Bogdan Maftei
The Erudite Elders
Oct 4, 2025
The United States is finally doing something that actually changes the war for Ukraine. Not a photo op, not a clever turn of phrase in a communique, not a one-week trial balloon that dies at the first sign of political pushback. Quiet, targeted, and very likely decisive if Kyiv uses it right. On paper, it looks simple. In practice, it opens the door to a strategic shift that could leave Russia scrambling from one end of its energy belt to the other.
The move is easy to miss if you skim headlines. Intelligence support for long range strikes inside Russia sounds technical. It reads like the bureaucracy doing what the bureaucracy does, more cables, more coordination calls, more taskings for the analysts at Langley, Fort Meade, and Ramstein. That framing sells it short. To understand the weight of what is changing, you need to think about a map and how air defenses really work, then put that in the context of how Washington’s policy has swung over the last nine months.
Start with the policy arc. Two months into the invasion, the United States set up a coordination cell at Clay Kaserne in Germany, the headquarters for U.S. Army Europe and Africa. That hub allowed the Americans and Ukrainians to pass targets, deconflict, and plug gaps. Sometimes Kyiv would say, we want to hit here, what do you see. Other times Washington would say, we see a window there, can you reach it. For most of the Biden years, those conversations stayed on Ukraine’s side of the border. The line was clear. Watch the Russian side, sure, but do not help with strikes beyond the border.
Politics then threw sand in the gears. After the Democrats lost the November 2024 election, there was a brief window where the United States dropped restrictions and approved cross border use of U.S. weapons, with the caveat that the scope focused on areas directly tied to the frontier. When Trump took office, that window closed again. Coordination snapped back to the inside of Ukraine and to Russian troop movements that touched the war theater. Then came the late February Oval Office meltdown, and the administration pulled back even more, briefly cutting off intelligence sharing entirely. During that pause, Russia retook almost all of the Kursk salient, and Putin made sure to be seen there. Was the intelligence blackout the cause of the collapse. Maybe it contributed. Maybe the Ukrainian position in that wedge had simply become untenable. Either way, Zelensky accepted a ceasefire that Trump wanted, intelligence sharing resumed, and the fight moved on.
Now comes the actual break with the past. Two changes matter, and they are happening at the same time. First, the door is open to long range strikes deep in Russia. This is no longer about plugging gaps along the frontier. Second, energy infrastructure is not just allowed, it is actively
encouraged. Washington is pushing allies to feed Kyiv targeting data too. That turns this into a genuine team effort.
Why is this such a big deal. Think about the basic game on any night when Ukraine launches a wave. On one side, drones and missiles, cheap and numerous, many of them cobbled together in workshops that barely existed two years ago. On the other, Russian air defenses, a patchwork of high end systems, older batteries, radar sites, and jammers, all of it stretched thin across a country that measures in thousands of kilometers. In the textbook version, a defender with enough interceptors spaces them to create overlapping umbrellas. The attacker must stack a salvo on a single axis, saturate that umbrella, and hope that a handful of warheads slip through.
That is not Russia’s reality today. Ukraine has ramped up production and imports. Every week brings another wave somewhere over western Russia. Russia does not have enough interceptors to ring everything. So it rotates defenses, drags batteries from point A to point B, shuffles radar coverage, and patches the last hole at the price of opening the next one. That constant motion is one of the best explanations for why refinery fires have multiplied. Some nights, Ukraine guesses right and finds the seam. On others, it does not. Without a clear picture of where the Russian coverage is thin, a lot of those drones die without ever seeing a flare stack.
This is where U.S. intelligence changes the math. Imagine you can see the rotation. Imagine you know which S-300 battalion just moved, which Pantsir battery just switched sectors, which radar is down for maintenance, which jammer is on a truck headed east, and which site has been quietly running out of missiles. You do not need perfection. You only need better than random. Feed that into Ukraine’s targeting cycle, and hit rates climb. Misses fall. The same number of airframes produce more explosions where it counts.
We have a rough sense of the scale. On an average run, Ukraine might send a hundred drones. Russian claims say the peak has reached three hundred, which fits with nights that looked like a swarm on radar. Very few get through on any single night, yet even with a low per wave success rate, the attrition has been brutal. Ukraine has knocked out roughly forty percent of Russia’s refinery capacity, while another ten percent at any given time sits in scheduled maintenance. The Kremlin has even started importing gasoline, a sentence that would have sounded absurd three years ago. Russia, the raw energy exporter, buying finished product because the domestic system cannot keep up.
Now ask the only question that matters to a planner. What happens if guidance improves and the hit rate doubles. You do not need to destroy every site. Knock enough of them out, keep repair crews busy, force shutdowns for safety, and western Russia’s refining network ceases to be a reliable business. That is before you account for labor, parts, and insurance headaches that follow repeat attacks. Each fire costs more than the last one because the backup pumps have already been cannibalized and the spare heat exchangers are already spoken for.
There are political layers to this that Moscow cannot wish away. Russia’s budget is stretched. Oil and gas taxes feed the war. Cut volumes, and money disappears. The Kremlin can paper over shortfalls for a while, pull from reserves, squeeze regions, borrow quietly from state banks, push state firms to pay early. That buys time. It does not solve capacity destruction. Then there is the
social contract. The pitch at home has been simple for years. Moscow decides foreign policy, the public goes along as long as day to day life stays intact, fuel is available, prices are stable, pensions arrive, and the lights turn on. When fuel lines form and stations go dry, that bargain looks weaker. Gas subsidies do not calm nerves if there is no gas to sell at any price. When ordinary drivers stare at a closed pump, the war stops being a show on television. It arrives in the queue outside the forecourt.
There is another wrinkle. It is possible the United States began sharing this category of targeting data a couple of months ago, and what we are reading now is a delayed leak. If true, the jump in successful refinery attacks since August would reflect better guidance, not a step change in Ukrainian output. If that is the case, we should expect the current pace to continue rather than accelerate. You can see why it is hard to cleanly assign causation under a thick fog of war. Yet the political timing points in the other direction. Over the past month, Trump pressed Europe to adopt tighter sanctions designed to shut Russian energy out of global markets. That push ran into the usual wall, unanimity rules, partners who still buy Russian gas, capitals that do not want to pick a fight with Budapest or Bratislava. If diplomatic embargoes stall, one alternative is kinetic sanctions by proxy, help Ukraine break the refineries that feed Russia’s exports. In that frame, the new American posture is not a bolt from the blue. It is the obvious Plan B.
Set the politics aside for a second and measure the American cost. The big bill for building this kind of surveillance network was paid years ago. Satellites are in orbit. Signals gear is set up. Airborne and maritime platforms run regular circuits. The marginal cost of using it to help Ukraine is the analyst time to tip and cue, check, fuse, and push. Call it desk costs. There is even a selfish reason to do the work. Running real targeting cycles on a large, well defended country gives the people who will one day have to manage the Pacific a training lab. You can see the parallels. Blocking an amphibious push on Taiwan without firing first means seeing every lift ship and every fighter, watching the jammers, tracking the air defense rotations, and pre-selecting the seams. In that sense, Ukraine is an incidental beneficiary of a program designed to be useful elsewhere.
Even the weapons chatter fits that pattern. Talk of Tomahawks always grabs headlines, but the fine print matters. European capitals are on the hook to pay for most of the inventory that would be transferred. For Washington, that is not a check with many zeros. It is political cover and logistics support. The step that actually carries a domestic price tag is indirect. If Russian supply drops, global gasoline prices tick up. America is no longer a hostage to imported fuel. The United States is the largest gasoline exporter on the planet. American refiners will like fatter margins if Russian barrels are chased out of the market. Still, the macro picture is not friendly to a White House in a tight electoral cycle. Gasoline is an input cost for countless businesses, so an uptick ripples through to goods and services. Consumers see the number in bright LED digits on the corner of every busy street. The price changes fast, it is unavoidable, and it has a way of dominating dinner table talk. In the CPI basket, gasoline weighs in at about 3 percent, which is enough to move inflation prints if it spikes. We are roughly a year from the 2026 midterms. Special elections have not gone well for Republicans since Trump took office. Add a gas price surge and the political math gets rough. That is a real risk the administration is accepting.
Back to the war itself. If you give Ukraine repeatable ways to find the gaps in Russia’s air defenses, you do not just set more refineries on fire. You force Moscow to change behavior. High value air defense units will be pulled off the front to cover refineries, power plants, and critical logistics nodes. That, in turn, makes Russian troops across the border more vulnerable to the same kind of night raids that Kyiv has been honing since last year. Protect one class of target, expose another. Moscow can try to solve this by buying time. It can move more interceptors toward major fuel hubs, keep fighters on alert over key corridors, and invest in decoys, smoke, and rapid repair teams. It can build more sheds over pipe racks and put up walls to slow fragment damage. Those measures lower the odds of total loss on any given hit, and they buy a handful of months on the calendar. They do not change the strategic constraint. The stock of modern missiles is finite. Factory output is slow. Training new crews takes time. Batteries wear out. In the meantime, Ukraine only needs a steady trickle of successes to keep pressure high.
What about the logistics behind energy. Refineries are the most visible target, big complexes with flares that glow on satellite, and tanks that explode into orange towers when punched. Yet the system depends on more than towers and tanks. Pipelines, pumping stations, rail transfer yards, and power feeds are all fragile points. Target a handful of pump motors and your pipeline throughput slumps even if the crude keeps flowing in the ground. Hit the right substation and a plant goes dark, not because the units are wrecked, but because upstream power is gone for days. Drag the maintenance schedule off its rails and a planned repair on Unit 200 has to be delayed because crews are putting out a different fire, literally. If better intelligence lets Ukraine sequence these hits instead of spraying them at random, the downtime increases, the repairs stack, and managers lose the ability to say with a straight face that everything will be back next week.
The budget strain grows in parallel. Russia can still export crude, and it will. Discounts widen. Middlemen take a larger slice. Insurance gets trickier. Tankers take longer routes. Each friction point is survivable on its own. Together, they erode cash flow. Moscow then faces a choice between funding the war at the current tempo or cushioning the domestic fallout from fuel shortages. It can try to do both, draw down buffers, squeeze the private sector, or ask regions to pre-pay taxes and call it patriotic duty. That works until it does not. When refinery output is down for months, not weeks, the price of every trip for food and every truckload of cement rises. Even citizens who wave flags start asking why the pump is dry.
None of this means Ukraine will sail through unscathed. Russian air defenses adapt. New interceptors arrive from abroad or from plants that have ramped output. Radar coverage improves around critical sites. Moscow increases hardening, builds blast walls around key units, breaks up the most visible target areas, and adds more mobile batteries to plug gaps on short notice. Jammers get better at frying guidance links. Operators learn the pattern of Ukrainian routes and change their alert posture to match. The United States and Europe will not always share perfect, real time data. Satellite passes are not continuous. Clouds and weather matter. A radar that looks down at the right angle one night misses a truck moving under trees the next. Ukrainian production lines can still stumble. A batch of airframes comes off with a fault and a night’s strike rate tanks.
Even with those caveats, the direction of travel is clear. If Kyiv can blend its own moles, open source sleuthing, and commercial satellite buys with government grade tip and cue from U.S. and allied services, the quality of each strike package improves. The payoff is not one big night that knocks out everything. The payoff is a system that stays under stress. A refinery that comes back in two weeks gets hit again in six. A power substation patched on Monday fails on Friday because a transformer was already running hot and the new load pushes it over. Russia’s managers spend more time rewriting crisis plans than running the business of the war.
There is a secondary effect worth watching. As more high end air defense kit covers Russia’s energy belt, Russian troops across the border lose umbrellas they had grown used to. Ukraine will probe those front line holes, and if the artillery radar density drops, you will see longer range rockets, guided shells, and drones pushed a few kilometers deeper. The worker who used to sleep under the protection of a nearby S-300 battery will find that battery pulled to guard a refinery stack. That does not flip the battlefield on its head in a week. It shapes it month by month in Ukraine’s favor.
Where does Europe fit into this. The failed push for a unanimous embargo on Russian energy tells you what you need to know. Consensus breaks on energy when a couple of capitals still buy gas and will not budge. That is why kinetic sanctions, as brutal as they sound, start to look like the only tool left that can move the needle. If European services join in the targeting picture, you get better coverage of Russian rotations from more angles and more sensors. The legal lines get tricky, but there is nothing illegal about telling a partner where a mobile radar was at 02:00 and where it is now at 02:15. The political messaging writes itself. No one is firing missiles at Russia from NATO soil. Ukraine is making sovereign decisions with sovereign hardware. Partners are sharing information. Moscow will rage anyway. It always does.
The energy market story will run in parallel. Pull Russian refined product out of export markets and someone else sells more. The price gap between markets that take Russian barrels and those that do not will widen. Traders will chase arbitrage until regulators and navies close the most obvious routes. American refiners will look at export spreads and run harder. European governments that spent two winters managing energy crises will try to head off a new price spike with subsidies and tax tweaks. All of this is manageable if the hit to Russian output is uneven and temporary. It is much harder to manage if night after night of strikes make the output decline persistent and unpredictable.
If you graph this in your head, you get two lines that matter. One is Russia’s capacity to repair and adapt. The other is Ukraine’s capacity to keep finding the holes. U.S. intelligence support bends the second line up. Russian adaptation bends the first line up too, but not for free, and not immediately. The gap between them is where the pressure lives. Kyiv does not need that gap to be huge. It only needs it to exist and stay open long enough to force choices in Moscow that weaken the war machine.
There is one more political point to make about Washington. Sharing this category of intelligence is not the same thing as throwing open the armory. It does not mean a wholesale shift to bankrolling Ukraine at scale. It signals something narrower and more cynical, in the
pragmatic sense of the word. The United States is willing to do things that hurt Russia where it cannot easily strike back, and it will choose tools that cost little at home while imposing real costs over there. It also sets up the kind of leverage the White House wants for negotiations. You can get the Kremlin to the table faster if pain is mounting at home and the people who matter to the regime are worried about money, not medals. That does not translate to a blank check for Kyiv. It tells you the center of gravity in Washington, use intelligence and allied money to create leverage, avoid large new appropriations, and accept tolerable domestic pain on gasoline if the timing looks survivable.
If you are watching for proof that this is working, keep your eye on very specific things. Insurance chatter around tank farms and refineries in western Russia. Russian federal and regional decrees that tweak fuel pricing formulas and ration supply in roundabout language. Open source videos of longer queues at stations in regions that had been quiet all summer. Local reports of electrical outages around refinery towns that are not explained by weather. Movement of Russian air defense regiments away from front line sectors known for heavy fighting, followed by Ukrainian operators pushing a bit deeper with guided rockets or drones. A notable uptick in rail disruptions, since rail moves finished products when pipelines are down. And, of course, a steady rhythm of refinery fires that never quite stops.
None of this guarantees a quick break. Wars rarely give you clean lines like that. Yet this is one of the few moves available to the United States that threads the needle, lower marginal cost for Washington, high pressure on Moscow, real help for Kyiv. It rewards Ukrainian ingenuity in the air and on the factory floor by making every airframe count for more. It exposes the limits of Russia’s air defense inventory and forces the Kremlin to choose between shielding the energy belt and shielding troops at the front. It raises the risk of quiet political anger in Russian towns far from the trenches when the pumps run dry.
If the leaks about timing are right and this support only started recently, expect a phase where the hit rate improves a notch and then stays there, not a hockey stick chart that climbs forever. If the support began months ago, accept that the current burn rate may be the new normal until Russia finds an answer of its own. Either way, Ukraine has been gifted the most precious commodity in war, a slightly better picture than the other side has. With that comes the chance to bend the line of effort that matters most inside Russia, the reliable flow of fuel. If Kyiv keeps its nerve and keeps its production lines humming, that alone can reorder the fight in the months ahead.
There will be noise, politics, and pundit arguments about credit and blame. The market will move on rumor and only later on fact. Moscow will claim victory every week and admit nothing. Kyiv will keep the cameras away from the factories that build the drones. Washington will talk about processes and protocols. Strip all that away and you are left with simple arithmetic. Fewer Russian refineries working on any given day means less Russian fuel, less money for the war, and more unhappy drivers at home. Give Ukraine the eyes to pick the right nights and the right routes, and those numbers get worse for the Kremlin faster than they can make them better.
That is the signal through the noise, and it is worth your attention. The American move is not flashy. It does not produce a ribbon cutting ceremony. It does something more valuable. It lets
Ukraine hit where it matters, more often than not, and forces Russia to fight fires at home while trying to wage a war abroad. That is how pressure builds. That is how strategies crack. And if you are sitting with a map and tracking the lights going out along Russia’s energy belt, you can see how this ends for Moscow if the trend continues. Not with one big bang, but with the steady grind of a system that cannot keep up.