Ukraine has set Russia ablaze – and Putin’s humiliation is complete

A year ago, it looked as though Donald Trump was set to force Ukraine into an ignominious surrender.

Today, Ukrainian drones rain fire on Moscow and St Petersburg and the country’s troops are gaining ground on the battlefield, in a deeply humiliating spectacle for Vladimir Putin .

The Russian President’s ill-judged war is now publicly and repeatedly putting the Russian heartlands in jeopardy, with the G7 this week noting Kyiv’s “new momentum” and “progress on the battlefield” after years of slow yet gradual Russian gains.

Ukraine is daring to hope that Russia will lose. Kyrylo Budanov, chief of staff to Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky , said the prospect of a peace deal by winter was realistic.

“The point where the Ukrainians are capable of striking Moscow and St Petersburg … hundreds and hundreds of miles from the Ukrainian territories, that’s a pretty significant sign that Russia has lost control of the momentum of the war,” said Jacob Parakilas, research leader in defence, security and justice at Rand Europe.

Black smoke rises from the refinery in Moscow on 18 June after a drone strike (Photo: Sefa Karacan/Anadolu via Getty Images)

The war had been characterised by momentum swings between Russia and Ukraine, but Parakilas pointed to “substantial differences this time, which are more about the strategic situation and the picture at home in Russia”.

Russia losing ground and under siege

The character of the war is shifting in favour of a rapidly innovating Ukraine, while Russia struggles to adapt. Russia’s theory that its meat-grinder tactics would overcome its vastly outnumbered foe in eastern Ukraine no longer holds.

Russian advances are stagnating as Kyiv employs new tactics and concepts to break out of attritional warfare. Independent battlefield tracking groups have reported Russia’s advances slowing or reversing for the ​first time since 2023. Oleksandr Syrski, Ukraine’s top military ​commander, said this month that his forces had recaptured more than 600 sq km of territory this year.

Russia is also incurring casualties at a faster rate than it can recruit replacements, reports suggest. It suffered 9,000 more casualties than it was able to replace in January, said Bloomberg. Its recruitment rate in March was below its loss rate for the fourth month in a row, according to Robert Brovdi, commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces (USF).

Media restrictions in Russia cannot prevent news of setbacks filtering through, especially as Ukraine’s devastating long-range strike campaign to cripple Russia’s oil exports brings the war home.

Footage of a Ukrainian attack drone hitting a storage tank at the Moscow Oil Refinery this morning, sending the tank lid perfectly soaring hundreds of feet. pic.twitter.com/2GIHEGk52M

— OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical) June 18, 2026

Huge explosions after drone hits on oil refineries and military bases deep inside the country are an increasingly common sight, even in the better-defended cities of Moscow and St Petersburg. On Thursday, drones and missiles struck across Moscow in Ukraine’s biggest air raid on the city in two years, setting a major ⁠oil refinery on fire and forcing the temporary closure of local airports.

Military bloggers, influencers and the business community are voicing discontent. As inflation and taxes rise, economic officials routinely complain about the burden of the war and politicians have called for its end. The leader of Russia’s Communist Party warned that the stagnating economy risked a 1917-style revolution. Putin’s approval levels have fallen to their lowest since the war began.

Muscovites try to protect themselves from carcinogenic smoke after Ukrainian drones hit an oil refinery in the city’s south-east. Officials have warned citizens to keep their windows closed (Photo: Sefa Karacan/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Ukraine’s mid-range drone campaign

Since April, Ukraine has ramped up air strikes against crucial infrastructure behind enemy lines, using homemade drones on targets close to the front including air defences, logistics centres, command posts, fuel supplies and the road and rail networks used to transport troops and matériel to the front.

Video feeds from first-person view drones show them hurtling towards military convoys, leaving blazing depots, the charred husks of trucks and railways in flames.

Kyiv is targeting areas of southern Russian and occupied Ukraine, in particular the T-0509 highway connecting the occupied cities of Mariupol and Donetsk, and the R-280 “Novorossiya” supply route to Crimea, which Ukraine’s troops have dubbed the “the highway of death”.

Zelensky said Ukraine’s mid-range strike campaign was a “priority”, saying last month that Ukraine had quadrupled the number of such strikes since February and that “there will be even more”.

Ukraine’s defence minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, said Kyiv’s aim was to “systematically destroy enemy logistics and supply lines, stripping them of their capacity to mo…