Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Thursday that Ukraine’s deep-strike campaign will force Moscow to carve out a larger buffer zone inside Ukraine, rejecting Trump’s suggestion that Western pressure could speed a peace deal. Peskov called that idea a mistake, warning that continued escalation would prolong the war and that “it will force us to create a larger security zone, a larger buffer zone,” according to NBC News. The framing casts continued war as Ukraine’s fault for resisting, but it arrives alongside a less flattering fact for Moscow: Ukrainian drones have spent the past several days striking refineries, logistics hubs, and naval targets with a reach that Russian air defenses have largely failed to stop.
That failure is most visible in the Sea of Azov, where Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces have struck dozens of vessels in Russia’s sanctioned “shadow fleet,” tankers that ferry fuel to occupied Crimea, according to the Kyiv Independent. Analyst Serhii Kuzan says the goal is “to ensure that Crimea ceases to be a rear base” for Russia’s southern force grouping, per the Kyiv Independent, and the campaign has already pushed Crimean authorities to declare a state of emergency over fuel shortages, according to GV Wire. Paired with refinery strikes as far as Omsk, 2,500 kilometers from the border, this looks like a deliberate dismantling of two supply chains at once, not scattershot escalation.
Russia’s answer has been blunt force rather than precision. Two nights before Trump’s Patriot pledge, Russia fired 29 ballistic missiles at Kyiv, and Ukraine’s air defenses stopped none of them. “The success rate is low, to put it mildly,” Ukrainian Air Force spokesman Yurii Ihnat said, according to Scripps News. The contrast is stark: one side is running out of interceptors to stop missiles aimed at civilians; the other is increasingly unable to stop drones aimed at its own infrastructure.
That contrast makes Trump’s Patriot license pledge more symbolic than immediate. Ukraine would become only the third country ever granted such a license, according to Defense Express, and the shortage squeezing Ukraine now is compounded by the US-Israel war with Iran, which has already consumed roughly a third of the global Patriot stockpile, per Scripps News. It’s a real long-term commitment that fixes nothing this month, likely why the Kremlin dismissed it as mere “ambivalence” rather than an urgent threat.
