🚀 I just published my latest Missile Matters post assessing Russia's growing air and missile defense problem.

Interceptor scarcity, long treated as a uniquely Ukrainian problem, now appears to be affecting Russia as well. Reports since November 2025 indicate that Russian crews are loading Osa-AKM launchers with outdated interceptors and operating Buk launchers with only one or two rounds. By April, Russian military bloggers were reporting severe shortages specific to the Pantsir system, with similar concerns now emerging around S-300 and S-400 stocks.

This scarcity compounds an already thinning air and missile defense network. Ukraine struck dozens of high-value radar systems across Russia and Russian-occupied territory between March and May alone, and confirmed Pantsir and S-300/400 launcher losses have increased significantly in recent months.

Russia is now experiencing the same structural disadvantage that defines the unforgiving nature of modern missile warfare: legacy-type interceptors are more expensive and harder to produce than the systems they are meant to shoot down. Lacking Ukraine's technological and operational ingenuity, Russia is struggling to find an answer to Ukrainian long-range drone swarms that are growing in both size and intensity.

As missiles and long-range drones continue to proliferate, this structural imbalance will increasingly define inter-state competition in the age of proliferated deep strike.