KYIV—It was near midnight, and I was on an overnight train passing through Kyiv on the way back from meetings with Ukrainian commanders in Kharkiv, Dnipro, and Pavlohrad, when my compartment door was thrown open and the lights flipped on. A voice called out, “Get up now. There’s a ballistic missile coming our way. We have to get off the train.”
There was no time to think, only to calculate: How many minutes do we have? Will we ever get back on this train? I grabbed my passport, wallet, and phone. The first boom came as we pulled into the station, the attendants already throwing the doors open. The second, much louder, hit as passengers stepped onto the platform. The station chief ran toward us shouting one word: “Run!”
We sprinted for the underground passage between the platforms as the booms kept coming—at least ten more that I could count from the shelter. Around four hundred Ukrainians huddled with the train passengers below ground, evacuated like us from the night trains. Station workers moved through the crowd handing out bottles of water and tea, calm and weary at once. Children in patterned pajamas pressed themselves against their parents, their faces carrying a fear no child should ever know. As a mother, it is a look I will not forget.
One explosion sounded as if it had landed at the end of our platform. It was, I later learned, five kilometers away. That is what a ballistic strike does to your senses. Drone attacks tend to come slowly, with warning. Ballistic missiles arrive with minutes—sometimes seconds—of notice, at speeds that make the alarms feel like an afterthought. From a hotel room at night, when the missiles tend to hit, you hear the sirens and the distant thuds without ever grasping the full weight of what is happening around you. Caught in the open, you understand exactly what Russia is raining down on this country. The next morning, I watched a video of one of that night’s missiles plunging into a residential building.
The overnight attack of August 19–20 was one of the largest of the war on Kyiv: twenty-two missiles in two waves, including Iskanders, hypersonic Zircons, and North Korea–supplied KN-23 ballistic missiles. As our train finally pulled out of the city, I learned that Russian Tu-95 bombers were taking off to hit Kyiv again within hours. Among the targets struck that night: an apartment building, a school, and a children’s hospital. Twelve people were killed and thirty injured.
What Russia is doing from the air
Russia is throwing an array of weapons at a country that has rejected it and will keep rejecting it. In my meetings with commanders at the front, three threats repeatedly came up—and for each, Ukraine currently lacks a scalable answer.
The first is the ballistic missile campaign—what I witnessed for one night, and what Ukrainians endure constantly. Ballistic missile defense was the number one priority of every commander I heard from. Ukraine has no good way to counter these weapons today, and with winter approaching, the gap turns deadly: strikes on the power grid with no consistent means of interception mean months of cold and darkness for civilians. Planning is already underway for the possibility that some residents may need to move out of Kyiv for the winter.
The second is glide bombs. Ukrainian officers told me that Russia is upgrading its old Soviet FAB-series bombs, which range up to 3,000 kilograms, by fitting them with glide kits and releasing them by Su-34 and Su-35 aircraft flying at altitudes higher than Ukrainian air defenses can reach. While standard versions travel less than 80 kilometers, upgraded variants produced since 2025 can apparently reach 95 kilometers. The very latest, jet-boosted versions can glide up to 150 kilometers when released from high altitude, guided by jam-resistant antenna arrays. Russia is releasing hundreds of these bombs every week. In one command center, I watched Ukraine’s digital battle map track a Russian jet releasing a glide bomb, while Ukrainian forces had nothing available to stop it. Here too, no clear scalable solution is in sight.
The third is the new jet-powered Shahed drones. Ukrainian interceptor drones—an innovation that went from one company’s invention to an industry of dozens of manufacturers in about eighteen months—became so effective against propeller-driven Shahed drones that Russia’s massed raids simply stopped working. Moscow answered with jet-powered variants, propelled by inexpensive Chinese turbine engines, that Ukraine’s current interceptors cannot reliably catch. Ukraine needs faster interceptors, and its technology teams are racing to build them, but a faster solution is still two to four months away, and scaled production further still.
This is not only Ukraine’s problem. The strike architecture Russia is perfecting—cheap, fast, mass-producible, and increasingly precise—is being developed alongside North Korea, refined with Chinese components, and watched closely by Iran. What Russia learns over Kyiv, the United States’ adversaries learn with it.
Ukraine’s hardest winter—and what the US can do
The commanders I met believe that if they can hold the line until November, drones can fend off Russian advances at the front through the winter. But the arithmetic of survival there has grown brutal: One commander told me that most troop losses now happen during rotation and movement between positions, so soldiers are staying locked in their positions for longer stretches. And behind the front, every official described the same hole in the country’s defenses: There is no consistent answer to the ballistic missiles falling on their cities. Without one, this will, without a doubt, be Ukraine’s hardest winter yet.
There are at least four ways the United States could help—each with its own complexities, but all within reach.
First, rally allies to quickly provide Ukraine the interceptor missiles it desperately needs now. This is the band-aid that buys time for everything else.
Second, stand up a rapid joint task force with Ukraine to co-develop an anti-ballistic solution at scale and low cost. Ukraine has already shown what its engineers produce under pressure: interceptors cheap enough and good enough to force Russia to abandon an entire attack strategy. Ukraine will eventually build its own anti-ballistic system. It is better for the United States to be on the winning end of that—co-developing now means sharing the capability later.
Third, press Starlink to allow Ukraine to use its connectivity to strike both ballistic launch sites and the ecosystem around the launch sites in Russia. The ecosystem matters because launch locations move. Ukrainian military intelligence knows where these targets are, but Ukraine’s long-range weapons lack a reliable guidance over Russian territory. Satellite-based connection would provide that. Going after the archers would do more to stop nights like mine than any interceptor.
Fourth, as a wildcard: send Ukraine more F-16 fighter jets. Ukraine already uses them against incoming threats, and additional aircraft might let its pilots attempt new ways of taking down ballistic missiles.