The IssueRussia has normalized massive, mixed drone‑missile salvos: The average wave size has risen from about 100 munitions in 2022 to nearly 300 in 2025, while intervals between major strikes have compressed from roughly a month to as few as two days. The salvo campaign now leans heavily on Shahed swarms to saturate Ukraine’s air defenses in line with the increasing Russian low-cost drone manufacturing capability. These salvos reflect an attritional punishment strategy—victory through volume, persistence, and psychological strain Ukraine must counter with layered, cost‑efficient defences: rapidly field high‑energy lasers and HPMs, expand cross‑domain early‑warning networks.
On the night of July 9, 2025, Russia launched the largest combined drone and missile attack of the Russia-Ukraine war, saturating Ukraine’s defenses with 728 kamikaze drones and 13 missiles, most aimed at Kyiv. The scale was staggering. And it was not an isolated incident. In the days that followed, two more salvos hit Ukraine—416 weapons in one wave, 625 in another—each exceeding the daily averages seen in prior months. These attacks were more than mere upticks in Russian activity. They demarcate a deeper, deliberate shift in operational tempo and a signal to Ukraine and its backers: Russia is prepared to escalate, overwhelm, and exhaust Ukraine.
What was once the exception has become routine. Large-scale salvo attacks now make up roughly 10 per cent of all Russian aerial operations (see Appendix Table A-1). Since September 2022, the CSIS Futures Lab has tracked 157 of these coordinated waves—combinations of missiles, drones, and ballistic projectiles—deliberately sequenced to test and stress Ukrainian defences. Early in the conflict, salvos averaged around 100 weapons per wave. By 2025, that number has tripled to nearly 300, reflecting not only expanded production but an increasingly aggressive aerial campaign.
By mid-2025, the gap between salvos has shrunk to just eight days (see Figure 1). What were once peak events are now baseline activity in a campaign defined by sustained pressure and operational tempo. The tempo keeps climbing. In the past two months, the shortest interval between major salvos has dropped to just two days. What were once outlier events—occasional spikes in intensity—have become standing features of Russia’s aerial campaign. Each wave piles pressure on Ukraine’s air defences, saturating systems already strained by months of attritional combat and forcing difficult choices about what to protect.
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