As Washington flip-flops on granting Tomahawk cruise missiles to Kyiv, there is a more practical, politically expedient solution, which doesn’t involve an American veto of every target that Ukraine may want to hit.
That solution is twofold: fund Ukraine’s defense companies to make their own missiles and long-range drones, and supply Kyiv with cheaper, less advanced munitions in greater numbers, observers and insiders said.
This will still let Ukraine scale up its deep-strike campaign, meant to grind down the Russian offensive rather than face its full might on the front lines, saving both lives and money.
“Right now, we need less missiles to meaningfully reduce the Russians’ capabilities, compared to 2022, because now we have drones,” said Serhii Kuzan, chair of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Center.
"But let's imagine that you also add missiles... this is a few dozen-fold enhancement to our long-range capabilities."
American Tomahawks and German Tauruses, which would be very helpful for deep strikes, remain blocked by politics for the time being. However, the Ukrainians have already made up for their dearth of missiles by innovating a menagerie of effective homegrown solutions. They just need support to make more.
Ukraine’s drones have proven effective at hitting softer targets like refineries, but also factories. One Kyiv-based developer told Euromaidan Press that drones can now penetrate a meter of concrete and deal heavy damage with warheads lighter than 100 kilograms.
Ukraine also produces its own missiles, like the Neptune and, more recently, the Flamingo. It also gets cruise missiles from less reticent allies — the Storm Shadows and SCALPs provided by the UK and France, respectively. All of the above have been used in successful strikes against Russia.
“The situation is not binary, and Ukraine could undoubtedly make effective use of 50 or so Tomahawks. However, since the US is highly unlikely to donate these missiles, European governments might be better advised to channel the estimated $125–200 million they would cost… directly into Ukraine’s missile industry,” wrote missile expert Fabian Hoffmann of Oslo University.
“Given that expanding Ukraine’s domestic missile production remains a major strategic priority, this may represent the more beneficial option.”
Deep strikes into Russia need to be scaled up
If necessity is the mother of invention, she has been an especially fruitful mother in Ukraine, birthing a wide variety of tech for both the front line and strategic attacks deep inside Russian territory.
When Western allies refused to grant long-range weapons out of fear of escalation, Ukraine was forced to develop a plethora of effective attack drones of different shapes and sizes, from their Shahed analogues like the Batyar, to bombers resembling civilian aircraft, like the UJ-22 or the Horynych, to high-altitude balloons and more.
Using these unmanned technologies, Ukraine has been striking Russia’s hydrocarbon infrastructure for years, but this campaign really kicked into high gear in 2025, with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy claiming that attacks are happening practically every day.
In spite of the economic damage, Russia has so far kept up the frontline pressure, demonstrating that it can still afford to throw money and bodies at the problem, something that Ukraine, short on both funds and manpower, cannot do.
Still, Kyiv hopes that by disabling enough strategic targets with more attacks, Russia’s military sustainability will falter.
Observers and insiders who spoke to Euromaidan Press said that deep strikes will not win the war or reconquer lost territories, but they can still weaken Russia’s war effort and halt its advance, with the right choices of targets and sufficient means to hit them.
- Drones work better against softer targets like refineries, but these are easier to replace
- Industrial machinery is harder to replace but harder to damage and is farther away from the front, so missiles work better against it
- Missiles are also useful for killing commanders in bunkers — if enough are killed, this can paralyze a regional offensive, thanks to Russia's top-down command style
- Tomahawks would be very useful to hit hardened targets, but chances of Ukraine getting them seem remote, with the White House constantly changing its mind
- Up to 50 missiles were under discussion; Ukraine would need hundreds of Tomahawks to take out entire factory complexes — plus, Washington could tell Kyiv what targets it's allowed to shoot
- For the same cost, the US and European allies could provide cheaper missiles and funding to buff up Ukraine's deep strike capabilities
Blasting Russia's refineries and industrial base
Designing a deep strike campaign around drones means choosing softer targets, said Marc DeVore, a defense policy scholar, who advised the UK’s Foreign Office on Russia’s full-scale invasion.
“I think that Ukraine has done a great job in terms of identifying some of those target sets,” he told Euromaidan Press.
Well-placed drone strikes can take refineries offline but to keep them that way, the attacks have to be regular and repeated, with most drone-sized payloads.
“Repairs and restoring a refinery to operation is not necessarily rocket science and there's a sufficient number of producers of the necessary equipment that the Russians will be able to source,” DeVore said.
Replacement piping, pumps, and other components can be easily acquired from China or built at home. Now, drones can do lasting damage to cracking units, which break down crude oil, and may be harder for Russia to source.
Missiles are able to do a lot more devastating damage to these targets, which would keep them offline longer. But missiles can be even more valuable if used to strike harder to reach targets, such as factories that make weapons or the stuff that goes into them.
Such plants are better-protected and also contain hefty industrial machinery like CNC machines or rotary forges that make parts for military vehicles. A recent investigation by InformNapalm showed that Russia must resort to evading sanctions to get its hands on more of these machines.
These machines are hard to damage with small payloads, but also much harder to replace if they are destroyed by a larger blast.
“Russia doesn't produce its own rotary forges, and China also is a laggard. So the rotary forge industry is largely dominated by one Austrian company, (GFM), and Russia depends on it for rotary forges,” DeVore said.
“So if one could either destroy those forges or inflict sufficient damage, it would be very difficult for Russia to replace them,” assuming the company doesn’t sell its tech to a random middleman that pops up overnight.
Range is also a factor. Tomahawks can go up to 1,500 kilometers. A significant proportion of Russia’s heaviest military production assets are located far from the front lines, requiring any weapons to cross major distances to reach them.
The majority of long-range attack drones and cruise missiles that Ukraine uses now typically have ranges in the hundreds of kilometers, without breaching the 1,000 kilometer mark. Ukraine’s Flamingo cruise missile has a claimed range of up to 3,000 kilometers, but this has yet to be verified independently.
Killing Russian command staff to halt the advance
Missiles are typically more effective at penetrating command and control centers, which are typically shielded by thick concrete. An attack like that can kill important command staff, which can be very disruptive to the Russian military, with its top-down command structure.
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It was a Ukrainian Storm Shadow strike in 2023 that blasted the Black Sea Fleet headquarters and command center in Crimea, reportedly killing dozens of officers.
Missile strikes were also instrumental in hitting the command posts of Russia’s 155th Naval Infantry, “paralyzing that entire direction” for a while, according to Kuzan. “The same story played out in Kursk in the spring.”
Successful attacks over the course of a month can disable command and control of an entire assault grouping, he said. But this requires a sufficient number of missiles.
The limits and opportunity costs of expensive missiles
With a few dozen good missiles, Ukrainians can force Russians to divert their air defense assets to protect more strategic sites, possibly weakening air coverage along the front. Or the Russians can be forced to spend resources to disperse production and harden facilities, especially if they don’t know how many missiles Ukraine has.
However, “if your goal is inflicting decisive damage on the Russian economy, yes, you would need hundreds,” DeVore said.
Hoffmann would agree, writing that destroying production plants with conventional missiles requires large salvos. Each Tomahawk can obliterate everything within a radius of 13 meters, but the Alabuga plant that makes Russia’s weapons stretches across 160,000 square meters.
It’d take at least 150 Tomahawks to destroy 50% of the facility, assuming all of them reach their targets. This is a lot more than the amount Washington had reportedly considered.
“This is not to suggest that this type of counter-industry targeting is inherently unfeasible. It is not,” Hoffmann wrote. “Still, such operations are more demanding than commentators generally suggest, and arguably require more heavy missiles than Ukraine has access to in the short-term.”
With fewer missiles, Ukraine can focus on disrupting supply chains like electronics, explosives, propellants, and so on, which it has been doing with some success, using drones and Storm Shadows.
“The other problem… is that for the Tomahawk to be used, it requires an entire targeting infrastructure that's dependent on the Americans,” DeVore said.
“Even if the Americans were willing to provide this system, they would have a de facto veto on every use case which I'm not sure is the situation you want to be in when the occupant of the White House seems to change his mind a lot.”
The more expedient alternative: help Ukraine develop missiles and drones
With that in mind, if Washington is unwilling to supply Ukraine with its most advanced, exquisite missiles, the US and other NATO allies can still improve Kyiv’s ability to degrade Russia’s oil industry and military production capabilities.
“Whether or not Tomahawks arrive in Ukraine, this will not decide the war. What matters far more is that European governments continue to invest substantial funds directly into Ukraine’s missile sector,” Hoffmann wrote.
Zelenskyy said that while Ukraine uses foreign missiles like Storm Shadows, 95% of deep strikes are conducted using Ukrainian weapons.
For example, some Ukrainian attack drones are more powerful than people give them credit for, despite having a limited payload size on paper, said Viktor, a Ukrainian technician who works in a lab developing Shahed-like delta-wing UAVs to attack Russia. His full name was omitted from the article for security purposes.
He claimed the cost of the basic hardware is just $5,000, although incorporating jamming-resistant antennas raises the price several times. According to Viktor, some Ukrainian companies have learned to squeeze a lot more damage out of a relatively small payload, just tens of kilograms in mass.
"Some ammo is made by ordinary guys... they don't know the chemistry or physics that they should know," he said.
"But I know a few companies that paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for special simulation programs for how they need to make the ammo to penetrate a meter of concrete, with a small amount [of explosive charge] and cause huge damage inside."
He added that Ukrainians already have the ability to use digital image matching to hit stationary targets on the ground. This is similar to what the Tomahawk uses for its terminal guidance.
In fact, there is a “whole list” of much simpler weapons that allies can deliver to Ukraine by the thousands, relatively inexpensively, Kuzan said. For example, air-launched munitions with cheap guidance, like turbo-powered versions of the glide bombs Russia keeps dropping — these “ersatz-missiles,” as he called them, can strike from 300 to 450 kilometers away.
While Russian air defenses are able to shoot cheaper weapons down with relative ease, Ukrainians have proven adept at punching corridors through these defenses with decoys, anti-radiation weapons, and other tech, enabling them to deliver sufficient firepower against stationary targets.
"You can carry out strikes against sites where weapons, equipment, fuel, and everything else the army consumes, are being stockpiled. That's the mission," Kuzan said. "The more such sites are hit, the slower the advance. So, in fact, it's precisely these strikes that can halt the invasion."
