Ukraine's air force reported that 258 drones and two Oniks anti-ship cruise missiles fired by Russia were reported over Odesa for hours overnight into Thursday, as was a volley of unspecified ballistic missiles. Some 90 percent of the drones were downed, as were one Oniks and seven ballistic missiles, but the attack had nonetheless ripped into port facilities, the grain store, an educational building and a multi-storey residential block. President Volodymyr Zelensky expressed his gratitude for the "important decisions" this week taken by European allies to support Ukraine's air defence capabilities, and announced a small new batch of interceptors had arrived a welcome bit of good news in a barrage that has been relentless in terms of volume and intensity.

This is the characteristic nature of the war today. Not a couple of hundred metres of trench change, but two capitals, each hurling nightly barrages set to exhaustion of stockpiles and factories, of nerves. The Russian defence ministry said two weeks ago it shot down 822 drones in the course of one night, while Ukraine launched approximately 600 drones toward Moscow, killing an elderly man in a private home, and that the city's mayor was bragging about the number of drones he had intercepted on social media. At the same time, Ukraine launched over 800 drones into Russian territory, inflicting heavy losses on the country's security forces and killing six people, around the same time Ukraine launched more than 800 drones deep into Russian territory, in what authorities in Moscow described as the largest such attack since the beginning of the year, targeting Wildberries warehouses, refineries and industrial plants. According to Zelensky's own count, more than 1,500 drones were fired at Ukrainian cities during last week. In July alone, the United Nations human rights monitoring mission has documented 437 civilian deaths and 2,610 injuries in Ukraine, the highest monthly death toll since the invasion started in 2022.

The bottom line is that neither side is any less eager to fight, but the numbers have shifted. While that is a very good figure, Ukraine's air force claimed last month it was intercepting about 87 percent of incoming Shahed-type drones and cruise missiles, but only about 15 percent of ballistic missiles, down from much higher rates at the start of the year. The answer is simple and well documented: Ukraine got low on PAC-3 Missile Segment Enhancers about the first of July the only missile Ukraine has in its fleet capable of intercepting Russian Iskander-class ballistic missiles in their terminal phase. Zelensky has said Ukraine is getting about a third of the number of anti-ballistic missiles that it was receiving before this year. The launchers are there, the missiles to fill them are not.Air force officials have been succinct: They are there, the missiles to feed them are not.

This shortage goes beyond just Ukraine. Washington's own Patriot inventory has been depleted at the same time as the U.S. and Gulf-partner air defence campaign against Iranian strikes earlier this year has resulted in estimates from defence researchers that almost two-thirds of the American stockpile was used in that operation alone. Lockheed Martin's production lines produce several hundred of the most advanced PAC-3 missiles annually, and Ukraine has consumed almost 700 missiles in the course of only four winter months. Every Patriot battery dispatched to Kyiv has been, in effect, taken from the reserves of the countries with which Ukraine has concluded agreements on providing military aid.All Patriot batteries sent to Kyiv have come from the stockpiles of Ukraine's allies, with their governments replenishing their own stocks in secret as their air-defence pledges increase. The price of one PAC-MSE round is currently between $4 million and $4.5 million. Russia and Iran, on the other hand, are deploying Shahed drones at $20,000 to $50,000 each, which will require defenders to spend up to two hundred times as much to shoot it down.

Instead of waiting for a solution from abroad, Ukraine has been working on building its own way out of that trap. Domestically-made interceptor drones, which cost $1,400 to $5,000, have been cited by Ukrainian authorities as shooting down about 70% of Shahed strikes in the Kyiv area, the first front in the conflict where the price of the defender's weapon makes a significant dent in that of the attacker. But companies like Fire Point have advanced their own locally designed systems, like the FP-7, in order to chip away at ballistic and cruise-missile defence as well, expressly to limit reliance on the pace of American production lines and the politics of allied stockpiles. Kyiv's Defence Ministry has also appealed to partners for approximately $6 billion for this year's procurement needs to address the shortage of interceptor drones as well as deep-strike weapons and FPV drones which have, in part, made up for the long-term artillery shortage.

This has gone far beyond Ukraine's borders. NATO aircraft have been scrambled to shoot down drones that have flown over into Romanian and Polish airspace and Denmark has temporarily banned civilian drone operations in the vicinity of military installations and airports following a series of reported sightings. The air war is now, in essence, a live-fire inspection of the amount of ammunition in their magazines: the interceptors being demanded by Kyiv are the same as those they would need if they launched an attack on Warsaw, Bucharest or Berlin. The lesson of the day being learned in Washington and Brussels and Kyiv is not yet easy to swallow but getting easier by the day: the number of radars and launchers is a non-issue compared to how many rounds a country can actually get behind it, and how many years it takes to build a production line for an older time of war.