Ukraine’s deep-strike campaign is the most successful thing it has done all year, and Volodymyr Zelensky has been explicit that the point is coercion: make the war hurt inside Russia until Putin negotiates. The instinctive next question is how much further he can push.
But the real limit on the strategy may not be Putin’s tolerance for pain at all.
T-84 Tank from Ukraine War. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
T-84 Tank Ukraine. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
It may be the NATO airspace that his own drones keep drifting into — and the alliance politics that spill over are already straining.
The Ukraine War Momentum Shift
By any military measure, the campaign is working.
Ukraine’s General Staff claimed in early July that its strikes had disabled roughly 43 percent of Russia’s oil-refining capacity, with independent energy analysts putting the functional disruption closer to a third; the same campaign has forced petrol rationing across dozens of Russian regions.
A Financial Times analysis counted at least 194 strikes on Russian refineries in the first half of 2026, eleven times the pace of a year earlier. Zelensky calls this his campaign of “long-range sanctions,” and in late June he put a 40-day clock on it, an operation announced with an openly stated goal of forcing Moscow to the table.
On July 6, drones reached the Omsk refinery in Siberia, roughly 1,550 miles away, the last of Russia’s eleven largest gasoline producers to be hit.
So the “how much further” question is natural. But it runs into two ceilings, and only one of them is the one everyone watches.
The Putin Question
The first ceiling is Putin himself, and the evidence here is discouraging for the coercion theory. Escalate-to-de-escalate works only if the adversary believes that compliance will actually stop the pain, and Putin appears to be drawing the opposite lesson.
Three sources close to the Kremlin told Reuters this month that the drone campaign has hardened his position rather than softened it, with one describing a “high probability” of further escalation. Thomas Graham, a former White House Russia director, wrote days ago that Putin has responded to his string of setbacks not by moderating but by expanding his demands, now invoking not just the Donbas but “Novorossiya,” a swath of southern Ukraine.
The Kremlin’s own framing is that the strikes will simply require it to carve out “a larger buffer zone.” Pressure, in other words, is buying more war, not less. That is a sobering finding, but it is not a new one, and it is where analysis of this campaign usually stops.
The Drones
The second ceiling is the one that deserves more attention, because it is a limit Kyiv cannot fully control: its own drones do not always land in Russia. As the deep-strike envelope has expanded across Russia’s western military district, Russian electronic warfare has been severing the drones’ satellite-navigation links mid-flight, and a share of them drift off course into NATO territory.
This is not hypothetical. Across spring, a documented series of stray Ukrainian drones crossed into Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland, one striking the chimney of an Estonian power plant, another exploding at an oil facility in Latvia. In May, a Romanian F-16 flying NATO’s Baltic air-policing mission shot a suspected Ukrainian drone out of the sky over Estonia — an alliance jet destroying a Ukrainian weapon, a headline that would have been unthinkable a year ago. Ukraine’s foreign ministry has issued formal apologies to three capitals.
The political cost is already real, and one case shows exactly how sharp it can get: after a stray drone struck an oil facility at Rēzekne, Latvia’s prime minister and defense minister resigned over the failure of national airspace integrity, collapsing a NATO government.
Under international law, a military drone entering an ally’s airspace is a violation, and one striking infrastructure is arguably a use of force; the Baltic states have chosen, so far, to treat these as unintentional consequences of Ukraine’s war rather than attacks.
That choice is a courtesy, not a guarantee, and it depends on the incidents staying small. The uncomfortable physics, one regional analysis argues, is that, under current Russian jamming density, drifting into NATO airspace as the campaign expands is nearly unavoidable.
What Happens Now?
This reframes the “how risky can Zelensky get?” question entirely. The danger is not that Putin lacks a pain threshold; it is that Ukraine’s pressure strategy has a failure mode that routes through Vilnius, Riga, and Tallinn rather than Moscow.
Every additional strike deep into Russia’s northwest raises the odds of another errant drone hitting something, or someone, inside an Article 5 state — an outcome that could fracture the very alliance whose support Kyiv depends on, and hand Moscow exactly the wedge between Ukraine and its backers that it has been fishing for.
The ceiling on bombing Putin to the table, in the end, may be written in Baltic airspace, and it is lower than the drone campaign’s success makes it look.
About the Author: Harry J. Kazianis
Harry J. Kazianis (@Grecianformula) was the former Senior Director of National Security Affairs at the Center for the National Interest (CFTNI), a foreign policy think tank founded by Richard Nixon based in Washington, DC. Harry has over a decade of experience in think tanks and national security publishing. His ideas have been published in the NY Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, and many other outlets worldwide. He has held positions at CSIS, the Heritage Foundation, the University of Nottingham, and several other institutions related to national security research and studies. He is the former Executive Editor of the National Interest and the Diplomat. He holds a Master’s degree focusing on international affairs from Harvard University.
