Ukraine is steadily undermining Russia’s war effort—targeting leaders, exporting insecurity inside Russia, and gaining firmer Western backing—even without quick battlefield gains.

Livy tells us that Tarquin the Proud, Rome’s last king, counseled his son to neutralize powerful citizens and top generals in cities the Romans sought to subdue. In the brutal arithmetic of early Roman statecraft, decapitating an enemy’s leadership hastened victory. Ukraine’s campaign to target senior Russian commanders—on the front and, at times, within Russia itself—echoes that ancient logic.

Since Moscow’s full-scale invasion in 2022, by some counts, eleven Russian generals have been killed, an attrition rate that has shocked the Kremlin. Vladimir Putin expected a quick, fervent triumph; instead, Ukraine’s indirect approach—disrupting command nodes and sowing disarray—has proved stubbornly effective.

Targeting the technocrats who sustain Russia’s war machine—figures such as Igor Kirillov, long associated with the Radiation, Biological, and Chemical Defense Forces—has compounded those shocks. Yet after more than three years of unrelenting aggression, Ukraine faces its most challenging stretch. Russian drones now penetrate Ukrainian airspace at a scale that tests air defenses and morale, prompting an uncomfortable question about endurance on both sides. To critics, Western support for Kyiv has been hesitant and uneven, while Russia has tightened its ties with Iran and North Korea.

That pessimism, however, mistakes turbulence for trajectory. Despite Moscow’s swagger, sanctions have hollowed out key sectors and strained logistics. And the alternative partnerships Putin touts are limited by the relative weakness and vulnerabilities of those partners—Tehran not least among them after recent Israeli and U.S. strikes left it looking more exposed than emboldened.

Despite Russia’s massed firepower and manpower, Ukraine has learned to unsettle the Russian psyche by hitting soft targets and symbols. What Ukrainians endured in the war’s opening phase—sudden strikes that shattered any sense of sanctuary—now increasingly visits Russia. Drone attacks have reached deep into the interior, turning comfortable peripheries into nervous frontiers. Even the set-piece pageantry of Navy Day has been scaled back or canceled for security reasons, a tacit confession that spectacle cannot be insulated from risk. The cumulative effect is practical as well as psychological: late in July, Ukrainian drones reportedly struck a power plant, disrupting rail traffic near Volgograd; soon after, tit-for-tat attacks on Sochi—Russia’s resort showcase—sent summer vacationers into shelters and the Kremlin into defensive spin.

Politics presses in, too. Remarks by President Trump during a visit to Scotland added a layer of pressure for Moscow to reckon with, as Washington’s posture hardens rather than slackens. The Russia scholar Mark Galeotti has argued that Putin’s endgame is to wait out the West—stall negotiations, bet on fatigue, and grab the best deal. But the risk of that gambit is obvious: delay can just as easily consolidate Western resolve. Recent joint statements by European defense ministries underscore a growing willingness to coordinate the protection of arms shipments bound for Ukraine, including via Poland—a narrowing of the seams Putin has sought to pry open. Meanwhile, promised heavy kit continues to edge forward after long delays; each tranche adds another layer to Ukraine’s defensive and offensive options, and each arrival reminds Moscow that time does not automatically favor the aggressor.

The coming months may prove decisive, not because one knockout blow is imminent but because several grinding vectors are converging. On one side, the Trump administration keeps tightening sanctions designed to constrict Russia’s war economy; on the other, Moscow is escalating ground assaults paired with waves of drones meant to exhaust Ukrainian magazines and patience. The central question is no longer where lines on the map move but how long Russia can sustain operations as cumulative pressures mount—material, diplomatic, and domestic. History offers a caution: Hannibal once stood a few marches from Rome, only to see his campaign unravel when counterstrikes in North Africa forced his hand. Strategic reach can become strategic overreach in a heartbeat.

Ukraine’s playbook—economic attrition through sanctions, steady infusion of Western arms, and clandestine operations that rattle senior ranks—does not guarantee a quick victory. It does, however, threaten the coherence of Putin’s project. By fraying command, exposing vulnerabilities, and exporting the war’s anxiety back into Russia, Kyiv is shaping a conflict in which momentum is measured less by territory than by the adversary’s resilience. The winds of change on Ukraine’s war front are not gale-force yet. But they are steady, and they are blowing in directions the Kremlin did not intend.