Ukrainians have spent the past day flooding social media with footage of their army’s large-scale drone attack on Moscow. To many, the images of black smoke billowing over the Russian capital are proof that Ukraine is now able to respond in kind to Russia’s air assaults — or, as President Volodymyr Zelensky put it, “If Ukraine burns, then your Moscow will burn as well.”

But the celebrations over Thursday’s attack obscure a more complicated reality. However effective its drone arsenal may be, Ukraine still lacks the weapon that has long underpinned Russia’s most devastating air attacks: ballistic missiles.

Such missiles carry hundreds of pounds of explosives — many times the payload of drones — and their speed makes them hard to intercept, helping to inflict damage far beyond what drones alone can achieve.

Time and again, Russia’s barrages of ballistic missiles have overwhelmed Ukraine’s air defenses, and they wreaked havoc on the country’s energy grid during a brutally cold winter. With Russian forces largely stalled on the battlefield, their air war against Ukrainian cities makes for the largest mismatch in the conflict now and the biggest source of military pressure on Ukraine.

Conscious of the disadvantage, Ukrainian officials have said in recent weeks that the country is pushing hard to develop ballistic missiles domestically. Kyiv views them as essential to increase pressure on Moscow and, perhaps, to force it toward negotiations.

“Ukrainian ballistic capability will fundamentally change the nature of this war,” the Ukrainian defense minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, told Ukrainian television this week. “We are not overhyping expectations, but we can say that Ukrainian ballistic missiles will exist and will be used against Russia.”

Defense experts caution that developing ballistic missiles is far more complex than making drones. Ukraine has focused much more on mass-producing low-cost, “good enough” weapons that have helped keep its outnumbered military in the fight.

“Ukraine still lags behind in the technology area, and it’s going to take time to develop them domestically,” said Olena Kryzhanivska, a defense fellow at the Canadian Global Affairs Institute. “A lot of time. A lot of resources.”

Still, Ukrainian defense companies are pressing ahead. One of them, Fire Point Rocket Technology, which is behind many of the drones striking Russia, says it is developing two ballistic missiles. Several other Ukrainian companies have announced partnerships with European missile makers in what appears to be an effort to tap Western technology to accelerate Ukraine’s missile program.

Serhii Honcharov, executive director of the National Association of Ukrainian Defense Industries, said that Ukraine did not aim to produce state-of-the-art ballistic missiles but rather a version that could be built quickly and relatively cheaply.

Ukraine is not starting from scratch. During the Soviet era, the country was an important industrial base for missile systems. The central-eastern city of Dnipro was long nicknamed “Rocket City” for its facilities developing missiles.

Much of this defense industrial capacity was shelved after the fall of the Soviet Union, leaving Ukraine with few powerful weapons to counter Russia’s invasion decades later.

The country quickly depleted its limited stocks of Soviet-era Tochka ballistic missiles, Mr. Honcharov said. The only state-backed program to develop a new ballistic missile, the 1KR1 Sapsan, has dragged on for years without producing concrete results.

Trying to compensate for this, Ukraine lobbied partner nations for ballistic missiles. The United States supplied short-range ballistic missiles known as Army Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMS. But Kyiv received only a limited number and has at times been restricted in how it can use the missiles against Russia because of Washington’s fears of escalation.

All the while, Russia has significantly increased production of its own ballistic missiles, leading to attacks that have grown in scale month after month.

So far this year, Russia has launched an average of 74 ballistic missiles each month, with roughly two-thirds breaking through Ukraine’s air defenses, according Ukrainian Air Force data analyzed by The New York Times.

In 2023, the monthly average was six. It rose to 28 in 2024 and 49 in 2025, according to the data.

“All these developments pushed Ukraine to find some domestic solutions to these problems,” said Ms. Kryzhanivska, the defense analyst, who writes a newsletter tracking Ukrainian arms development.

The first such response was the development of drones capable of flying hundreds of miles and striking deep inside Russia. These drones have been used to hit oil facilities, the main source of revenue for the Kremlin’s war effort, including during Thursday’s attack on Moscow.

They have also targeted plants producing components for the very ballistic missiles that Russia lobs at Ukraine — what Mr. Honcharov described as a strategy “to shoot the archer, not the arrow.”

But Ukrainian officials have long acknowledged that, to inflict serious damage and perhaps alter Russia’s political calculations, they need to turn to ballistic missiles.

The most advanced effort is a program by Fire Point to develop a short-range ballistic missile called FP-7 and a long-range version called FP-9. Both models were showcased at a major defense exhibition in Paris this week. Mr. Zelensky told Western leaders on Thursday that the company was “moving toward” production.

Denys Shtilerman, an owner of Fire Point, said in an interview with The Times on Friday in Paris that the FP-7 was “completely ready” and that he expected a flight test of the FP-9 this summer.

How effective these systems will prove, however, remains to be seen.

Fire Point also produces cruise missiles, and the company’s experience with those weapons, which entered combat last year, warrants caution, Ms. Kryzhanivska said.

The missiles have shown “low effectiveness,” she said, possibly because of accuracy problems. “The results that we see are not the ones” that Ukraine would like to have, Ms. Kryzhanivska added.

To improve the sophistication of their weapons, Fire Point and other companies recently signed cooperation agreements with major European weapon manufacturers that could give them access to advanced technologies such as guidance systems that help detect a target.

Dmytro Kuleba, a former foreign affairs minister in Ukraine, told New Voice Ukraine, a news outlet, that if Ukraine were to develop a ballistic missile program that would “truly pose a threat to Moscow and major Russian cities,” Mr. Putin would be forced “to make the next step.”

The question is what this next step would be.

The idea is that ballistic missile strikes would break the sense of insulation from the war that Moscow has tried to maintain for its population and would erode the Kremlin’s ability to justify a continuation of the fighting.

But escalation is another possibility, as President Vladimir V. Putin engages in nuclear saber-rattling from time to time.

“The only unresolved question of our war is whether Fire Point’s ballistic missiles will reach Moscow, and then whether Putin will dare to use nuclear weapons,” Mr. Kuleba said.

Nicholas Kulish, Kim Barker and Olha Konovalova contributed reporting.