Description
Since late 2022, Russia has conducted a persistent and escalating long-range aerial strike campaign as part of its broader war against Ukraine. Combining cruise and ballistic missiles with one-way attack (OWA) drones and drone decoys, Russia employs large, mixed-weapon salvos to target cities, infrastructure, and civilians. Despite more than three years of strikes—peaking at over 6,000 monthly drones in July 2025—the effectiveness of this campaign remains unclear. Existing scholarship also offers competing expectations about how large drone salvos may affect conflict outcomes. On the one hand, Russian strikes resemble a punishment strategy, which security scholarship broadly finds ineffective at coercing civilians and their governments to abandon war aims. On the other hand, inexpensive, mass-produced unmanned systems may alter the logic and potential effectiveness of punishment campaigns. This paper therefore examines the effectiveness of Russia’s long-range drone strike campaign from both strategic and tactical perspectives. We argue that, despite force-structure modernization, the logic of punishment still holds: Russia’s drone strike campaign has neither furthered its coercive objectives, achieved meaningful military gains, nor provided political leverage against Ukraine. Instead of generating military effectiveness, the OWA campaign’s primary—and perhaps only—impact is as a signaling mechanism to the West. To advance this argument, we combine micro-level data on Russian launches, Ukrainian economic and military capacity, Russian equipment and personnel losses, and Ukrainian public opinion with qualitative analyses of Russian military doctrine and semi-structured interviews with Ukrainian drone pilots. In doing so, we provide a more empirically grounded and technologically relevant study of airpower that contributes to both academic and practitioner debates on the topic.