Russia fired 24 ballistic missiles, four Zircon or Onyx cruise missiles and 115 drones at Kyiv and the surrounding region overnight on August 5, killing 17 people and injuring 44. Ukrainian forces shot down 98 of the drones but intercepted none of the missiles. Eight people died at the Kvitneva railway station near Brovary, and a strike on a Nova Poshta sorting centre killed three more. The attack tore through the logistics backbone of Ukraine's consumer economy, destroying or damaging distribution centres run by Rozetka, Epicentr, Fozzy Group, NOVUS, Intertop and several other major retailers, part of a wider pattern of strikes on Ukraine's civilian economy that Kyiv itself has mirrored against Russian retail with its own Operation Wildberries.

A separate strike a day earlier gave a preview of what Russian President Vladimir Putin is reportedly planning for the coming winter. An attack on power facilities in Dnipropetrovska oblast left 126,000 households without electricity, according to regional utility DTEK, with outages hitting Nikopol, Marganets and Pokrov. Marganets has now been without running water for four days, with residents queuing at wells under the threat of shelling, and Nikopol, Pokrov and Tomakivka are reporting their own water problems. Ukraine's prime minister has warned water infrastructure, not just the power grid, is now a likely target this winter.

With Ukraine's stock of Patriot and other interceptor missiles run down toward zero and partners struggling to fill the gap, Zelenskiy's government is shifting its bet from shooting Russian missiles out of the sky to destroying the launchers that fire them before they ever get airborne. It is a much harder problem than it sounds.

Hitting a launcher that is never still

Russia's Iskander-M launchers survive by never staying in one place long enough to be caught, presidential adviser Serhii "Flash" Beskrestnov said on Ukraine's national telethon. The launchers only move to their firing positions once a combat task is set, sometimes travelling for five hours along forest roads to dodge satellite detection, before deploying quickly, firing and fleeing. They launch from 140-150 km behind the front line - beyond HIMARS range - which is exactly why catching one on the move, or at the moment it fires, is so difficult. Hitting the factories that build the missiles is not much easier: production happens deep underground, and Beskrestnov argues the Iskander is largely immune to sanctions because it is built almost entirely from Russian-made components and electronics, though Ukraine's own sanctions commissioner has previously documented Western parts inside captured Iskander wreckage.

The one tool that could genuinely change the equation is satellite-guided targeting over Russian territory itself. “Allowing Starlink enabled strikes over Russia, or part of it, is one of the few ways available to hunt and displace Russian Iskander-M launchers,” military analyst Michael Kofman wrote on July 30, noting that “Ukraine is just not getting the interceptors it needs to keep up with Russian ballistic missile strikes.” Elon Musk, whose Starlink network underpins Ukrainian battlefield communications and drone guidance, has not granted permission for it to be used to strike inside Russia. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk was blunter still after a call with Zelenskiy: “The next 100 days could decide the outcome of this war, and the chances are 50/50,” he said, adding that much depends on decisions taken by US President Donald Trump and by Musk over Starlink.

Enter Fire Point

The missiles that would eventually make that trip into Russia are being developed by Fire Point, the Ukrainian drone and missile manufacturer already building the FP7 ground-attack missile and its longer-range sibling, the FP9, which is designed to reach Moscow and is due for its first combat use in late autumn; the FP7 itself, after roughly 15 test launches, is in final Ukrainian defence ministry certification with first combat use expected in early autumn.

Fire Point is now also the industrial lead on Freyja, a European-backed anti-ballistic missile system that has just entered what its own executives call its most challenging stage: integrating radar, guidance and command systems from 13 industrial partners, including Norway's Kongsberg on command-and-control and Germany's Diehl Defense on guidance technology drawn from its IRIS-T system. Freyja is meant to combine Ukrainian-built interceptors with European sensors and infrastructure, with a target of the system's first successful ballistic-missile interception by mid-2027. Fire Point chief executive Iurii Terekh says the FP7.X interceptor at the heart of the system is being built to cost under €1mn each, a quarter to a sixth of the price of a Patriot interceptor - earlier estimates put it at around $700,000, against roughly $3.8mn for a single PAC-3.

The programme builds on a European coalition launched in Paris in July, when ten countries including Ukraine endorsed a joint declaration on an integrated continent-wide missile-defence architecture, with Zelenskiy separately courting Japan's Mitsubishi over licensed Patriot production. None of it, however, changes the arithmetic Ukraine faces this winter: until Freyja or an equivalent system is proven and Starlink-guided strikes on launchers are politically possible, Ukraine's cities will keep absorbing missiles no one can shoot down, and no one has yet destroyed on the ground.