Ukraine's Offense Went Sovereign. Its Defense Is Still Waiting on a Delivery Date.

On the eve of the NATO summit in Turkey, Ukraine flew drones 3,000 kilometers to hit Russia's largest oil refinery and could not stop a single ballistic missile over Kyiv. That split, offense it builds itself and defense it has to import, is the war's next phase.

The war Ukraine can win with its own factories and the war it cannot fight without Washington's separated on the same day. Overnight on July 6, Ukrainian long-range drones struck the Omsk oil refinery in western Siberia, roughly 3,000 kilometers from the border and the deepest strike of the war, while Ukraine's air defenses intercepted zero of the 29 Russian ballistic missiles that hit Kyiv and killed 21 people. The refinery strike used a weapon Ukraine builds in its own plants and has started selling abroad. The failure over Kyiv traces to a shortage of American-made interceptors that Ukraine's defense minister says will not be resupplied until next year. Both questions now sit in front of the leaders meeting in Ankara for the NATO summit.

Zero of 29 over Kyiv, and a first strike on Omsk

Russia fired 419 aerial weapons across Ukraine on Monday, per Defence Blog, citing the Ukrainian Air Force: a mix of 23 Iskander-M ballistic missiles, six Zircon or Oniks anti-ship missiles repurposed against land targets, 33 Kh-101 cruise missiles, six Kalibr cruise missiles, and hundreds of attack drones. Ukraine's record against the cruise threat was near-total: 31 of 33 Kh-101s and all six Kalibrs destroyed. Against the ballistic threat, Air Force spokesperson Colonel Yurii Ihnat said the interception "success rate is low, to put it mildly," and confirmed that all 29 ballistic and anti-ship missiles reached their targets, striking 34 locations. Fifteen people died in Kyiv and six more in the surrounding region, according to city and regional officials cited by the Guardian, days after a July 2 barrage killed at least 31, the capital's deadliest of the year.

Hours earlier, Ukraine's Special Operations Forces said they had struck the Omsk refinery for the first time, in what Kyiv Post reported was a roughly 3,000-kilometer flight by new long-range drones. The plant processes more than 21 million tons of oil a year and accounts for about 10 percent of Russia's refining capacity, the SSO and the monitoring channel Exilenova+ said, supplying more than half of the Siberian Federal District's motor fuel and a large share of Russia's aviation fuel. The strike hit the ELOU-AVT-11 primary crude unit, the plant's most important installation. It was the latest node in a months-long campaign that the Center for Strategic and International Studies describes as a deliberate effort to raise the economic and political cost of the war for the Kremlin, one that has pushed fuel shortages across large parts of Russia. CSIS notes that Russia's forces advanced at roughly 50 to 90 meters a day through the first half of 2026 and lost ground on net in April and May, a crawl that suggests the deep-strike campaign against fuel and logistics, rather than the ground offensive, has become Ukraine's most effective source of pressure on Moscow.

A supply problem, not a systems problem

The ballistic gap is an inventory problem more than a doctrinal one. The Patriot is the only Western system in Ukraine's arsenal that can reliably engage a ballistic missile, and when its interceptors run short there is nothing behind it in the layered defense to take the shot. A ballistic missile re-enters on a steep trajectory at several times the speed of sound, collapsing the engagement window that lets fighters, mobile fire groups, and shorter-range systems pick off slower cruise missiles and Shaheds. Zelensky said plainly that the "insufficient supply of interceptor missiles" was why nothing was stopped. Novinite and Euronews report that Russia now produces roughly 120 ballistic missiles a month and has tuned its strike packages to the shortage, leaning on the one category Kyiv cannot answer.

Zelensky has called the interceptor stock the worst it has ever been. Ukrainian crews are reportedly firing single interceptors at ballistic targets rather than the two to four that doctrine calls for, a rationing measure that stretches the stockpile but lowers the odds of a kill. Even that fails when Russia fires more ballistic missiles in a night than Ukraine has interceptors to meet. A Patriot battery engages targets out to about 35 kilometers and up to 15 kilometers in altitude, according to the system's published limits, so a large enough raid can saturate the battery regardless of how well any single intercept performs. The War Zone reported this spring that Congress openly questioned the Pentagon's ability to supply enough PAC-2 and PAC-3 interceptors for both US needs and allied demand, a squeeze the war in the Middle East has tightened by draining the same global pool.

Sovereign offense, imported defense

This is the asymmetry the summit has to reckon with. Ukraine increasingly owns its offensive reach. The Omsk strike used domestically built long-range drones, part of a strike complex that also includes the home-grown Neptune cruise missile and, per Ukrainian and open-source reporting, newer long-range types still in development. Kyiv sets its own target list and production rate for those weapons. Its defense against ballistic missiles runs the other way, built on a foreign-made interceptor whose delivery schedule sits with Washington and a supply chain Ukraine cannot control.

That gap is now visible in Ukraine's foreign policy, not just its air defense. Kyiv hopes to sign defense deals with at least seven NATO countries by year-end, the Guardian reported, turning from a recipient of hardware into a provider of it. It has already signed drone deals with six countries in recent months, including the NATO members Latvia and Lithuania and three Middle Eastern states that wanted Ukrainian help after being hit by the same Iranian Shahed drones Russia fires at Ukrainian cities. Ukraine is selling the expertise, radar and ground stations included, that four years of combat forced it to build. The same country that now exports drones and strike know-how still has to import the interceptors that keep its cities standing.

Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov's response captures the bind. He confirmed Ukraine keeps signing new contracts for Patriot interceptors, then acknowledged deliveries will not begin until next year. So Ukraine has asked partners to hand over interceptors from their existing stocks now and take Ukrainian-made replacements later, once domestic alternatives reach maturity. Fire Point's FP-7.X and its Freyja interceptor, developed with radar, tracking and command systems from Hensoldt, Thales, Leonardo and Kongsberg, are Ukraine's clearest attempt to solve the ballistic gap the way it solved the strike gap, by building the weapon at home rather than waiting for an ally to ship it.

A record UAH 4.4 trillion budget that can't buy time

The money is arriving faster than the hardware it is meant to buy. Ukraine raised its 2026 defense budget to a record UAH 4.4 trillion, with UAH 2.3 trillion earmarked for weapons and equipment, according to UNN. The EU sent a first 3.9-billion-euro tranche on June 30 aimed specifically at drones, part of a 60-billion-euro line within a larger 90-billion-euro loan, with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen framing it as backing Ukrainian "ingenuity." That capital fits the domestic half of Ukraine's war better than the imported half. Euros can stand up a new drone line in months; they cannot pull forward a Patriot interceptor that a Western plant has not yet built.

The summit is where those timelines meet. NATO's European members and Canada are set to pledge around 70 billion euros, some 80 billion dollars, in military aid for 2026 and at least the equivalent in 2027, Deutsche Welle reported, with 30 billion a year drawn from the EU loan. Germany is weighing a PAC-3 production deal ahead of the Ankara meeting and has moved to allocate 400 million euros for anti-aircraft missiles for Ukraine, per Militarnyi. Those are production-side fixes, and new production takes time to reach a battery. What Zelensky is pressing for in Turkey is faster: a decision by allies to release interceptors from their existing stocks now, ahead of any new missiles coming off the line.

What to watch

Three indicators will show whether the summit changed anything. First, whether any ally commits to transferring Patriot interceptors from current stocks on a timeline measured in weeks, not the next-year horizon Fedorov described. Second, whether Germany's PAC-3 deal converts into a firm production and delivery schedule rather than a memorandum. Third, whether Ukraine's own interceptor programs, Fire Point's Freyja chief among them, post a verified intercept of a ballistic target, which would begin to make the defensive half of the war as sovereign as the offensive half already is. Until one of those moves, the July 6 split is the template for the months ahead: Ukraine reaching farther into Russia with weapons it builds, and absorbing ballistic strikes it does not yet have the interceptors to stop.