Russia has been shooting down most of Ukraine's best long-range cruise missiles as fast as Ukraine can launch them. Just one or two of the $500,000 Fire Point FP-5 Flamingo missiles have hit their targets in recent weeks.

That means Russian air defenses are working for now. Whether they'll continue to work is the critical question for Ukrainian strike planners.

Under the cover of darkness on 6 August, the Ukrainian army's 19th Missile Brigade launched at least three of the six-ton, jet-propelled Flamingos toward Tyumen Oblast in western Siberia. The missiles traveled around 2,500 km before disappearing, according to mapper AMK Mapping.

The apparent shoot-downs capped a difficult week for Ukraine's deep strike campaign. AMK Mapping claimed the Russians shot down 10 of 11 launched Flamingos since 1 July. That count is one mapper's, based on open-source tracking, and no official Ukrainian or Russian figures exist to check it against.

The mapper may be off by one. Between 24 and 25 July, at least one Flamingo struck the Vyatka Machine-Building Enterprise Avitek missile plant in Kirov Oblast 1,300 km from the border with Ukraine. Michael Bohnert, an analyst with the RAND think tank in California, concluded that two Flamingos hit the plant, causing visible damage.

It was a potentially powerful blow. Among other things, Avitek produces parts for the Tor medium-range surface-to-air missile system. Slowing Tor production "will have the most impact," Bohnert explained. And the Ukrainian system that a Tor slowdown might benefit the most is ... the Flamingo.

After all, the Tor is one of the air defense systems the Russians could use to shoot down Flamingos. "Any slow-down in the production of these could greatly improve the prospects of FP-5 performance over time," Bohnert noted.

Aerial defenses

At present, however, it seems that the Flamingo's biggest problem is in the air, not on the ground. Russia is shooting down most of the incoming FP-5s because it has eyes in the sky.

The Russian air force's fleet of lumbering Beriev A-50U radar early-warning planes now has one mission and one mission only: the A-50Us with their fuselage-mounted radars patrol over the likeliest flight paths for Flamingos motoring into the Russian interior to strike strategic industries.

The A-50Us are effective in the role. As recently as June, more Flamingos were getting through Russian defenses. Between 9 and 10 June, the 19th Missile Brigade launched five Flamingos at the VNIIR-Progress electronics plant in Cheboksary, in western Russia, 960 km from the Ukraine border.

Two missiles struck the plant, punching right through anti-drone protections and inflicting major blast and fire damage with their 1,150-kg warheads, the biggest on any Ukrainian deep strike munition.

Russia adapted fast. On 4 July, an A-50U helped missile batteries on the ground spot and shoot down five FP-5s flying toward Votkinsk, 1,360 km from Ukraine. From its perch thousands of feet in the air, the A-50U has a much longer detection range against low targets than any radar on the ground can manage.

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Targeting A-50Us on the ground and in the air in a series of drone and missile ambushes, the Ukrainians have destroyed two A-50Us and damaged at least two others, reducing the fleet to no more than five. Russia has no way to build replacements. But those five planes are now fully committed to the anti-Flamingo fight.

On 7 July, the Russians reportedly launched four of the irreplaceable planes at the same time in order to coordinate the Flamingo shoot-downs. Now, almost all Flamingos go down in flames before they reach their targets.

Ukraine isn't powerless. Fire Point has been working hard to improve the Flamingo and make it harder to shoot down. Perhaps most importantly, it seems the company tweaked the missile's altimeter in order to help it fly lower. The lower a missile flies, the better chance it has of hiding among the radar clutter created by surrounding terrain.

But if a lower-flying Flamingo is harder to shoot down, the improvement hasn't yet registered in the statistics. For now, Russia has figured out how to take out almost all of Ukraine's heaviest deep-strike missiles.

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Russia is running out of its best eyes in the sky

Russian troops are slowly marching toward and around Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, the last two big free cities in eastern Ukraine's Donetsk Oblast.

The Russians have a standard playbook for taking a Ukrainian city, and running it means doing two things at the same time. Along the nearly 100-km Kramatorsk front, they don't have the infantry to do both at once. Every time a Ukrainian brigade holds somewhere, the Russians have to move men to cover it—and something stalls somewhere else.

That strategy is simple in concept but difficult in practice. The idea is for Russian forces to advance along a city's under-protected flanks in order to put pressure on the main supply lines of the city's garrison. As the flank attacks squeeze the garrison's logistics, Russian infiltrators slip into the city, hoping to create a lodgement for follow-on forces.

The final assault through that lodgement comes late in the campaign, after the Ukrainians are already weakened by a lack of supplies.

The strategy only works when the troops on the flanks and those in the middle work together. The former squeezes. The latter infiltrates. The problem for the Russian Center Group of Forces on the Kramatorsk front is that it's not squeezing and infiltrating at the same time. That delays the overall Russian advance and buys time for Ukrainian forces to dig in, reinforce, and hope for a miracle.

"Russian offensive planning at the operational level remains disciplined," mapper and analyst Vitaly explained. But only "on paper," Vitaly added. "Groupings are sequenced, axes are assigned, objectives are staggered."

"What the discipline is not is well-manned," the mapper wrote.

Vitaly reads one recent Russian adaptation as evidence of the shortfall rather than of cleverness. "I read the shift to two- and three-man infiltration teams on motorcycles and ATVs as less a sign of tactical innovation than of a manpower deficit that organization is straining to hide," he wrote.

Manpower shortages

Ukraine's manpower problems are well-known. Fewer observers appreciate that Russia struggles, too. Yes, the Russians still recruit around 30,000 fresh troops every month. In theory, that's enough new manpower to replace monthly losses.

But replacing casualties is not the same as resourcing a strategy. Ukraine's commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi put the Russian force in Ukraine at 721,300 at the end of June—a gain of only around 11,000 since late 2025, against Russian losses he estimated at 30,000 to 35,000 a month. Contract recruitment collapsed in the spring, falling by a third year on year, and Ukraine's foreign intelligence service counted 195,000 contract recruits by early July against an annual target of 409,000.

A Russian general, speaking anonymously to the investigative outlet IStories, put the requirement more starkly. To capture the rest of the Ukrainian-held Donbas, he said Russia would need to replace at least 55,000 to 60,000 casualties every month—roughly double what it recruits. That figure rests on a single unnamed source and should be weighed accordingly. But it describes the same gap Vitaly sees on the map.

When a Ukrainian brigade defeats one attack anywhere along the Kramatorsk front, it may compel Russian regiments to shuffle troops between units in order to quickly replace the losses. The shuffle may sap the combat power of a flanking or infiltration unit working along some other section of the front.

A weak flanking unit may not be able to keep up the pressure on enemy supply lines, perhaps imperiling the adjacent infiltration unit as it probes for the gaps in Ukrainian defenses that the flankers were supposed to help create. By the same token, weak infiltrators may find gaps in Ukrainian defenses, but fail to secure a lodgement—effectively wasting the efforts of the adjacent flankers.

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"That gap keeps producing the same effect," Vitaly explained. The Ukrainian armed forces' "ability to hold separate sections of the front independently forces Russian formations to compensate for each other's failures, and that compensation creates new stalls."

Vitaly gave a name to the effect, and was careful about what he was not claiming. "I call it structural deterrence—not deterrence in the conventional sense, and not a doctrine, but the byproduct of asking an undermanned army to keep a sequenced plan on schedule."

A byproduct is not a defense, and it holds only as long as the Ukrainians can keep producing it. That requires synchronization of their own. Supplies and reinforcements must arrive when and where they're most badly needed. Air and artillery support should shift from sector to sector depending on the urgency of the local garrisons' needs.

All that is to say, the lack of synchronization that has slowed the Russians' march on Kramatorsk could eventually speed up the Russians' march—if and when the Ukrainians are the ones struggling to synchronize.

It's worth noting that the Russians aren't advancing fast toward Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, but they are advancing—especially from the northeast.

The Russians may not be perfectly synchronized. But they're clearly synchronized enough to grind toward the last free cities in Donetsk. Just very, very slowly.

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