Recent developments in Russian missile technology

By Matthew Parish, Associate Editor

Tuesday 10 February 2026

Western Ukraine has always occupied a particular place in Moscow’s air campaign. She is far from the front line, she hosts logistics, repair capacity, training sites, power infrastructure and the ‘back office’ of a country at war. For much of 2022 and early 2023, distance itself offered a measure of protection: long-range strikes were episodic, stockpiles looked finite, and Ukraine’s air defences—imperfect as they were—could sometimes be saturated only by Russia’s most carefully husbanded salvos.

Over the past year, the character of the threat has shifted. The change is not a single ‘wonder weapon’, but a set of technological and industrial adaptations that make sustained pressure on western Ukraine easier to maintain. Persistence is the point—night after night, wave after wave, enough objects in the sky to force Ukraine to spend scarce interceptors, keep crews on constant alert, disrupt rail timetables and keep households and businesses in a state of fatigue.

Three developments matter most: Russia’s ability to replenish long-range missiles more quickly than many assumed, the widening of the missile and drone mix used in each strike package, and incremental improvements to guidance, navigation and survivability that complicate interception and target defence.

Stockpiles that refill—rather than merely empty

The most sobering indicator of persistence is banal: dates stamped on wreckage.

Ukrainian officials have publicly displayed fragments of Russian missiles described as manufactured in 2026—suggesting that Moscow is not merely drawing down Soviet legacy stocks, but feeding newly produced weapons into the strike campaign within weeks of assembly. Earlier, Ukrainian technical examinations of strike debris were already pointing to ‘fresh’ Kh-101 cruise missiles manufactured only months before they hit targets in the west of the country. 

This matters because the Kh-101 remains Russia’s workhorse for deep strikes. She is air-launched, long-range and accurate enough—when properly functioning—to be used against power nodes, industrial facilities and high-value infrastructure. If Moscow can keep building Kh-101s at scale, then the limiting factor for strikes on western Ukraine becomes less a question of “how many missiles remain?” and more a question of “how often can Russia assemble a package big enough to overwhelm local defences?”

Open-source investigations, think-tank reporting and battlefield analysis have increasingly converged on the idea that Russia has learned to keep production lines moving despite sanctions—through substitution, stockpiled components, grey imports and third-country intermediaries. That is not to say sanctions are futile. Rather, they bite in specific places—yield, quality control, reliability—while Moscow adapts to keep overall output at politically useful levels.

The upshot for western Ukraine is grimly practical: even when a large raid appears to “spend” a great deal of Russia’s long-range inventory, the inventory may be recovering faster than the defender would wish.

A broader strike toolbox—designed for saturation

Persistence is not just about building more missiles. It is also about making each raid more efficient—forcing Ukraine to defend against many different kinds of incoming threats at once.

In 2025, monitoring projects tracking air strikes described Russia’s increasing emphasis on modern cruise missiles such as the Kh-101 and Kalibr, alongside ballistic missiles and other systems—adding up to very large annual totals.  This “mixed raid” approach is tactically logical. Cruise missiles fly low and can weave around terrain. Ballistic missiles arrive fast and steep. Drones arrive in swarms, often at night, often from multiple axes. Each class requires different sensors, interceptors and engagement tactics—meaning the defender is constantly forced into uncomfortable choices.

At the same time Russia has expanded the drone element of these packages—not merely as an alternative to missiles, but as a partner to them. The mass use of Shahed-type loitering munitions (often referred to in Russian service as Geran variants) has become central to this logic of saturation. International reporting and specialist analysis describe large and growing production capacity, which—combined with low unit cost—makes frequent, high-volume raids economically tolerable for Moscow. 

Why does this matter for western Ukraine specifically? Because drones are not constrained by the same scarcity calculus as high-end cruise missiles. If Russia can launch hundreds of drones in repeated waves, then air defence units in the west face a constant attritional test—radars run, searchlights sweep, mobile fire groups burn out, ammunition and interceptors are spent. Even when drones are intercepted, they can still serve Moscow’s purpose by forcing Ukraine to reveal radar positions, expend missiles and keep aircraft tied to defensive patrols.

Just as importantly, drones can be used as decoys and pathfinders—probing defences, drawing fire, and then arriving alongside cruise missiles timed to exploit gaps. Western Ukraine, with her critical rail corridors and power distribution nodes, is precisely the kind of “rear area” where such a campaign yields strategic friction even when individual strikes do not produce spectacular headlines.

Incremental technology improvements that matter in aggregate

There is a temptation, when looking at Russian strike performance, to ask whether Moscow has achieved a dramatic leap in missile technology. The more accurate answer is less dramatic and more worrying: incremental improvements, multiplied across large numbers of weapons, can change the shape of a campaign.

Several strands are visible in recent reporting:

Ukraine and open-source analysts have reported Russian use of the Kh-69 cruise missile in strikes—an air-launched weapon sometimes characterised as having reduced observability compared with older designs, designed to be carried by tactical aircraft and used against fixed targets. Whether the Kh-69 proves transformative is almost beside the point. Adding another modern cruise missile type increases Russia’s flexibility: more launch platforms, more potential flight profiles and more ways to complicate defensive planning.

Much of Ukraine’s defensive success has relied not only upon interceptors, but on electronic warfare—jamming satellite navigation, spoofing signals, degrading the ability of drones to find their targets. Recent analyses of Shahed/Geran evolution describe improvements in anti-jamming measures and, in some variants, enhanced communications that allow more robust control. This does not mean drones become immune to electronic warfare. It does mean that each iteration forces Ukraine to adapt, and that adaptation is costly in time, equipment and training.

For cruise missiles, the same broad issue holds. Long-range weapons commonly rely upon a mix of inertial guidance and satellite updates; even modest improvements in antennae, filters, signal processing, or terminal seekers can reduce the miss-distance enough to make strikes on substations, transformer yards, depots and workshops more consistently damaging.

Adaptation is not confined to “flying better”. There are repeated indications of Russia experimenting with payload types, fusing and roles—using whatever is available to keep the strike rate up. Ukrainian reporting around strike debris has, at times, included mention of different missile types being used in roles outside their original design intent—an improvised approach that nonetheless sustains pressure. 

The practical effect on western Ukraine is that defensive planning cannot assume a stable, predictable set of threats. Each month of war produces variations in what arrives—how it flies, what it carries and what it aims to do.

If there is a single theme linking “technology” to “persistence”, it is supply chains. Detailed studies of components found in Russian missiles and unmanned systems have stressed the role of third-country intermediaries and complex procurement routes—suggesting that even under sanctions, Russia continues to acquire or substitute crucial electronics. 

This is not a glamorous battlefield story, but it is the story that keeps western Ukraine under nightly threat. A cruise missile is not merely a piece of engineering—it is an industrial product. If the inputs can still be sourced, then the output can still arrive over Lviv, Ternopil, Ivano-Frankivsk and beyond.

What “persistent strikes” are trying to achieve

It is worth stating plainly what this campaign seeks in the west of the country—because it is not always the dramatic destruction that makes headlines.

Persistent strikes seek:

The technology described above—new production, mixed raid packages, more resilient navigation and evolving payloads—does not guarantee Russian success. Ukraine’s defence has adapted with remarkable ingenuity, including layered air defence, mobile fire groups and an accelerating domestic drone and counter-drone effort. Yet the direction of travel is clear: Moscow is investing in the capacity to keep coming.

The uncomfortable conclusion for western Ukraine

The threat to western Ukraine is not merely the next “big raid”. It is the normalisation of air attack as a constant background condition—punctuated by surges designed to exploit weather, intelligence or momentary shortages in interceptor stocks.

Russian missile technology, in this sense, is less a story of revolutionary breakthroughs than of wartime learning: a state under sanctions and battlefield pressure choosing the least elegant but most workable path—build what she can, mix what she has, iterate what fails, and keep the sky busy.

Western Ukraine sits at the receiving end of that learning curve. She is far enough away to be strategically tempting and close enough to be operationally reachable. If Russia can keep replenishing Kh-101 class missiles quickly, add newer cruise missile types into the mix, and continue improving drone guidance and raid composition, then persistence becomes not an occasional spike but a defining feature of the war’s second half.

For Ukraine and her partners, that implies a parallel imperative—persistence in defence. Not simply more interceptors, but more dispersed infrastructure, faster repair capacity, smarter warning networks and a sustained campaign against the procurement networks that turn foreign components into weapons that arrive, night after night, over the western oblasts.