Who Owns the Skies? Ukraine’s Expanding Air War Over Russia

By Matthew Parish, Associate Editor

Saturday 27 June 2026

For most of military history, control of the skies has meant something readily recognisable. Aircraft fly when they wish, enemy aircraft are unable to do so and the movement of armies beneath is dictated by whoever possesses aerial supremacy. During the Second World War, the Allied bombing campaign over Germany became possible only after the Luftwaffe had largely been defeated. During the Gulf War, coalition aircraft operated almost without opposition. Air superiority was measured by fighters, bombers and anti-aircraft missiles.

The war between Ukraine and Russia has rewritten that definition.

When Ukrainian officials now assert that they increasingly control the skies over Russia, they are not claiming that Ukrainian fighter aircraft patrol above Moscow or that Russian aviation has been eliminated. Rather they are making a more subtle, and perhaps more revolutionary, claim—that Ukraine has acquired the ability to reach almost any strategically significant target inside the Russian Federation while compelling Russia to devote an ever-growing proportion of its military resources merely to defending its own airspace. Recent weeks have seen an unprecedented tempo of Ukrainian long-range drone strikes against military, industrial and energy targets deep inside Russia, while Kyiv has spoken of a sustained campaign intended to impose continuous pressure upon the Russian war economy.

The distinction is important because modern warfare no longer revolves around fleets of expensive manned aircraft alone. Ukraine has demonstrated that hundreds of relatively inexpensive autonomous or semi-autonomous drones can penetrate airspace once thought secure. Some are intercepted. Many are not. The cumulative effect is that Russian commanders must assume that any installation—from airfields to oil refineries, ammunition depots, railway junctions or naval facilities—may be vulnerable.

This changes strategic calculations profoundly.

Russia entered the war with one of the world’s largest air forces. Her inventory of combat aircraft vastly exceeded anything Ukraine possessed. Classical military analysis therefore assumed that Russia would inevitably dominate the air domain. Yet this prediction proved false, largely because modern integrated air defences prevented either side from establishing complete control close to the front.

The next phase has been even more surprising.

Ukraine has not attempted to match Russia aeroplane for aeroplane. Instead she has invested in long-range unmanned systems, artificial intelligence-assisted navigation, electronic warfare and increasingly sophisticated methods of overwhelming Russian air defences through numbers rather than individual capability. Ukrainian officials have even claimed operational drone ranges measured in thousands of kilometres, allowing strikes against infrastructure previously regarded as safely beyond the battlefield.

This is not traditional air superiority. It is strategic denial.

Every surface-to-air missile battery defending Moscow is a battery unavailable for the front line. Every radar protecting an oil refinery cannot simultaneously protect an ammunition factory hundreds of kilometres away. Every interceptor missile launched against a drone costing perhaps a few thousand dollars represents an exchange ratio favourable to Ukraine.

The economic arithmetic may ultimately prove more important than the military arithmetic.

Russia possesses enormous industrial capacity, but defending a nation extending across eleven time zones against persistent drone incursions is an extraordinarily expensive undertaking. No air-defence network is designed to provide perfect protection over such immense distances. Commanders must prioritise. Ukraine’s strategy appears intended precisely to make those prioritisation decisions increasingly painful.

The psychological dimension should not be underestimated either.

Wars are fought not only by armies but by societies. For much of the conflict ordinary Russians experienced the war largely through television broadcasts. Increasingly that insulation has disappeared. Airports close because of drone alerts. Industrial facilities burn. Bridges require extraordinary defensive measures. Residents hundreds or even thousands of kilometres from Ukraine become aware that the conflict has entered their own daily lives. Satellite imagery and battlefield reporting indicate that Russia has had to introduce increasingly elaborate protective measures around critical infrastructure, including key logistical links to occupied Crimea.

Whether this translates into political pressure upon the Kremlin remains uncertain. Modern authoritarian governments have often demonstrated remarkable resilience under external attack. Nevertheless the assumption that Russian territory lies beyond meaningful Ukrainian reach has largely disappeared.

There are however important qualifications to Ukraine’s claim.

Russia continues to launch substantial numbers of missiles, glide bombs and drones against Ukrainian cities. Ukrainian air defences remain under immense strain. Civilian casualties continue. To suggest that Ukraine possesses uncontested mastery of the aerial domain would therefore overstate the position. Russia retains formidable offensive capabilities and continues to inflict devastating destruction across Ukraine.

Moreover neither side enjoys the kind of absolute command of the air familiar from twentieth-century conflicts. Instead the skies have become a constantly contested environment dominated by sensors, electronic warfare, autonomous systems and precision-guided munitions. Control is temporary, localised and often measured in minutes rather than months.

Perhaps the most significant lesson extends far beyond Eastern Europe.

Military establishments around the world are observing a transformation comparable to the arrival of tanks in 1916 or aircraft carriers in the inter-war years. Traditional assumptions that expensive combat aircraft constitute the decisive instrument of air power are being challenged by swarms of inexpensive autonomous systems capable of exhausting even sophisticated defensive networks. Future wars may be decided less by the number of fighter squadrons a nation possesses than by its ability to manufacture millions of intelligent machines cheaply, rapidly and continuously.

If that proves true, Ukraine’s campaign against Russian airspace will be remembered not merely as an episode within a brutal regional war but as the moment when the concept of air superiority itself underwent permanent revision.

Ukraine may not literally own the skies over Russia. Russian aircraft continue to fly, Russian air defences continue to destroy many incoming drones and the Kremlin retains substantial military capabilities. Yet strategic dominance no longer requires complete physical control of the atmosphere. It requires the ability to threaten, disrupt, impose costs and compel an adversary to defend everywhere at once.

Measured by that newer standard, Ukraine’s assertion deserves to be taken seriously. The skies over Russia have become contested territory—and that, in itself, represents one of the most remarkable military reversals of the twenty-first century.