The war in Ukraine is entering a new phase: while the Russian military’s offensive is bogged down at the front, the Ukrainian Armed Forces have pulled ahead in the drone race. Meduza has already written about how this Ukrainian success led to a fuel collapse in Crimea, how drones broke through Moscow’s layered air defenses, and how strikes on oil refineries have plunged entire regions into a gasoline crisis. These were all scattered episodes. The main Ukrainian operation of the past month and a half is best described as a campaign of long-range attacks on Russia’s operational rear — the belt of territory that begins a few dozen kilometers (roughly 15 to 30 miles) from the front and lies mostly within annexed lands. For the Russian army, it has turned into an extremely dangerous zone. How much more often are drones hitting this zone now, and how much farther do they reach? And where is it most hazardous for the Russian military? To answer these questions, we studied thousands of geolocated Ukrainian strikes.
The Ukrainian military opened a campaign of intense long-range strikes against Russia’s rear supply zone in mid-May, hitting targets about 100 kilometers (62 miles) from the front for the first time in a long stretch. Fuel tankers, supply trucks, and other vehicles — along with people, including civilians — came under fire. On the Novorossiya highway alone, which links Rostov-on-Don with Simferopol, at least 30 vehicles were struck in May. Video of burning fuel tankers circulated widely on social media and in news reports.
But how widespread has this campaign become? How long can it continue at this pace, and will it shift the balance at the front? These questions are difficult to answer without hard numbers. The Ukrainian Armed Forces have repeatedly struck deep behind the lines, including hundreds of kilometers from the border. There have also been strikes on the supply lines behind frontline forces — mainly on fixed installations, using HIMARS rockets and aerial bombs. But until this year, neither side had the ability to hit moving targets regularly, including individual trucks. Isolated attempts to attack equipment in the rear did, of course, occur. What matters is scale and regularity.
To estimate this, we analyzed the trend in strikes on the Russian rear within Ukrainian territory (that is, in areas annexed and occupied by Russia) based on geolocations from open sources.
One caveat up front: coordinates can’t be established from open sources for every successful strike. We don’t know how many attacks have been geolocated, or how that share is changing. Only scattered estimates exist. According to calculations by Clément Molin, an independent French analyst, video from various sources over the past 48 days showed about 500 damaged trucks. Yet only 270 such strikes have been geolocated since the start of the year. Some Ukrainian attacks, it appears, are never reported publicly at all.
All of this complicates efforts to tally the strike numbers and track their patterns. We can, however, reliably trace one thing: not the number of attacks but their range. If the likelihood of geolocation doesn’t depend on the distance of the strike point from the front line (it would be hard to explain the opposite), then we can track how that distance changes.
For this analysis, we examined every set of coordinates compiled by the project Geoconfirmed, singled out the strikes on trucks and other targets, and measured, for each strike, the shortest distance to territory under Ukrainian control as of the date of publication. That allowed us to see how these distances shift.
The chart below shows that in May and June 2026 the Ukrainian Armed Forces shifted something that had held steady for years. The median depth of attacks grew from a few kilometers to a few dozen kilometers. The exact figures matter less than the trend, which is striking.
The trend in strikes on Ukraine’s occupied territories: how the range of attacks has grown
The changes happened over the past six to eight weeks, and, as of June 18, the median range of strikes had not fallen — meaning the Ukrainian long-range campaign is continuing.
Judging by media reports, one might have assumed that this strategy mainly hit fuel trucks or — more narrowly still — only those moving along the Novorossiya highway and supplying fuel to Crimea.
That turns out not to be the case. The range of strikes on trucks and on other types of targets in the operational rear changed almost in sync. Having learned to strike dozens of kilometers behind Russian lines (largely thanks to the Hornet drones made by the company of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt), the Ukrainian Armed Forces began using that capability against any suitable targets. And strikes on fuel trucks are merely the most visible part of the campaign, not its only goal.
The trend by sector: where the Ukrainian Armed Forces now strike most often
We separately tracked how the range of strikes is changing in different sectors of Ukraine’s occupied territory. It’s still too early to speak of long-term trends here, but the data reveal some interesting dynamics.
In particular, the range of strikes behind Russia’s “Vostok” grouping, which is advancing in the Hulyaipole area, rose sharply in May but fell back in June. This is probably because, at the start of their campaign, the Ukrainian Armed Forces struck roads (including the Novorossiya highway) in the southwestern part of the Donetsk region, in the Mariupol area, and in the eastern part of the Zaporizhzhia region, and then shifted their aim westward — toward the Kherson region and the land crossings into Crimea.
Even so, the Ukrainian army did not fixate on “turning Crimea into an island” (as the country’s defense minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, recently called the measures to disrupt supplies to the peninsula). Instead, it set about expanding its aerial campaign in Russia’s rear areas at a pace that outstrips Russian countermeasures along the Pokrovsk axis, as well as in the Kostiantynivka and Sloviansk areas — where the Russian offensive aimed at the full capture of the Donbas is continuing. Along the other axes, from Sumy region to Kupiansk and farther south to the Siverskyi Donets River, no significant increase in range — that is, no systematic effort against the Russian rear — has yet appeared.
For comparison — the trend in each side’s advances since the start of 2023
Meduza
