For the past five days,Kyiv has been under ground. Now, air raid sirens ring alongside school bells for the first week of September, and Ukraine's education ministry is still tallying the hundreds of thousands of textbooks that were burned in the strikes against publishing warehouses before students sit down for class. This is not "collateral damage. It is the visible side of a carefully orchestrated Russian campaign to "wear down Ukraine and Ukrainians, first and foremost our people," as President Volodymyr Zelensky has put it in no uncertain terms but one that doesn’t rely on a major breakthrough offensive but on exhaustion, and is being carried out almost daily, now as well by day.

The figures are what matter. Russia alone, between Thursday and Sunday, launched nearly 1,500 drones against Ukraine, and about 800 of those were jet-propelled versions of the Geran family, which is a domesticated copy of Iran's Shahed. A year ago, around 180 of these jet-powered models were in use on the battlefield during the entire year; in 2025 Russia was able to operate about 180 such units. That went up to approximately 1400 in the first half of 2026. The engineering reasoning is straightforward: attach a small turbojet to an aircraft, and you have a drone that can fly 2-3 times as fast as the propeller-driven Shahed, at altitudes and speeds where Ukraine's cheaper, slower interceptor drones are unable to react in time before they hit their target. Zelensky has admitted the deficiency in public statements, saying four Ukrainian companies have already developed models of interceptors, which will be powered by a jet, and one of them is proving to be promising, though none has reached a large scale level that will close the window.

The difference from the drone barrages of 2023 and 2024 is that Moscow is now targeting. In parallel to the residential strikes, Russian army has systematically attacked Ukraine's commercial infrastructure, food warehouses, the nation's biggest private postal company, home-goods distribution centers. This week, Ukraine's agriculture minister put a price tag on it that should be of concern to anyone watching for civilian resilience, not just dead bodies: In the case of major retail food chains, some 90 percent of the food logistics infrastructure has been destroyed or disabled. The shelves in the supermarkets in Kyiv are visibly empty. It's not a collateral casualty of weapons that are not as precise as they could be; it's a logistics war overlaid on the shooting war, one designed to hit plumbing that serves a modern economy under siege.

That's where it gets a little more interesting than a tale of Russian aggressive escalation. At the same time Moscow was intensifying its jet-drone offensive, its own economy was quietly collapsing due to a reverse pressure marketing war. The Ukrainian strikes against Russian oil refineries have become an increasingly common occurrence in this war since it began and the numbers are no longer small the strikes have now hit 20, at least, of Russia's 33 major refineries since the war started, offloading nearly a quarter of Russia's fuel production and about a third of its gasoline production, and causing more than $13 billion in damage to the infrastructure, according to direct estimates.

Russia's domestic state-supported macroeconomic forecasters have responded by cutting their growth forecasts by nearly 50 percent, to between 0.5 and 0.7 percent, given the loss of export capacity of nearly a million barrels a day from strikes at the Baltic terminals at Ust-Luga and Primorsk and at the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk. In the first half of this year, oil and gas revenue which still accounts for about a quarter of the Russian federal budget was only 64 percent of that two-year amount. Nearly brought under control, inflation is creeping back up. But economists who monitor domestic business activity say the country is becoming bifurcated: if you run a tank factory or a drone maker, you're doing well if you're anything else, you're feeling the pressure; Russia's biggest retailer has even announced a move by consumers toward store-brand staples as a subtle concession to trouble.

The larger equation of both sides in this war is a cost equation that increasingly favors offense over defense and is changing the way militaries around the world think of air power. The cost of building a Ukrainian interceptor drone is estimated to be anywhere from $3,000 to $5,000. The Shahed-style drones it is chasing run $20,000 to $100,000. The air-defense missiles fired by Western systems to down the fastest threats are much more expensive, ranging from half a million to almost four million dollars each, depending on how heavy they are and how fast they can travel.

Applied to a war that has been in its fifth year, it helps to make sense of why both Moscow and Kyiv are desperate to produce more affordable platforms to strike more than the opponent can afford to shoot down. Ukraine has reportedly ramped up its own drone production to eight million units per year, a rate which was previously unthinkable, before this conflict made it possible.

It's not a sign of a neat half way through. Russia's ‘drones' with the help of their jet propulsion gives Moscow a temporary tactical advantage over the Ukrainian air defenses, which have not yet increased their response. The refinery campaign offers Ukraine some time to breathe by depriving the Kremlin of the revenue it needs to keep its war machine running, but hasn't yet compelled a rethinking of Kremlin calculations that a year of sanctions and a weak ruble have also failed to generate.

Both campaigns rely on the assumption that eventually the one who runs out of options first will be those whose side of the war it is.Both campaigns assume that economic attrition rather than battlefield breakthrough will be the deciding factor as to who eventually runs out of options and meanwhile bears its cost, whether that be in the form of a bare supermarket shelf in Kyiv or a shut refinery shift in Bashkortostan.