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Until this weekend, the prevailing narrative in the Russia-Ukraine war was that Vladimir Putin was on the back foot.

Ukraine’s long-range drones struck four miles from the Kremlin. Russia’s victory day parade was only possible because Volodymyr Zelensky agreed not to attack it. Putin now spends much of his time in underground bunkers. The Russian people are frustrated and worried in equal measure as the war is thrust upon them at home.

Looking to arrest the decline, Putin fired 90 of his biggest, most damaging missiles at Kyiv.

On Sunday, every one of the Ukrainian capital’s districts was hit, by Kh-101 cruise missiles, Iskander-M/S-400s, Kh-47M2 Kinzhals, 3M22 Zircons and one hypersonic Oreshnik.

Russia fired 83 missiles throughout May 2025. At the weekend, it surpassed that in one barrage.

Moscow was willing to ransack its reserves to send a message. The package of missiles and drones cost some £268m, including the £37m cost of the Oreshnik hypersonic missile that hit the town of Bila Tserkva, some 50 miles south of Kyiv, in only its third use in the war.

On Monday, Russian officials said the attack would be the first of many, vowing to launch fresh waves of “systematic strikes” against “decision-making centres [government buildings] and command posts” in Kyiv, and ordering foreign nationals to evacuate.

Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s top diplomat and foreign minister, went so far as to phone Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, to advise him to remove American diplomatic staff and citizens from Kyiv.

Kyiv’s formidable air defence is made up of layers of interceptor drones, electronic warfare systems, helicopters, surface-to-air missiles and heavy machine-gun-mounted mobile fire teams.

It managed to take down 44 of the 54 KH-101s and 11 of the 30 M/S-400s. But the rest of the missiles – and a handful of jet-powered drones – made it through.

Kyiv’s Achilles’ heel is a shortage of US-made Patriot missiles, the only effective weapon in its arsenal for downing ballistic missiles.

“In the field of cruise missile defence, we have significantly strengthened our capabilities,” said Anatolii Khrapchynskyi, a Ukrainian defence industry expert and military tech company chief. However, “we still remain dependent on our partners in several critical areas, especially in ballistic missile defence”.

He told The Telegraph: “This is where critical dependence still exists. Ukraine has still not received systems comparable to THAAD [US Terminal High Altitude Area Defence systems] or Arrow [US-Israeli anti-ballistic missiles].”

Mr Zelensky has made increasingly urgent public statements about the need for allies to supply Ukraine with resources for downing missiles, as they are increasingly redirected to the Middle East.

These pleas have largely gone unheard. Meanwhile, Moscow has unleashed ever-larger waves of attacks, attempting to overwhelm the defences with sheer volume.

As Ukraine’s interceptors have become increasingly adept at blunting incoming drone swarms, reportedly neutralising around 95 per cent of those that reach Kyiv’s skies, Moscow has begun to retire its propeller-driven Geran-2 drones in favour of more advanced, stealthier variants.

The increasingly common Geran-3 and Geran-4 variants are powered with turbojet engines. This made them almost three times faster than the 115mph drones that interceptors were designed to counter, Ukraine’s intelligence said on Monday.

In the past few months, Russia has also begun mounting R-60 infrared-homing air-to-air missiles atop these jet-powered drones in order to hunt expensive air defence targets such as helicopters and other aircraft, further adding to the strain.

Mr Khrapchynskyi described Russia’s attacks as “changing the very philosophy of aerial warfare”.

“We are seeing combined attacks involving ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, Shahed-type drones, decoys and multiple flight profiles simultaneously,” he said. “So I would say that what we are witnessing now is the emergence of a new instrument of aerial attack that requires entirely new approaches for countering it.”

Ukraine is rising to the challenge of adapting to these evolving tactics.

Its flagship defence company, Fire Point, has said Kyiv will field its own more affordable alternative to US-made Patriots before the end of 2026. It has also perfected its new home-grown electronic warfare system known as Lima, which spoofs satellite navigation to send incoming missiles off course.

Even so, Russia’s bombardments are likely to exploit this window of adaptation, pressing its advantage to inflict maximum damage before Ukraine’s countermeasures fully catch up.

Still, analysts say, the posturing should be taken less as a show of strength than a symptom of mounting strain in Moscow’s war effort, and Putin’s ability to project strength.

Antonia Langford for The Telegraph

The Kremlin is haemorrhaging soldiers at the front, has been forced to push back its logistics because of Kyiv’s mid-range strikes on occupied territory and border regions, and is struggling to keep pace with Ukraine’s near-nightly assaults on its refineries and other infrastructure.

The warnings issued by Russian authorities in recent days may be part of an effort to shift the narrative “rather than something meaningful in conventional military terms”, said Keir Giles, an associate fellow of Chatham House’s Russia and Eurasia programme.

“Russia will have been dismayed at the shift in global perception of the war over recent weeks,” he told The Telegraph. “The inching back of the front line, together with Ukraine’s deep strikes into Russia, have shown many people the deep cracks in Russia’s previous narrative that its victory was inevitable.”

Mr Khrapchynskyi said Russia often needs weeks to gather enough missiles and drones for another large-scale strike package. In recent rounds of strikes, Ukrainian officials have said missiles were sent straight from the production line, suggesting Moscow’s strategic stockpiles are running low.

“This is exactly why we are already seeing signs of exhaustion behind the propaganda image of ‘limitless capabilities’,” he said. “Many of these attacks are designed for psychological and media effect rather than for achieving decisive military results.”