Russian Firepower Strike Tracker: Analyzing Missile Attacks in Ukraine

This digital series—featuring scholars from the Futures Lab and across CSIS—explores the challenge of modern firepower strikes and their central role in coercive campaigns and competitive strategy.  

Key Concept: Firepower Strike

Firepower strikes are an emerging concept that cuts across multiple states. They involve large, combined attacks by air/land/sea launched cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, and attack drones – often supported by a larger array of information effects – used to attack military and/or civilian targets. In Russian doctrine, there is a concept called noncontact warfare that discusses how to use standoff precision attacks in pursuit of operational and strategic objectives, including attacking critical infrastructure. In PLA doctrine, a firepower strike system is one of the five major forms of system warfare. Even in U.S. doctrine, there is an emerging discussion about convergence and pulse attacks, used to overwhelm adversary intelligence and defensive capabilities to enable joint campaigns.

Methods

Futures Lab has developed this platform with the goal of helping users better understand modern coercive campaigns. Studying patterns and trends in the data will help the larger national defense community develop options for supporting Ukraine and deny similar cost imposition strategies against free societies. The tool allows users to explore daily aggregated data on various missile types which includes ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, various UAVs, and surface-to-air defense missiles such as X-101/X-555, X-22, Shahed-136/131 and Iskander-M. All data is drawn from official Ukrainian Air Force social media accounts[1]. The Futures Lab extracts and analyzes data using R, a standard statistical analysis software. Analysis pieces employ common empirical analysis techniques from social science to identify statistically significant correlations that help concerned citizens and policy makers better understand the character of the threat.

Data Analysis

Every month, Futures Lab will publish a deep dive into the data. These commentaries will use data science to assess the correlates of firepower strikes. Based on the statistics, each piece will conclude with a policy insight. Through this combination of interactive tools and expert-driven insights, the Russian Firepower Strike Tracker serves as a powerful resource for understanding the dynamics of Russian missile operations and their impact on the Ukraine War.

[1] The data is compiled by https://github.com/PetroIvaniuk. The dataset is available at: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/piterfm/massive-missile-attacks-on-ukraine/data. CSIS has verified that the data aligns with the official numbers published by the Ukrainian Air Force Accounts. The data covers the period from September 27, 2022, to November 30, 2024.