Russia attacked Ukraine from 18:00 on 5 September and through the night into 6 September with 108 strike drones and S8000 Banderol cruise missiles, Ukraine's Air Force reported. The assault ran while US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner were finishing three hours of talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow. They left the Russian capital after midnight and were expected in Kyiv on 6 September, again carrying a US proposal to end the war. Ukraine's own offer of a four-day pause in the fighting went unmatched by Russia.

The attack was still running in the morning

By 09:30 air defenses had downed or suppressed 82 Shahed-type, Gerbera, and other drones, along with six Banderol missiles. The military logged impacts at 11 locations and falling debris at seven more, and warned that Russian drones were still in Ukraine's airspace.

Over the previous day, Russian strikes killed seven people and injured 57 across Kharkiv, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Dnipropetrovsk, and Donetsk oblasts, according to oblast administration figures published on the morning of 6 September. Kharkiv Oblast lost four people, three of them one family in Chuhuiv. Zaporizhzhia Oblast reported one death, 25 injured, and 886 strikes on 54 settlements.

Three hours in the Kremlin

Witkoff and Kushner met Putin on 5 September and left the Kremlin close to midnight. Putin opened by telling them he had "full trust" in the US side, Axios reported, and Washington's goal is to restart direct Russian-Ukrainian talks that stopped six months ago. Putin's aide Yuri Ushakov called the discussion "substantive, constructive, exceptionally candid," ABC News reported, and stated the envoys had promised to carry Putin's own assessments into their meetings in Kyiv. Ushakov also repeated that Russia will achieve its goals and that the war's "root causes" must be removed — the Kremlin's shorthand for barring Ukraine from NATO and cutting down its army.

A White House official told RFE/RL that the sides discussed "concrete plans" for next steps, to be announced in the coming weeks. Kremlin envoy Kirill Dmitriev, who sat in on the talks, called the Moscow trip an important peacemaking visit, Al Jazeera reported. The Kyiv leg would be the envoys' first trip to Ukraine since taking over the US effort; it was set for August and postponed as Russian strikes intensified.

Russia is launching more of its best jet-propelled attack drones and miniature cruise missiles at Ukrainian ports, cities, warehouses, and power plants. The speedy Geran-3, Geran-4, and Geran-5 drones and Banderol missiles can zoom right past Ukraine's ground-based guns and slower interceptor drones, so the Ukrainian air force is deploying more supersonic fighters to chase down the Russian munitions.

But there's a problem. The Ukrainian jets are running short of the missiles that work best against them.

A deepening shortage of infrared-guided AIM-9 missiles and radar-guided AIM-120 missiles for the Ukrainian air force's ex-European Lockheed Martin F-16 fighters has been reported elsewhere. Less well known is what has been happening to the Soviet-era missiles carried by Ukraine's older Mikoyan MiG-29 fighters.

The F-16 is probably the most numerous Ukrainian fighter type, with around 50 in service. But the MiG-29 is a close second. Despite steep losses of MiG-29s in the 55 months since Russia widened its war on Ukraine, Ukrainian aviation brigades may still fly dozens of the classic Soviet-made fighters. MiG-29s are daily sights in the sky over the port of Odesa in southern Ukraine as the twin-engine fighters chase down Russian missiles and drones.

The MiG-29 can carry the full array of Soviet-style air-to-air missiles in the Ukrainian inventory including the infrared-guided R-60 and R-73 and the radar-guided R-27. But the missile of choice for intercepting the 500 km/hr Gerans and 700 km/hr Banderols is the more modern R-73. The $300,000 heat-seeking missile is maneuverable and accurate at the close ranges that are typical of fighter-on-drone engagements. Its one known weakness is cloud: a Ukrainian pilot said in 2022 that the R-73 tracks poorly through it, which is part of why pilots sometimes fall back on the cannon.

Ukraine went to war in 2022 with substantial stocks of R-73s and surely received additional copies from allies. While Ukrainian industry built some components for the 1980s-vintage missiles, they were and still are assembled in Russia—so the supply is finite. And the rate of expenditure rose sharply as Ukraine pushed the R-73 into roles it was never built for: onto ground-based launchers, after the 9M33 missiles for its Soviet Osa air defense systems ran short, and even onto some of its robotic boats.

Down to the 1970s stock

The sign of that pressure is the return of the R-60—a missile designed in the 1970s and considered obsolete when Russia widened the war. Last month an R-60 was visible in the wreckage following the crash of a Ukrainian MiG-29. And this week, video circulated of a MiG-29 downing a Banderol with one at extremely low altitude.

Ukraine's air force had enough R-73s in 2022 that nobody expected to see R-60s again. Continuous interception of Russian cruise missiles and Shahed-type drones changed that, Militarnyi reported. Nor is this improvisation: since November 2025 Ukraine has been running a program to modernize the R-60, replacing analog seeker components with digital ones to sharpen its infrared sensitivity, and adapting it for ground launch. Ihor Fedirko of the Ukrainian Council of Defense Industry called it a temporary way to put otherwise unusable missiles to work.

It's not that the R-60 isn't suitable for downing a Geran or Banderol. It's that it's less suitable than an R-73. "I don't think Ukraine would be using R-60 missiles unless it had nothing else left," one close observer of the Ukrainian air force noted.

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Ukraine’s F-16s are so short of Western missiles that pilots fall back on jet’s built-in M61A1 Vulcan cannon, which risks killing civilians below

The only other alternative is for a fighter to use its gun. But that's risky, as the pilot must fly dangerously close to a drone or missile before opening fire; the resulting explosion could take out both the interceptee and the interceptor.

In the same way Russia is exhausting Ukraine's long-range surface-to-air missile batteries by firing more ballistic missiles than Ukrainian forces can intercept with their dwindling supply of Patriot missiles, Russia may also be exhausting Ukraine's fighters and their limited stocks of short-range air-to-air missiles.

As the Ukrainian missiles run out, more of the Russian missiles and drones get through—and strike their targets.

The problem is going to get worse before it gets better. Russian industry is ramping up production of both the jet-propelled Geran models and the Banderol, and jet output overtook piston output in August. The Russians launched a reported 1,500 jet Gerans in July and 2,500 in August. Interception rates for the fast drones specifically ran as low as 50% in July, though they may have ticked up to 60% or even 70%.

But that's still too low considering that Ukrainian air defenders usually shoot down 90% of slower propeller-driven Geran-1s and Geran-2s. "Nobody wants interception rates in the 60s/70s," explained Michael Bohnert, an analyst for the RAND think tank in California.

New models of faster interceptor drones, which several Ukrainian manufacturers are scrambling to deliver to front-line forces, may help restore the 90% kill rate for even the fastest Gerans. But "jet-interceptor output has been behind jet-drone output," Bohnert noted. So it's likely that, for a few months at least, the Russians will have the numerical edge, and the Ukrainians will have no choice but to continue sortieing F-16s and MiG-29s to reinforce ground-launched air defenses.

But what happens when the fighters run out of even their oldest missiles?