necks in drones, it is easy to forget what the technology looked like before the invasion of Ukraine began. Once upon a time, the best-known drones used in war were sophisticated systems, born out of U.S. casualty sensitivity, and designed to replicate what manned aircraft did, just without a pilot in the pilot seat. Welcome to the era of the Reaper, the Cadillac of drone warfare. However, as soon as you remove life support from the equation, you get a bunch of other benefits. Now there is more weight available for munitions. There is less need to defend the airframe itself. All you are putting at stake is a bunch of metal and electronics, which makes even more room available for weapons. Issues with combat fatigue disappear. Airmen, using that term loosely, can pilot the craft in shifts. This also meant the aircraft needed to spend fewer dead hours transiting back and forth from the base to the area of operations, leading to less fuel waste. Conversations among the pilot, commanding officer, and legal advisors became easier, because they could all now sit in the same room. Notably, this effect was offset by how many more missions could be flown, leading to an increase in the total number of legal problems, even if per-strike issues declined. Overall, combat pilot turned into a 9-to-5 style job, where pilots could deploy wherever was necessary for their shifts, and still make it home in time for dinner. This centralization further allowed the United States to cut support staff closer to the combat zone, and instead focus on drone maintenance and repair. The other notable difference from this era is that drones were purpose-built for the mid-2000s warfare that the United States faced. Its opponents in Afghanistan and Iraq were relatively weak, so designers could further scale back the Reaper's defenses. As a result, they were not cut out for a conventional war with contested airspace. Yes, they were relatively cheap compared to traditional exquisite airframes, so they were expendable. That said, at around 30 to 40 million dollars per drone, they were far from disposable. It just was not a major crisis if the United States lost one. Running parallel to these developments was the early use of quadcopters in combat. This dates to the Libyan Civil War, when insurgents took commercially available quadcopters and used them for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions. ISIS began adopting the same strategy. By the mid-2010s though, the group was engineering a way to attach grenades to quadcopters, and equip them with a release mechanism. Effectively, the prototype for the models of drones that define the line of control today. The key difference is that they were not pervasive. Quadcopter interactions may have been routine, but you did not have to plan every war action around loitering munitions. The problem that these groups faced was the inability to produce drones at scale. The quadcopters used were hobby models with minor modifications to suit them for combat. There was neither the industrial capacity nor the supply chains in place to produce them at scale. Hence, they were a novelty, at least at the time. Chapter 1. Traditional Airpower The modern world of drone combat evolved right in front of our eyes, because at the start of the invasion, no one was thinking about it. Indeed, when Russian troops began pouring across the border, the Kremlin's game plan mirrored what the traditional U.S. or NATO game plan looks like. Establish air superiority by destroying anti-aircraft systems, pick apart the remainder of high-value targets from the safety of the skies, and let the boots on the ground handle the finer-grained aspects of the war. It did not turn out that way. The U.S. intelligence community knew that the invasion was imminent. It did not fully succeed in convincing Ukraine to fully prepare. Kiev was reluctant to immediately assume a war footing before the war actually broke out. But one critical thing that the Ukrainian military did do was shift around its air defenses. In the opening hours of the invasion, Russian missiles hit their GPS targets properly. However, the coordinates were empty, and the effort was wasted. Ukraine's air defenses were all elsewhere. But not realizing that, the Russian Air Force then treated the situation as though it had air superiority. It did not. Legacy Soviet systems like the S-300 and Buk picked apart the unprepared Russian fighters. Commanders attempted to compensate by having the fighters drop to lower altitudes to evade radar systems. Yet all that did was put those frames in range of U.S. manpads, one of the few systems that the United States authorized for delivery to Ukraine prior to the invasion. By April, Russia had basically conceded the skies and stopped flying manned missions over Ukraine. Chapter 2. Gliding Overall Flashback to the simpler times of the 1960s, when the world was merely concerned about a thermonuclear apocalypse. As a part of the Soviet force posture at the time, everyone's favorite shoe-banging premier oversaw absurdly large productions of FAB-500 bombs. Contrary to their acronym though, the FAB-500 bomb was not particularly fabulous. In fact, FAB just stood for High Capacity Aerial Bomb. But fast-forwarding to 2022, they presented an interesting engineering problem for Russia. There was effectively an unlimited supply of these and closely related bombs still in the Russian inventory, thanks to some questionable Soviet investment decisions. Yet they were simultaneously worthless as is. Dumb and gravity-fed, they needed to be dropped over their targets. That presented an inherent problem when Russian planes stopped crossing into hostile territory. Long ago, the United States also had this problem. An over-abundance of dumb bombs left over from the Cold War. One of the solutions was the development of the JDAM Extended Range Guide Kit. It basically converts the bomb into a GPS-guided munition. Attach a and suddenly you get 70 kilometers of range. Well, back in the former Soviet Union, Russia duplicated that idea with the UMPK Conversion Kit. Unlike the more modular bomb designs that JDAM kits attach to, FAB-500s are rigid, so the end product looks like a science fair project wrapped around a bomb. But you do not get bonus points for style and war. The system works. An airfoil and a guidance system still leaves you with a smart bomb. Thus, the solution became having Russian fighter jets fly high up, safely on the Russian side of the border. Drop a glide bomb from that safety. Then let gravity and the airfoil generate the desired distance for the bomb. It is not as good as what Russia intended at the start of the war, but it is cheaper and comes with a lot less risk. And the end product puts them at a similar level as Gimler's missiles that HIMARS can launch, allowing them to fill equivalent counter-logistics roles. In early 2023, Russia began experimenting with them on the battlefield. Over the summer, they became commonplace. Glide bombs remain a scourge to Ukraine's frontline logistics and cities close to the line of control. Chapter 3. The Quadcopter Takes Over Back on the frontlines, quadcopters were becoming a defining feature of the modern battlefield. Taking cues from those earlier conflicts in the Middle East, Ukraine experimented with them from the beginning. But most of the applications were done from hobbyists on the frontlines, with some clever ideas for ad-hoc missions. It took until the middle of 2023 for quadcopters to become ubiquitous on the Ukrainian side, with Russia following by the end of the year. In 2024, we reached a point of industrial saturation. Everyone understood the utility of loitering quadcopters on the frontlines, and the assembly lines away from the front shifted toward producing them at scale. And unlike exquisite weapon systems, it was possible to accelerate production in short order. Everything about the front bent to the humble quadcopter. The era of neatly defined trenches and a no-man's land separating the two parties was over. In its place, a grey zone soup emerged, where it became possible that Russians had snuck west of Ukrainians, and Ukrainians had snuck east of Russians. Heavy armor disappeared from the battlefield. With the frontlines freezing, it became too easy for a few thousand dollars of to waste millions of dollars of tanks. Other traditional battlefield logics flipped. With everyone dismounted, treelines became advantageous for those going on the offensive, as they offered a place to hide. Until the other side burned them down, or winter left their leaves barren. Heavy rain also became advantageous, with drones struggling to operate under those weather conditions. Then you had the fiber-optic mini-game. Jamming equipment would prevent opposing radio-controlled drones from entering your zone. So drones with long fiber-optic cords would first seek out the jammers, and then open up the skies to the rest of the quadcopter fleet. Forests along the grey zone started to look like they had been infested by spiders, due to the web of fiber-optic cables left over. Not to mention Operation Spiderweb, when Ukraine smuggled quadcopters next to far-flung Russian airbases, and laid waste to billions of dollars of equipment in a single afternoon. All the while, Beijing was enjoying the show. Sure, the end production of these quadcopters predominantly occurred in Russia and Ukraine. However, the component parts tended to originate from China, both for Russian and Ukrainian production lines. Beijing found a way to profit no matter which side was winning, setting up its industrial infrastructure for a potential future confrontation with the West. Chapter 4. The Shahed. Meanwhile, back at higher altitudes, another Russian initiative was kicking into gear. Following the failures of Russia's manned aircraft at the beginning of the invasion, Moscow sought solutions beyond the aforementioned glide bombs. The standard 70 kilometer or so range of a glide bomb was useful for striking targets near the front lines. But they could not go much further. The entire point was to launch from the safety of Russian skies. And so flying near the line of contact put Russian airframes in danger. And indeed, Ukraine would still score kills every now and then like that. Maintaining crew safety meant that much of the bomb's 70 kilometer range was lost traversing Russian territory. The solution there came from a decade earlier. In the 2010s, Iran developed the Shahed drone, which was pretty much the antithesis of the luxury drones that the United States favored at the time. Shaheds married a shoestring budget and minimum reliance on international supply chains. The result was a kamikaze aircraft, capable of going more than 1,000 kilometers and delivering a payload of at least 10 kilograms, and often more around 50 kilograms. It was exactly what Russia was looking for. The freedom from international supply chains was critical, because the West froze out Russia from the moment that the invasion began. The low cost would become critical as the war progressed, and the Kremlin began feeling a tighter economic squeeze. U.S. intelligence first detected a to negotiate a direct transfer of Shaheds. By the end of the year, Russia signed a licensing agreement to localize production, essentially opening up the world of the Shahed to Russia's industrial might. Well, that was easier said than done. It took more than a half a year to get the first assembly lines up and running, with Iran still producing key components to enforce its provisions. Russia then spent another year trying to localize everything and refine the Shahed's design for its purposes in Ukraine. We have to jump to August 2024, before Russia had clearly reached an industrial scale. At that point, Shaheds became a fixture over Ukraine's night skies. Chapter 5, Countermeasures With glide bomb and Shahed bombardments becoming commonplace, Ukraine had to look for solutions. Moreover, they had to be cheap solutions, because Russia basically viewed the warhead on the glide bomb as free, and Shaheds only cost tens of thousands of dollars. It did not take long for a template to form. A combination of standard radars, long-range radars from NATO AWACS planes flying on patrol, and even a dedicated network of cell phones always on and listening for the distinct sounds of Shaheds, which could then triangulate the locations and trajectories of incoming munitions. Once Ukraine identified an inbound strike package, interception teams could exploit a critical weakness in the Shahed system in particular. Speed, or more precisely, a lack thereof. Remember, standard Shaheds thrust forward with propellers. Ukraine can therefore use paired-down drones, also propeller-powered, to catch up to them. That is why Ukraine sees so much success in its Shahed shootdown percentage, often with claimed rates safely above 90%. All you need are mobile teams in the field to pilot the interceptors. And as time progressed, Ukraine invested in developing AI targeting systems, so one person can be responsible for multiple interceptions simultaneously. There is a notable problem with faster-moving glide bombs, though. These interceptors do not have the speed to catch up to them. If the radars can get a trajectory, you only have one opportunity to direct a head-on interception. Otherwise, the glide bomb can safely watch the interceptor from its rearview mirror. Understanding that Shaheds had a weakness, Russia developed a countermeasure, introducing jet-powered Shaheds to its regular lineup in summer of 2025. At first, these models basically cut out the propeller and replaced it with a jet system. Later models were purpose-built for jet power. Either way, it put Ukraine in the same position. Interceptors had one chance, and the impact needed to be head-on. And sometimes, even that was infeasible because the jet-powered Shaheds fly at higher altitudes. Interception rates for Ukraine dropped, but still stayed around 90%. Chapter 6, The Refinery Campaign You know, our discussion so far has been on Russian capabilities, and how Ukraine has responded inside of the country. What we have not mentioned are any efforts that Ukraine made to strike back inside of Russia. Well, that is because the first serious campaign like that did not begin until the end of summer 2025. The target? Russia's high-value oil refineries. Sure, Ukraine had made an effort every now and then to strike a handful over the first three and a half years of the war. They are obvious targets. Russia funds its war effort through oil receipts, and refineries are high up on the oil supply chain. But there was no concerted effort to systematically disable the entire industry. Ukraine's earlier problems were threefold. First, the Biden administration, fearing higher gas prices, strongly discouraged Ukraine from such a strategy. Second, to reach all but the closest refineries, Ukraine would have to evade a gauntlet of Russian air defenses, as opposed to just the air defenses sitting near the border. And third, Ukraine needed the actual hardware to travel those distances. The return of Donald Trump to the White House in 2025 solved the first two problems. Trump did not share Biden's qualms about the strategy. And despite cutting arms donations to Ukraine, he extended intelligence sharing on the location of Russian air defenses. That also helped Ukraine attrit Russian air defenses, further simplifying the problem. Domestically, Ukrainian engineers improved their drone arsenal, eventually opening up all of Western Russia to attack. At first, Ukraine exploited the nature of the target. Its drones could only carry small payloads, so it helped when the target had its own fuel to burn. Hence, Ukraine targeted fuel storage tanks at those facilities. However, the drone technology continued to improve, giving Ukraine more precision and firepower to disable the refining process itself. Now, Russia's budget is a constant source of concern inside of the Kremlin, with rumors that Putin is considering switching back to involuntary mobilization because the government cannot afford to keep paying recruitment bonuses. Chapter 7. The Medium-Range Logistics Campaign We can now transition to the beginning of 2026. For years at this point, the ground game had been slow-moving but favorable to Russia. It was at the point where you could see a clear difference in Russia's accumulated gains over time, but not to the point that Ukraine as a country was in any immediate danger. Still, you could not continue that pace for years on end without forever altering the fate of Ukraine. Whereas the refinery campaign relied on long-range drones with smart targeting, this time Ukraine's solution was the development of medium-range drones and, more importantly, the industrial saturation of them. Russia always faced a vulnerability in its southern tier of the front line. The occupied portions of Zaporizhia and Kherson are flanked by the Dnipro River to the northwest and the Sea of Azov to the southeast. For the portion of the front line just east of the hook in the Dnipro River, the only ways to get resupplied are through the land bridge that runs between Rostov-on-Don down to Crimea, and via the Crimean bridge that runs across the Kerch Strait on the eastern side of the peninsula. Back in 2023, Ukraine had a plan to exploit this problem. Amass an army to drive a wedge down the Sea of Azov. Blow up or otherwise disable the Crimean bridge. Then lay siege to the area south. The plan failed to get off the ground, though, as the Russian fortifications built the previous winter withstood Ukraine's assault. Returning to 2026, however, Ukraine was ready to try a revised version of this strategy, now focusing on air power to lay the siege. There are only so many roads that connect the land bridge, especially the portion that separates the Crimean peninsula. Bomb them enough, and Ukraine has, and the result is a section of Zaporizhia more vulnerable than it has ever been for Russia. This may be the first time that air power has been apparent in the territorial exchange data. February through August saw virtually no change in territory worth mentioning, yet these data hide a more complicated story. While Ukraine pushed south, Russia continued to travel east to west along the northern section of the front line. The changes just offset each other, leading to a situation where not much seemed to be happening, and yet a lot was happening. Chapter 8. Saturation over Russia. Shortly after Ukraine started its mid-range logistics strikes, it also began to saturate internationally recognized Russia with other drone strikes. As has been the case before, this was a combination of a few factors. Ukraine, again, was improving its production capacity and drone design. As time progressed, Russia's air defenses only seemed to further thin out. But perhaps the key aspect of this phase was Kiev realizing that a new type of target was vulnerable, and accepting the risk of blowback that could come with the strategy. Recall that the early phase of the refinery campaign relied on Russia storing flammable substances nearby. All Ukraine had to do was light a match, and parts of the facility would destroy themselves. Now, this feature might seem unique to the energy industry, where the whole business model is to create things that explode. Yet the strategists in Kiev found a surprising second option. Warehouses. This is Wildberries, often described as Russia's version of Amazon. The comparison is apt because the company handles the storefronts and centralizes delivery logistics for a ton of Russian businesses. Though unlike Amazon, Wildberries directly sells few products itself. Well, it turns out that the Wildberries fulfillment centers are gigantic, full of cardboard and batteries, and not equipped with fire suppression systems that can handle a And thus, drone manufacturers in Ukraine have a simple task. Create a system that can punch a hole into the warehouses, and maximize the initial fires. From there, you can just watch the whole things burn. Unlike the refinery campaign, Ukraine had to think through what public opinion would make of the new strategy, both to Western audiences and Russian audiences. After all, Wildberries was a civilian company. This was not a state-owned enterprise directly funding the war effort. The Western half was less of a gamble. On the surface, Ukraine claimed that Wildberries was a valid target. It sold many dual-use goods, and some items for sale were branded as special military operation approved. And it is true that Wildberries fulfilled orders that would eventually reach the front lines. Ultimately though, Western leaders and publics were uninterested in the nuance of proportionality. Civilian companies in Ukraine had been the target of so many Russian attacks over the years, that Wildberries, as far as they cared, was fair game. On the other hand, Kiev was gambling on Russian public opinion. There could be no doubt that eradicating Wildberries facilities would upset the average Russian. The question is who would the average Russian be upset with? Would it be the Kiev regime for actually committing the attacks? Or would it be the Kremlin for having started an invasion that led to this? The answer, it turned out, was to be more angry at the Kremlin than Kiev. There would be no rally round the flag effect, and Putin found himself with another political and economic problem on his hands. By mid-August, Ukraine had destroyed almost 30% of Wildberries' total warehouse space. Running out of large warehouses to target, Ukraine shifted its focus to Wildberries' main competitor. Air defense strategists in Moscow simply had no ability to provide adequate coverage to all of the targets that Ukraine could now strike. Drones were so saturated over Russia that Moscow's airports routinely had to pause flight traffic out of fear that airliners could get caught in the crossfire. Zelensky even began to make overt threats at Russia's airports, including that aforementioned declaration that he decides whether they stay open, though Ukraine has yet to follow through on any of those threats. Chapter 9, Ukraine's Missile Defense Crunch. Not everything was going well for Ukraine during this period. From the beginning, and while Russia pelted Ukraine with glide bombs and sheheds, ballistic missiles were also a part of the spread. They come with the benefit of packing a larger punch and being harder to intercept, but they are substantially more expensive to produce. For the majority of the war, Ukraine's counter-strategy was to defend key targets with US-produced Patriot interceptors, and just accept that a handful would inevitably go through. By May 2026, though, the problem had become acute. The United States had fought Iran for two months by this point, with Patriot systems working overtime to protect US bases in the Gulf region. The result was a global shortage of interceptors. Whereas before Ukraine could expect a slow trickle of interceptors to come in overtime, the spigot suddenly turned off. Meantime, Russia recognized that ballistic missiles had the highest success rate of its air systems, and thus expanded production. The result, as it stands at the time of video production, is that Ukraine is left with a new vulnerability. Ballistic missiles can hit their targets, and mostly Ukraine's response is to clean up the damage. It will put new pressure on the country as the calendar turns to winter, and simply keeping everyone warm returns as a problem for the capital. Still, that is a substantially better position than the bets that Ukraine would not even make it to the war's first winter, never mind through the end of March 2022. If you enjoy retrospectives like this, then you will love my book on the first year of the war. Check the video description for more information about it. I also have a playlist of retrospective videos similar to what you saw today. You can click here to view them all. And if you enjoyed today's video, then please like, share, and subscribe, and I will see you next time. Take care.