Has Ukraine Turned the Tide? by Ryan Cooper

[justaprogressive]

https://prospect.org/2026/06/29/ukraine-russia-trump-turned-the-tide/]

When Donald Trump won the 2024 election, many Russian nationalists celebrated. The support provided by the Biden administration would be ended, and Russia would be able to stomp on a helpless Ukraine. Vladimir Putin’s war on the Ukrainian people, which Russian forces have carried out in the areas they occupied, through mass murder, rape, and kidnapping of Ukrainian children, could continue apace to a full obliteration of the nation.

Trump did indeed cut off aid to Ukraine. He and Vice President Vance hauled President Zelensky into the White House and berated him to his face. “You don’t have the cards,” blustered Trump.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the inevitable Russian triumph: Ukraine started racking up victories. Europe stepped up to make up most of the funding gap caused by Trump’s stab in the back, and Ukraine’s domestic military industry matured enough that it could make up much of the munitions gap. Ukrainian leaders have reformed and strengthened their military units, while Russia’s are crumbling under stupendous casualties and corruption. And the Ukrainian economy is holding, while the Russian one is starting to pop rivets.

While it is far too soon to declare victory to be inevitable, Ukraine now has a decisive upper hand. It’s a remarkable underdog story.

Ukrainian leaders have reformed and strengthened their military units, while Russia’s are crumbling under stupendous casualties and corruption.

A major aspect of this story is about drones and missiles. Ukrainian long-range precision missiles are not as good as American ones, but they are a lot cheaper, getting better fast, and critically, they do not come with American rules about where and how they can be used. Ukraine even developed a custom cruise missile, called the “Flamingo,” with a range of 3,000 kilometers, and an apparent cost of less than $1 million. The American Tomahawk, by contrast, costs about $2.5 million for just a 2,500-kilometer range, though it is more technically advanced.

But when it comes to drone manufacturing and especially operation, Ukraine is almost certainly the world leader. Fully 95 percent of Ukraine’s drones are now domestically manufactured—a staggering figure for a country that had only a tiny drone sector before the war—and Ukrainian drone operators are terrifyingly effective. Ukrainian firms now make so many that despite tens of thousands of drones being used up per month, there are enough left over for some exports. All sorts of nations, anxious that they are now behind the military curve, are beating a path to Kyiv, begging for training and buying up what drones are on the shelves—including the U.S., ironically.