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KYIV, Ukraine — The war of attrition between Russia and Ukraine is expanding to encompass both countries’ economies.

Military targeting officers are operating as economists in reverse. Increasingly, the objectives of missile and drone strikes are declining output, lost jobs, and logistical bottlenecks.

Ukrainian officials are calling the current Russian campaign “total war” for its focus on economic impact, rather than on narrower goals like battlefield gains or infrastructure damage. While Moscow has targeted commercial assets throughout the war, its assaults have grown significantly in scale.

The intensifying Russian bombardment has followed Ukraine’s own effort to damage the Russian economy. Kyiv has used its expanding arsenal of domestically made drones to fire on Russia’s oil industry, its most valuable sector, while also targeting Russian e-commerce companies.

Russia has shifted its focus to economic warfare as its advances have largely stalled on the battlefield. “In a war of attrition, the economy becomes the prime target,” said Orysia Lutsevych, head of Ukraine Forum at Chatham House, a London-based research group.

Moscow is seeking, Lutsevych said, to raise the cost to Europe of sustaining Ukraine’s war effort. The growing bill provides fodder for far-right parties in countries like Britain, France, and Germany that oppose giving aid to Ukraine.

Last month, President Volodymyr Zelensky told European allies that Ukraine needed $27 billion to plug a budget shortfall, after the European Union had already finalized a loan of more than $100 billion earlier this year.

The economic damage from Russia’s campaign will reach about $10 billion by the end of the year, Ukraine’s economy ministry has estimated. Much of the cost is indirect, in lost sales, disrupted workdays, and logistical snarls.

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development on Thursday lowered its previous expectation of 2.2% economic growth this year in Ukraine to 1.5%. Some economists have said that Ukraine might end the year with zero growth.

Growth is also sluggish in Russia, where the Kremlin is struggling to fund the war’s ever-increasing costs. The Russian federal budget deficit reached $68 billion by the end of August, compared with the $44.5 billion planned for the entire year. On Thursday, Russia’s Finance Ministry said it would need to raise taxes to finance next year’s budget, following a major increase introduced the previous year.

Long-range Ukrainian attacks have opened cracks in the semblance of normal life that the Russian government has tried hard to preserve in cities far from the border with Ukraine. The strikes against oil refineries have led to fuel shortages and long lines at gas stations. Attacks on the warehouses of Russia’s two largest online retailers disrupted logistics and left many small businesses without inventory.

In the other direction, Moscow has waged a broad assault on Ukrainian exports and consumer spending. Attacks on warehouses have removed goods from shelves. Strikes on ports, locomotives, border crossings, and ships at sea have crimped exports. In recent days, Russia has expanded its strikes to internet infrastructure, disrupting service for some 100,000 households.

Russia changed its tactics in late August, increasing the number of daytime hours that major Ukrainian cities are under air alerts. Some retail businesses close during attacks, lowering sales.

The all-day strikes are bringing the economy close to a “standstill” as people spend so much time in bomb shelters, said Tymofiy Mylovanov, a former economy minister who is now president of the Kyiv School of Economics. The university is planning a new addition that will be built entirely underground, for student safety.

Dimitar Bogov, chief economist of the European reconstruction bank, said labor shortages and the increased bombardments meant that Ukraine was entering “its most difficult period of the war.” While spending power among the population remains strong, he said, people “are not able to spend.”

Ukraine’s economy contracted by about 20% in the first year of the all-out invasion, which began in February 2022, but it has grown since then.

An important area of growth is defense technology, which more than doubled in 2024. More recent figures are not available because Ukraine has classified economic statistics related to defense industries, which are targets of the Russian military.

Business is also growing in solar and wind power, providing electricity from small, numerous, and widespread sources, making the grid less vulnerable to missile strikes.

While Ukrainian exports of steel, iron ore, and grain have dropped by about a third during the war, rising foreign aid has compensated for those losses. The inflow and outflow of foreign currency has remained positive, with central bank reserves growing from $29.1 billion before the invasion to $48.7 billion now.

The latest barrages, however, are shifting the balance. A new Russian targeting system has been effective at hitting locomotives, even when they are rolling, cutting into Ukrainian exports. Ukraine, which had about 1,800 locomotives before the war, has lost about 500. It is now losing one a day on average.

Russia has timed its attacks for their seasonal effects. It hit grain silos in the summertime to knock out storage before and during the harvest. The European Union is rushing mobile grain silos to Ukraine, but lost sales are expected to cause farmers to default on loans, with likely knock-on effects in the banking sector.

Maintaining consumer spending, partly driven by high military salaries, is a key challenge. Ukraine is not at risk of hunger, but rather a slumping economy, with a lower tax base to fund the war.

A Kyiv-based wine distributor illustrates the difficulties. The company, Good Wine, operates a flagship outlet in the capital and stores around Ukraine. It has contracts with about 1,000 wineries around the world. Logistics are an ever-intensifying headache.

The company’s main warehouse in Kyiv was hit in tank crossfire at the start of the war. In total, 1.6 million bottles shattered in the explosions and fire. The owners gave away scorched but intact bottles, and rebuilt.

This year, the warehouse was hit again in a Russian long-range strike. Two other company warehouses and a commercial kitchen were also hit. No employees were killed, but about $9 million in inventory, including a collection of rare vintages, was lost.

Many Ukrainian companies are rethinking logistics. Broadly, the options are just-in-time delivery, distributed storage, or going underground.

Models for warehouses buried about 20 feet deep that would be impervious to most munitions are under consideration. A Ukrainian company has designed an underground data center.

At least three Ukrainian companies offer custom bunkers to individuals and businesses. One, Bunkerok, founded in 2023, is now installing about 170 a year. Another emerging bunker maker is called Hobbit House.

Good Wine is leaning toward distributed storage so that no single strike can upend its business model, said Dmytro Krymsky, a co-founder.

“Every day the war goes on, everything becomes more expensive,” he said. “It’s really hard to run a business in Ukraine.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

As Israelis prepare to vote next month, the question of who bears responsibility for failing to prevent the Hamas-led attack of Oct. 7, 2023, has become a dominant issue in one of Israel’s most consequential campaigns in history.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, seeking an unprecedented seventh term, has placed the blame on national security officials, while his critics have said he must personally answer for the failures. When Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, reported earlier this month that Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed, president of the United Arab Emirates, had given Netanyahu a secret warning that Hamas was planning a major attack, the question took on even greater urgency.

Netanyahu has denied the report.

But a person who said they had spoken with Sheikh Mohammed and another person who said they had been briefed by someone on the call between the two leaders told the New York Times that the Emirati leader had secretly reported to Netanyahu that Hamas was considering a major attack.

The warning from the Emirati leader, however, never reached the leaders of Israel’s security establishment, according to five former senior Israeli officials. Netanyahu gathered his security chiefs days later, on Oct. 1, 2023, for a meeting about the situation in the Gaza Strip, and never mentioned the warning, according to minutes of the meeting reviewed by the Times.

Instead, he told them that the goal should be to maintain calm in Gaza, and he pushed back when some security officials said that Israel should consider military strikes against senior Hamas leaders in Gaza who were overseeing attacks against Israelis in the West Bank, the minutes show.

At the meeting, details of which have not been previously reported, Netanyahu said that any Israeli action in Gaza might sabotage the prospect of Saudi Arabia establishing diplomatic relations with Israel — a deal the Israeli prime minister believed was imminent.

Sheikh Mohammed had called Netanyahu in late September to tell him that, based on information he had received, Hamas was planning to launch an attack, according to the two people who said they had spoken with someone on the call. One of those people said the information was not specific about whether Hamas was planning to launch rockets into Israel or preparing for a ground invasion over the border. The original sources of the intelligence that Sheikh Mohammed passed to Netanyahu are unclear, and it is also unclear whether other issues were discussed on their call.

The warning, though vague, proved to be correct. Days later, thousands of Hamas fighters and their allies launched an invasion over the Gaza border into southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking some 250 more hostage in the deadliest attack on Israel in the country’s history.

After the Haaretz report, Netanyahu denied in a statement that he had ever received a phone call warning from Sheikh Mohammed and said that if any intelligence came from the Emiratis it was passed to Israel through intelligence channels.

The Emirati Foreign Ministry and Netanyahu’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

But Sheikh Mohammed mentioned his September 2023 phone call with Netanyahu months later in a discussion with William Burns, the CIA director at the time, according to a person familiar with that discussion. Sheikh Mohammed told Burns that, during the phone call, he had spoken to Netanyahu about a looming threat of violence in the West Bank or Gaza carried out by Hamas.

All of the people the New York Times spoke to insisted on anonymity to divulge details of sensitive discussions.

Netanyahu was not the only Israeli leader to overlook warning signs in the lead-up to the Hamas-led attack Oct. 7, 2023. Israeli security leaders repeatedly downplayed other signs that Hamas was gearing up for an assault, which were abundant at the time.

The Israeli military even obtained a Hamas battle plan in 2022, but military leaders dismissed it as unrealistic. The plan, which the military gave the code name “Jericho Wall,” turned out to be the blueprint for the Oct. 7 attacks.

In the years before the attacks, Israeli military and intelligence officials had concluded that Hamas was incapable of carrying out a major attack on Israel, and that Yahya Sinwar, the group’s leader in Gaza, was more interested in governing the enclave than fighting another war with Israel.

Netanyahu thought that Israel had deterred Hamas from waging war, according to an Israeli state ombudsperson report about government decision-making before the October attack. He instructed Israeli military and intelligence bodies to pursue a policy of “postponing conflicts” and “preserving Hamas as an effective, restrained, and restraining governing authority,” the report said.

The phone call and the warning from Sheikh Mohammed are not mentioned in any of the internal investigations conducted by the military, intelligence agencies, or other entities into the causes of the severe Israeli security failures leading up to and including Oct. 7, according to the five former senior Israeli officials. The five officials were involved in the assessments, which have not been released in full.

Late next month, Israelis will vote in their first national election since the Oct. 7 attacks, and the race for parliamentary seats in the highly polarized country is shaping up to be extremely tight. Not only is Netanyahu’s political future at stake, but many Israelis also see the election as fateful for the future of their shaken country.

The Haaretz report punched a hole in Netanyahu’s argument that Israel’s military and intelligence services were to blame for the intelligence failures leading to the Oct. 7 attacks. He and his allies have blocked efforts by Israeli lawmakers to set up a state commission of inquiry into the security breakdowns that preceded the attacks, saying it would not uncover the truth.

Earlier this month, Netanyahu’s opponents in the campaign issued a joint statement saying that the Haaretz report about the September 2023 warning “joins a series of revelations concerning Netanyahu’s failures” and “once again underscores why Netanyahu is fighting for his life — to thwart the establishment of a state commission of inquiry and to thwart revealing the truth to the Israeli public.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

France will send troops and other military assets to Saudi Arabia to help protect critical energy sites along the Red Sea that have come under fire from the Iran-backed Houthi militia in Yemen, the French president said Thursday.

France will send “soldiers, radars, and defense systems” to help secure energy infrastructure in the coastal city of Yanbu, according to an agreement the two countries sealed Thursday, President Emmanuel Macron said in an interview on public broadcaster France 2. “Not to engage in any conflicts but to protect this site,” Macron said.

He did not rule out the possibility that additional military assistance might be provided as the situation evolves.

Macron framed the move as one part of efforts that France is making to ensure energy security and fight for lower gas prices at home amid the war started by the United States and Israel with Iran more than six months ago. That conflict has left the Strait of Hormuz, a key international waterway for oil and gas, effectively blockaded.

In recent weeks, the Iran-allied Houthi militia has repeatedly attacked Saudi Arabia, threatening its ability to export oil from Red Sea ports. The French president’s pledge came after what appeared to be one of the largest such attacks since the long-running conflict spiraled back into war.

The Saudi-led military coalition in Yemen said Thursday that it had shot down six ballistic missiles aimed at Yanbu and Taif, another Saudi city. Saudi authorities issued alerts Thursday warning of potential attacks in cities across the kingdom.

For more than a decade, Yemen’s civil war has pitted the Houthis, a Shiite Muslim group aligned with Iran, against the internationally recognized government backed by Saudi Arabia. A truce was reached in 2022, but the conflict recently reignited, opening a second front in the Middle East after the United States and Israel attacked Iran. The Houthis have accused the Saudis of launching hundreds of strikes in the renewed fighting.

The Houthis captured the strategic port of Mokha from the Saudi-backed government earlier this month, giving them control of Yemen’s west coast and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden, a route that Saudi Arabia has relied on to move oil while the Strait of Hormuz is choked.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.