Key Points and Summary – Ukraine’s SBU, HUR, and armed forces have racked up nearly 160 successful 2025 strikes on Russian oil and critical sites, contributing to fuel shortages and a reported 37% refinery capacity hit. Analysts say years of losses, redeployments, and corruption have thinned Russia’s air defenses, leaving gaps beyond the frontline.
-Ad-hoc “mobile” units—truck-mounted machine guns and reservists guarding refineries—underscore capability shortfalls.
-A deep strike on Yelabuga, 621 miles from Ukraine, highlighted spotty long-range radar coverage, though Moscow’s core remains heavily layered.
-The paradox: Ukraine is exploiting Russia’s porous shield but lacks enough long-range weapons to fully capitalize on the weakness.
Russia’s Increasingly Porous Air Defenses
WARSAW, POLAND – On November 9, the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) reported that the missile and drone strikes launched by its agency, plus the armed forces and the Military Intelligence Directorate (HUR), have inflicted increasingly destructive results on Russia.
One of the reasons for that success is the progressively diminishing capacity of Russia’s air defenses.
Unfortunately for Ukraine, the supply, quantity, and type of weapons provided leave them unable to exploit this weakness in Russian air defenses to the greatest possible extent.
The SBU reports that nearly 160 successful strikes were conducted in 2025, targeting oil extraction and refining facilities. To date, this has resulted in increasing fuel shortages across Russia, as well as a 37% reduction in Moscow’s refining capacity.
“These are legitimate military targets. Oil extraction and refining make up around 90 per cent of Russia’s defense budget. These are the [source of the] dirty petro-roubles funding the war against us,” said the SBU Chief Vasyl Maliuk on October 31.
Reports from inside Russia and Ukrainian sources indicate that Moscow is desperately seeking a method to defend against these strikes. On November 4, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed into law legislation that would allow reservists to be sent to defend critical infrastructure, such as oil refineries, from drone attacks.
Increasingly Primitive Responses
Moscow’s problem is that it has very little in the way of higher technology or sophisticated air defense systems that could have a meaningful impact. The most common and largely improvised Russian response is to increase what it calls “mobile air defense units.”
That sounds like an innovative concept, but in practice, it means having ordinary troops manning truck-mounted machine guns. The almost comically useless nature of such a response has resulted in Moscow being ridiculed for this amateurish image.
A photograph showing two Russian soldiers standing beside an anti-aircraft gun that is mounted on the back of a pickup truck—but parked near the Kremlin—went viral on October 26. This image had been circulated just as Moscow came under a massive Ukrainian drone attack.
The photo was published by pro-Kremlin Telegram channels rather than on anti-Putin platforms as one might expect. It instantly became a symbol of just how far Russia’s war against Ukraine, and a conflict which was supposed to take place only on Ukrainian soil, has instead turned into a struggle to defend the interior of Russia.
“From three days to [to take] Kyiv to two dudes defending Moscow. Em-bar-ras-sing,” wrote Meaghan Mobbs on her X account on October 27. Mobbs, a political commentator, is also the daughter of US Special Envoy for Ukraine Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg.
The State of Russia’s Air Defenses
Russia is often rated as the world’s second most powerful military, with the United States occupying the number one spot. But many Russian analysts and senior US military leaders say that corruption, almost 4 years of war, serial redeployments, and constant Ukrainian strikes have taken their toll on Moscow’s frontline forces.
But Russia’s air defense establishment has also suffered numerous strikes on some of its most advanced and effective systems. This has stretched the Russian air defense network too thin to be able to combat Ukraine’s drone warfare.
“Russia has lost many air defence systems over the past two years, so it is plausible that there are many holes in their coverage that make successful attacks possible,” said Sascha Bruchmann, a military analyst at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), who was speaking to the Kyiv Independent.
George Barros, the Russia Team & Geospatial Intelligence (GEOINT) Team Lead at the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) in Washington, DC, has stated that Russia now concentrates most of its air defenses around the Ukrainian front, and whatever is left over is committed to strategic installations that are located in far-flung regions.
“Once you get past that initial shell around the theater in Ukraine, the rest of Russia has holes and vulnerabilities,” he told the Kyiv Independent.
Ukraine has exploited those gaps on an almost weekly, if not daily, basis. In one of the boldest and devastating strikes to date, in April, a drone packed with explosives hit one of the main Shahed drone factories. This particular plant was located in Yelabuga, Tatarstan, which is approximately 621 miles from the Ukrainian border.
Barros said the strike was proof that the coverage of Russia’s long-range radar network is spotty. Therefore, the ability of the air defense forces to intercept even slow-moving targets is limited.
In Moscow, the set-up is far different. The Russian capital and its surrounding region remain heavily protected, with multiple layers of radar and missile systems in place.
“There’s a high concentration of Russian air defenses around Moscow. It’s difficult for our drones to reach the city center,” said Oleksii, Ukrainian deputy commander responsible for coordinating four of the air defense units guarding the north side of Kyiv.
An F-16 Fighting Falcon approaches the boom of a KC-10 extender aircraft during an aerial refueling mission out of Luke Air Force Base, Ariz., Nov. 16, 2016. F-16 pilots train on aerial refueling operations to be prepared for longer mission requirements. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman James Hensley)
The image of two soldiers standing with a pickup-mounted gun in front of the Kremlin “makes little tactical sense,” he said. “The Kremlin, the mausoleum, and this mobile anti-aircraft crew—it’s hardly the place where you’d shoot down drones. You don’t fire over your own cultural landmarks,” Oleksii said.
“It’s meant to reassure Russians that their sacred symbols—the Kremlin, Red Square—are protected. I think it’s more about shaping a narrative than about real defense,” he said.
There’s also the issue of how functional these units will be. Oleksii said these kinds of solutions were “cheap” and “effective” when Ukraine employed them in 2022. This was about the time Russia first started launching Shahed drones. But improvements in tactics and technology have rendered these tactics ineffective.
Russia continues to employ increasingly lower-tech solutions in the air defense game. And it is a game they cannot win against Ukrainian ingenuity.
About the Author: Reuben F. Johnson
Reuben F. Johnson has thirty-six years of experience analyzing and reporting on foreign weapons systems, defense technologies, and international arms export policy. Johnson is the Director of the Asia Research Centre at the Casimir Pulaski Foundation. He is also a survivor of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. He worked for years in the American defense industry as a foreign technology analyst and later as a consultant for the U.S. Department of Defense, the Departments of the Navy and Air Force, and the governments of the United Kingdom and Australia. In 2022-2023, he won two awards in a row for his defense reporting. He holds a bachelor’s degree from DePauw University and a master’s degree from Miami University in Ohio, specializing in Soviet and Russian studies. He lives in Warsaw.
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