From American Affairs Journal, September 10, 2026:
Until recently, Omsk, Russia had been far removed from combat. Roughly 2,500 kilometers from Ukraine’s border (about as far away as London), the Siberian city seemed safely beyond the reach of attacks. Then, on July 6, residents were shocked when explosions rang and a fire broke out at the Omsk oil refinery, Russia’s largest, after Ukrainian drones struck deep inside the country. It was one of the longest-range drone strikes of the war. With it, Ukraine said, every single one of Russia’s eleven largest oil refineries and gasoline-processing plants had now been hit by Ukrainian drones or missiles at least once. Since mid-July, Ukraine has expanded its deep-strike drone campaign to target logistics networks. It has hit some twenty hubs of Wildberries, Russia’s version of Amazon, in locations as far as Yekaterinburg, across the Ural Mountains and roughly two thousand kilometers from Ukraine’s border. Ukraine’s long-range attacks illustrate how it has become the world’s foremost laboratory for the development of drone warfare and AI-assisted military systems.
But in what has become the world’s first true drone war, Russia ramped up relentless, massive drone and missile attacks this summer, causing near-constant air raid alerts around Kyiv. And last winter, heavy bombing by Russian planes and drones destroyed roughly half of Ukraine’s electricity and heat generation capacity, leaving many Ukrainians to endure long blackouts in subzero temperatures. These attacks offer examples of how drone innovations are redefining the optimal geography for defense. Not only are drones now able to fly long distances, but they are being used in mass swarms. Some can employ AI-assisted terminal guidance to finish strikes autonomously. Infrastructure originally designed for twentieth century industrial warfare is becoming a liability. This is the sort of economic geography Russia and Ukraine inherited from the Soviet Union. Soviet planners optimized infrastructure around three strategic principles: centralized transport networks, concentrated industrial production, and strategic depth. Each of these created advantages under Cold War conditions. But they also created tradeoffs, including transport bottlenecks, overconcentrated production, and a reliance on remoteness for security. Increasingly, both Russia and Ukraine are using long-range drone campaigns to exploit these tradeoffs.
Industrial Overconcentration Simplifies Targeting
The Soviet industrial system emphasized centralization and efficiency. In the interwar period of the 1920s and 1930s, Soviet leadership had a fascination with American mass production, a phenomenon called Amerikanizm. They admired Henry Ford’s massive factories as a means of turning a society of agrarian peasants into an industrial powerhouse. Drawing heavily on Fordist ideas, the Soviets embraced industrial gigantism, creating enormous integrated factories that promised economies of scale and easier oversight. But the tradeoff was a lack of distributed resilience: spreading production across multiple smaller, decentralized locations so that a disruption at one does not halt production at the rest. The Soviet Union did at times deliberately disperse strategically important production, particularly during World War II, when factories were evacuated eastward ahead of the German advance. But overall, the Soviet industrial map contained critical geographic concentrations and production bottlenecks where one shortage, delay, or disaster could reverberate across an entire domestic supply chain.
This vulnerability persists today. Ukrainian strikes on Russia’s concentrated infrastructure have helped drive oil refining volumes to a twenty-one-year low and have contributed to widespread gasoline shortages.
Thus, while concentrating industries helped the Soviets achieve enormous economies of scale that facilitated their rise to superpower status, it also left an enduring legacy of geographic production and generation bottlenecks that can reduce the number of targets an adversary needs to strike to cause major economic disruption.
In response to drone attacks on its power grid, Ukraine has been pivoting rapidly over the summer to decentralize power generation. It has created “energy islands”—microgrids of localized electricity and heat production from solar, wind, and natural gas—located around critical services like hospitals, water utilities, and residential districts. This will allow these areas to decouple from the national grid if it is attacked. Ukraine is also moving many critical power nodes underground, while protecting others with massive shelters of concrete, earthworks, and sandbag gabions. And while Russia operates entirely within its own post-Soviet electrical grid, Ukraine has a critical lifeline: its full integration into Europe’s electricity network, ENTSO-E. This gives Ukraine a backup to prevent blackouts when its power stations are damaged, by immediately importing up to 2.45 GW from neighboring EU nations like Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania.
But despite these supports, Ukraine’s grid is still expected to be highly vulnerable in the coming winter. It retains the Soviet-era structure of its primary internal transmission system, especially in the Combined Heat and Power (CHP) plants of major cities like Kyiv, Kherson, and Odesa. Russia has been exploiting its deep historical blueprint knowledge of this system to target vulnerable transmission nodes. In an August 24 interview with RBC-Ukraine, Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence (GUR) Major General Vadym Skibitskyi warned that Russia had recently developed metal-cutting drones designed to strike power transmission towers and lines. Ukrainian Energy Minister Denys Shmyhal told POLITICO recently that now “Putin wants to finish off [Ukraine’s] energy system.”
Half of Ukraine’s electricity is generated by a few centralized nuclear power plants built in the Soviet days. But as yet, Russia has not attacked these, instead targeting the surrounding high-voltage substations and transmission lines. Russia has avoided striking Ukraine’s nuclear plants in part because it could trigger a radiation release affecting Russian territory, and also because it could alienate Russia’s allies and trigger a direct Western response....
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