The last month has seen the continuation and expansion of the Russian deep strike campaign against Ukraine. The Russian military has taken it upon itself to systematically dismantle key Ukrainian infrastructure, especially key components of its natural gas grid, which it dealt “critical damage” to in recent waves of strikes (Bousso, 2025). With a potential confrontation on the horizon, it is vital that Europe has the ability to defend both its critical military and civilian infrastructure. Whilst great focus has been put on developing defensive measures such as procurements of air-defence assets, investments into offensive assets capable of deterring an attack in the first place should not be forgotten. It is through deterrence and counter-strike that Europe may best be able to defend itself in future.

One factor that supports this line of argument is the constant expansion and improvement of Russian strike capabilities that would make defending the entirety of European airspace difficult and prohibitively expensive. Russia is engaged in what has been termed the “most ambitious expansion in military manufacturing since the Soviet era”, with a noticeable scale-up in the production of key components of missiles such as solid-propellant motor production (Hinz, 2025). The Russians are also diversifying their strike assets. The addition and production of cheap Iranian Shahed drones that cost between US$20,000 and $50,000 has given the Russians a way to conduct cost-effective attritional warfare, with weekly launches of drones reaching 1,100 as of April 2025 (Jensen & Atalan, 2025). Overall, this has allowed the Russian strike packages to achieve mass and precision at the same time, posing a significant threat to European defence (Horowitz, 2024).

In such an environment, producing and acquiring the air-defence assets required to successfully defend critical infrastructure on-top of defending front-line troops presents itself as a considerable challenge, especially in the short to medium run. It is here where developing long-range strike capabilities may be of use. Europe has long outsourced deep-strike capabilities to the US, depending on the provision of the munitions, intelligence gathering and target acquisition (Boswinkle, 2025). If Europe wants to credibly defend itself in a future where US commitments to NATO become increasingly unpredictable, it has to prioritise not only the development of new strike assets but also the ability to scale up production of munitions in mass in the event of a conflict (Loss & Mehrer, 2025). European militaries thus need to ensure they continue investing within the entire kill-chain, ensuring they have sufficient assets to gather intelligence and sustain operations.

In doing so, European nations may be able to deter and discourage any future Russian pressure or strikes. Russia is likely to avoid a fully fledged war with NATO, instead utilising localised strikes, the element of surprise and nuclear intimidation to lock in any territorial and strategic gains. By investing in capabilities that can strike key military infrastructure deep inside Russia, Europe could reinforce deterrence whilst also expanding their ability to fight a long, protracted attritional war (Boswinkle, 2025).