​​No one should dispute that Ukraine’s deep strike campaign is great public relations. Dramatic footage of drones and missiles slamming into Russian airfields, oil refineries and factories boosts Ukrainian morale and reassures allies that the country remains capable of offensive operations after 45 months of all-out Russian aggression.

But fiery Tik Toks set to thumping Ukrainian resistance anthems aren’t indicative of an effective deep strike campaign. Despite appearances, Kyiv’s drones and missiles aren’t striking hard enough to propel Russia toward defeat and Ukraine to victory.

That could change and there are some signs that the campaign is accelerating. But to meaningfully damage the Russian war effort, Ukraine needs much more powerful munitions, and lots of them.

The good news for the Ukrainians is that there are candidates: in particular, the new Flamingo cruise missile from Kyiv firm Fire Point. The badnews is that the Flamingo’s effectiveness is as yet unclear. And the most obvious replacement for the Flamingo, the American Tomahawk, remains out of reach for the Ukrainians.

The numbers tell the real story. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said late last year that Ukrainian industry would produce 30,000 one-way attack drones in 2025 — and there’s no reason to believe the Ukrainians won’t meet that target.

But very few of those 30,000 drones strike their targets. And even fewer inflict serious damage. “The overall success rate of Ukrainian strikes has been that less than 10% of munitions have reached a target, and fewer still have delivered an effect,” the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London concluded in a December report.

It’s one thing to hit a refinery with a drone or two. It’s another to disable them for long enough to seriously cut Russian petroleum production and exports, and for that to depress Russian military spending enough to cause significant front line effects.

“I think the amount of economic damage one has to inflict on Russia is probably more than Ukraine could create at the moment,” Sergey Vakulenko, a senior fellow at the Berlin-based Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center think tank, told CNN. “I believe that if push comes to shove, Russia could probably survive with half of its oil and gas exports.”

But a year of escalating Ukrainian oil raids — around 130 this year, compared to just 75 or so last year — has coincided with a mere 6% decrease in oil and gas Russian exports compared to 2024.

Again, pro-Ukrainian social media — with its dramatic celebration of every successful strike and its fiery aftermath — would try to suggest otherwise. “The regular images of fires in Russia have caused a perception that Russian air defenses are failing to protect the territory,” RUSI noted. “The reality is more complex.”

“Ukraine has, over time, become quite adept at attacking targets that lack air defense and has prioritized targets where flammable or sensitive materials will allow small numbers of munitions with limited payloads to cause cascading damage to a facility,” the London think tank explained.

Conversely, “this leaves large numbers of targets that the Russians have decided to defend, and that, consequently, Ukraine has struggled to hit.” According to RUSI, a typical Ukrainian raid will involve between 100 and 150 one-way attack drones in the class of the Fire Point FP-1 or FP-2 or the Ukroboronprom An-196, each drone costing as much as $80,000 for a total expenditure of around $12m.

That’s cheap, given that a single Tomahawk missile might cost $2 million. The problem, however, is payload. A Tomahawk packs a 1,000-pound warhead and delivers it at nearly 600 miles per hour (mph), adding kinetic energy to the explosive impact. An An-196 might have a 165-pound warhead and motors along at barely 250 mph.

Generously, those 15 drones that might get through in a 150-drone raid deliver the same weight of explosives as two or three Tomahawks. Bear in mind: US Navy submarines fired 30 Tomahawks at a pair of Iranian nuclear weapons sites back in June — and the Tomahawks weren’t even the most important munitions for that operation. US Air Force stealth bombers delivered the main firepower in the form of massive bunker-busting bombs.

Frontelligence Insight, an analysis group, estimated Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries during those six months cost the Russian economy $863m. But Russia’s total revenue from oil exports in 2024 was $189bn. The cost to Moscow was, in other words, negligible.

President Trump has made clear that Tomahawks will not be supplied to Ukraine. And there are real questions over the domestically produced Flamingo cruise missiles even if its 600mph 2,200-pound warhead could be just the thing to flatten Russian refineries rather than simply scratch them.

But only if the Flamingo is as cheap and producible as Fire Point has claimed. But based on the evidence, it seems Ukraine has fired just nine Flamingos in four raids over six months resulting in two damaging hits. Maybe the Flamingo is a viable weapon like Fire Point’s one-way attack drones. But if so, there isn’t yet a lot of proof. Ominously, Fire Point is under investigation in Kyiv for corruption.

Maybe an uptick in FP-1/2 and An-196 production, and an increase in the pace of attacks, will add mass and frequency to Ukrainian strikes and result in more lasting damage that, for example, makes generous enlistment bonuses less affordable to Moscow — and, as a consequence, depresses the steady manpower mobilization that has been Russia’s biggest military advantage over manpower-starved Ukraine.

Or maybe Russia will largely shrug off Ukrainian deep strikes in 2026 the way it shrugged them off in 2025 and 2024.

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