Russia Using Up Missile Stockpiles 'For No Militarily Meaningful Purpose'

On Monday, Russian forces struck Ukrainian civilian targets in its most wide-ranging rocket attack since the early days of the war. While the size of Russia's missile reserve stockpile remains a closely guarded Kremlin secret, their number is widely understood to be insufficient to allow for the continuation of similar attacks on a sustainable scale.

Data posted by the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces on Monday afternoon reported that air defense systems had succeeded in shooting down 43 out of 84 Russian cruise missiles fired and 13 out of 24 armed drones, including 10 out of 13 Iranian Shahed-136 UAVs.

The missiles and drones that hit their targets landed in fifteen Ukrainian regions, causing power outages and damaging playgrounds, but doing little to affect the Ukrainian military's ongoing counteroffensive operations in the country's South and East.

Although a precise tally of which missile types were used in the attack was not made public, Forbes.ua estimated the cost of the Russian blitz to have been between $400-$700 million. The calculation was based on the assumption that Russia used the more expensive X-101 rockets ($13 million each) to hit its targets while also firing off a swarm of less costly munitions as a means of overwhelming Ukraine's air defense systems.

It is not only the sticker price that is limiting Russia's capacity to mount similar operations in the future. As Western sanctions continue to deny the Kremlin access to imported technologies, it has become more difficult for the Russian arms industry to manufacture replacement rockets.

"Russia's procurement of Iranian drones is in part an effort to augment their degraded precision strike capabilities," George Barros of the Institute for the Study of War told Newsweek.

"They need to find a way to offset problems in the production and replenishment of precision guided munitions (PGMs)," he added, "which have been caused by sanctions targeting the supply chain for Western-sourced components that go into PGMs."

Other military analysts agree that Russia's capacity to wage war on Ukraine's civilian infrastructure is limited. The question remains, "how limited"?

"As horrible as today was for Ukraine, the sliver of good news here is that Russia likely can't sustain this rate of missile launches," Dmitry Alperovitch, Chariman of the Silverado Policy Accelerator, wrote on Twitter about Monday's barrage. "It's very telling that they have not had this rate of long range fires since the start of the war."

Still, estimates as to how long Russia might be able to sustain such a rate of missile launches are hard to come by.

"In early September I heard the figure of 60-70% consumed [since the start of the war]," Shashank Joshi, Defense Editor at The Economist, posted as part of the discussion as to how much of its PGM stockpile Russia has already used up.

This "60-70%" statistic matches information provided to Newsweek from an additional independent source. However, neither Joshi nor the second source had any clear insight as to how many replacement munitions Russia, despite Western sanctions, might have been able to manufacture since February 24, or whether the "60-70%" represented Russia's overall stocks as opposed to the portion of its armaments which had been designated specifically for use in Ukraine.

Russia's secrecy surrounding its military inventory means that the most successful private sector analysts are those most adept at reading publicly available tea leaves. Michael Kofman of the Center for Naval Analysis is widely regarded in the expert community as the pre-eminent authority on Russian military matters.

"I've seen a number of bad estimates," Kofman wrote on Twitter of Russia's potential remaining stockpiles. "These continue to reflect the false certainty of numbers. What can be said with some confidence is that the rate of [Russian] strikes declined over time, and the types of missiles often used suggested dwindling stockpiles of more suitable PGMs."

The overall picture emerging from Monday's series of strikes is one of an increasingly desperate Kremlin wasting scarce military resources on targets that carry more potential for psychological damage than for battlefield effect. While it remains unclear how many more such days of horror Russia has the physical capacity to create in Ukraine, there is a clear expert consensus that such capacity is limited.

It is also becoming increasingly clear that the Kremlin's hoped-for campaign of shock-and-awe did not produce the desired results. Although the Russian attacks succeeded in knocking out electricity in multiple Ukrainian cities for several hours, by Tuesday morning the power was back on from Lviv in the West to Kharkiv in the East.

"The Russians really do seem to be conducting deliberate terror strikes against civilian targets for no militarily meaningful purpose," Barros of the Institute for the Study of War added. "Perhaps they're attempting to demoralize Ukrainians, though I don't think the effort is achieving that effect."