Ukraine’s War Against Russia Has Gone Expeditionary

A Ukrainian sea drone washing up in a Greek cave is the latest sign that Kyiv's war has gone expeditionary. The next phase will be exporting the doctrine

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A fisherman in Greece found the future of the war sitting in a cave.

On May 7, an armed unmanned surface vessel turned up on Lefkada, a Greek island better known for its pristine teal waters and jaw-dropping snorkeling opportunities.

Greek Defense Minister Nikos Dendias later confirmed the craft was Ukrainian-built, explosive-laden, and serious enough that he raised it with EU counterparts.

Reports say that he was extremely pissed about the drone, to which I would refer him to the movie Stripes and say, “Lighten up, Francis.” Shit happens…

Greek findings pointed toward a MAGURA-type naval drone; the same broad family of weapons Ukraine has used to make Putin deeply nostalgic for the bad ole days Soviet naval power projection.

But the question is: What is a Ukrainian naval drone doing in the Mediterranean?

The answer to that question is the clearest single image of what Ukraine’s war has become.

Expeditionary warfare is the ability to project military power beyond your own borders; usually sans a constant supply line. Ukraine is doing it without American-style aircraft carriers, heavy airlift, or overseas bases; using drones, intelligence networks, maritime weapons, and special operations to make Russian power unsafe far from the front.

Russia invaded expecting a local conflict. What it got was a distributed campaign against Russian power wherever Russian power is exposed.

The clearest proof that geography stopped protecting Russia came on June 1, 2025.

In an operation Ukraine’s Security Service later called Spider’s Web, Ukrainian drones hidden inside wooden sheds or containers loaded onto trucks inside Russian territory launched against multiple strategic aviation bases simultaneously.

Ukraine claimed 117 drones participated and said 41 aircraft were struck. US officials later offered a more conservative count: roughly 20 aircraft hit, around 10 destroyed or seriously damaged.

The gap between the claims doesn’t change the operational significance. What changed was the address. The operation hit Belaya, Dyagilevo, Ivanovo Severny, Olenya, and Ukrainka airbases.

Belaya air base in Siberia sits more than 4,000 kilometers from Ukraine’s internationally recognized border. A drone that travels that far inside a hostile country is an intelligence-led strike operation against an adversary’s strategic aviation infrastructure.

Russia had positioned those bombers there, in part, because distance was supposed to be their protection.

Ukraine can’t out-produce Russia in most categories of conventional warfare. It’s outmatched in artillery shells, in manpower, and in attritional grinding.

The expeditionary answer to that problem is to shift the cost…

Don’t fight the bomber in the air. Burn it on the ramp.

Don’t fight the fleet ship-to-ship. Hit it with a naval drone before it can deploy.

Don’t try to outproduce Russian fuel. Attack the refinery, the pipeline, the terminal, and the port.

Make Russia defend everywhere instead of concentrating its meat-power advantages at the front.

It’s an odd hybrid between distributed guerilla warfare and conventional strike.

This strike on Russian strategic aviation is the most dramatic version of Ukraine’s deep-strike logic, but the energy campaign is the most systematic.

From early 2024 through the spring of 2026, Ukraine has conducted an intensifying series of drone attacks on Russian energy infrastructure.

The target list reads like a petrochemical atlas of Russia’s interior: refineries at Perm, Tuapse, Syzran, NORSI, Kirishi, Saratov, Volgograd, Ufa, and Afipsky; export terminals at Ust-Luga, Primorsk, Sheskharis, and Astrakhan; gas processing and pipeline nodes throughout the country’s fuel distribution network.

By some estimates, drone strikes had forced roughly 700,000 barrels per day of Russian refining capacity offline between January and May of 2026. Russia’s seaborne oil product exports dropped nearly 10 percent from March to April 2026 alone, and roughly 17 percent year-over-year.

Russia wanted a war of attrition. Ukraine started attacking the machinery of attrition.

The next category of target was the shadow fleet: the tankers and cargo ships Russia uses to move sanctioned oil and evade Western export controls.

These vessels operate in legal gray zones, often flagged through obscure registries, insured through opaque channels, and crewed with plausible deniability in every layer of the transaction.

In March 2026, Russia blamed Ukraine for an attack on the Russian LNG tanker Arctic Metagaz in the Mediterranean, involving operations near Libya.

Ukraine hasn’t officially confirmed the operation.

What it confirms is the direction of travel.

The Black Sea was the laboratory. The Mediterranean appears to be the field test.

The Lefkada drone fits this pattern even if its specific mission will never be officially explained.

It was in the wrong ocean for a training malfunction and the wrong country for a simple navigational error. Whether it was targeting Russian-linked shipping or represents something else entirely, it demonstrated that Ukrainian naval drone warfare is moving farther from home.

Also, Ukrainian special operations forces have conducted, or materially supported, operations against Russian-linked mercenary networks abroad, mostly Wagner and its successor structures, in places where Russia uses deniable force as a foreign policy instrument.

Incidents have surfaced in Sudan and Syria.

Guardian reporting and footage circulated by the Kyiv Post have pointed toward operations in both countries.

Wagner and its successor organizations represent “Russian power” at its most cost-effective and most exposed. They operate in jurisdictions where Moscow has minimal diplomatic cover, under organizational arrangements designed for deniability, with supply chains that cross multiple borders.

For Ukraine, that makes them targets because it raises the cost of Russian influence projection globally and signals to potential Russian partners that Moscow’s protective umbrella lets the rain through.

The export: Fire Point and the doctrine leaving the warehouse

All of the above involves Ukraine taking the war to Russian interests, directly or indirectly. But the final development is different in kind…

Ukrainian defense companies are now attempting to sell the method.

Denys Shtilierman, co-founder and chief designer at Fire Point, one of Ukraine’s more ambitious defense startups, gave an interview to the Financial Times earlier this year in which he described the company’s ambitions: expanded production of cruise and ballistic missiles, a pan-European air defense architecture, and a satellite program that has already put two birds in orbit this year with plans for dozens more in 2027.

It’s worth mentioning that Shtilierman has been the focus of recent investigations for graft. It may be real or politically motivated, but it doesn’t affect the outcome.

The satellite detail matters for reasons that will become clear in a minute.

But the line that should get more attention than it has is what Shtilierman said about Iran.

He described a concept he had pitched to Gulf state clients: a persistent drone kill zone, 200 kilometers deep inside Iranian territory and along Iran’s coastline, modeled on the strip of contested airspace that now defines Ukraine’s own kill zone.

The mechanics, as he described them, are straightforward.

You put kamikaze drones on continuous station above the designated zone. Anything that moves in that zone gets killed. The zone doesn’t need soldiers or forward bases. It needs drones, communications infrastructure, and the targeting and sensor layer to identify and engage.

The Gulf clients, Shtilierman said, were interested. But they “needed” American approval before they could move forward.

Washington hasn’t responded, at least not publicly. But Trump has dismissed the idea of needing Ukrainian assistance in the region, arguing that no one understands drones better than the US.

Which is fucking hilarious…

Can you hear it in Trump’s aggravating voice? I can.

“Frankly, the US is the best at drone war. The world has never seen anything like our abilities to do drone stuff.”

Then he falls asleep at the podium…

It’s familiar Trump nonsense. It’s also in direct contradiction with what the Pentagon has been doing quietly, which is preparing to sign a first-of-its-kind agreement to import Ukrainian drones for American military testing.

But I think the kill zone concept deserves more than a dismissive glance.

What Ukraine has built along its own front is a layered architecture of detection, communications, target recognition, electronic warfare, and strike capability, operating continuously at relatively low cost per sortie.

A buffer zone, if you will. Something I proposed Canada create along its massive US border to dissuade any more talk about “51st state.”

Cheap explosive aircraft wait for anything that moves.

FPV drone operators rotate through shifts.

Loitering munitions hold station until they’re needed.

In Ukraine, the result is a belt of contested airspace where Russian vehicles, personnel, and logistics face continuous attrition pressure without Ukraine having to concentrate troops.

Russia discovered what that feels like. Russia did not enjoy the experience.

Shtilierman’s satellite program is the infrastructure argument for why this could be exported.

Persistent kill zones don’t function without an information layer.

Drones need targets. Targets need detection. Detection needs sensors, communications, and a system that can survive jamming, degraded links, and adversary countermeasures.

A satellite constellation provides the persistent overhead coverage that makes a 200-kilometer drone patrol zone viable beyond a static front line. That’s why the orbital program is the enabling layer for the concept Shtilierman is selling.

Whether Gulf states ever receive that capability is a separate question, with a long chain of American approval processes, technology transfer negotiations, and regional political calculations between the pitch and any contract.

But the pitch itself is significant. It represents Ukrainian defense industry exporting the operational logic that hardware embodies.

What Russia’s global exposure became

Russia entered this war having spent decades building a specific kind of global presence: bomber bases protected by depth, an energy export system that made Europe dependent, a shadow fleet that moved sanctioned goods through legal gray zones, and deniable mercenary networks that bought influence in weak states without requiring Putin to sign its name to anything.

All of that exposure is now a liability in ways so-called Russian strategists couldn’t possibly conceive in February 2022.

Don’t get me wrong: The front line east of Pokrovsk still carries the heaviest burden. The infantryman in that trench is still the center of gravity for this war, and the outcome there will determine more than anything happening in Siberia or Africa, for now.

But Ukraine has built a second dimension to this conflict, one that follows Russian power into its rear areas, its economic infrastructure, its deniable networks, and now, potentially, into the threat calculations of countries that face different adversaries but similar problems.

Fire Point’s Iran pitch may go nowhere.

Washington may block it.

The technical and political barriers may be too large to clear.

Gulf states may find their own solutions or decide the risks outweigh the benefits.

But the idea is already in circulation.

A Ukrainian weapons executive is offering to recreate, over Iranian territory, the drone kill zone Ukraine built under invasion. He has clients interested enough to ask the United States for permission.

Still, the ability of a nation to project power beyond its borders is a hallmark of a middle power (and above).

Ukraine has crossed that threshold with drones, intelligence, and a very long memory.

That’s why I think Ukraine is now expeditionary.

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