Superfast jet-powered drones, the Russian weapon Ukraine is not ready for
With speeds of up to 370 miles per hour and a 90-kilogram payload, these attack vehicles, mass-produced by Moscow, bypass Ukrainian defense systems and devastate cities such as Kyiv
The direction of a war is sometimes more closely related to initiative than to combat. Ukraine is a good example. On paper, Russia’s numerical superiority should have ended the conflict quickly, but creativity and the element of surprise have allowed Kyiv to hold its ground. This is not always the case, though. Lately there is a growing sense that Ukrainian interceptors are struggling to deal with Russia’s jet-powered drones. According to data from the Ukrainian Air Force, four out of every 10 attack vehicles of this type — capable of speeds of up to 370 miles per hour and carrying a 90-kilogram explosive payload — reach their target successfully. The defensive gap is large. One of these aircraft struck a shopping center in Kryvyi Rih on August 21 after a first drone hit its warehouses a few minutes earlier. Sixteen people were killed.
The technical advance of Russia’s military industry is indisputable. Factories in the Alabuga economic zone in Tatarstan are mass-producing these high-speed jet drones — far faster than piston-engine aircraft — designed to evade Ukraine’s multiple layers of air defense. According to Ukrainian intelligence figures cited by Reuters, Russia now manufactures around 3,000 of these attack vehicles a month.
This inventory matches the upward curve recently outlined by Ukrainian Air Force spokesman Yuriy Ignat: according to the colonel, the invading army launched 350 jet-powered bomber aircraft in June, 1,500 in July, and 2,800 in August. Russia’s offensive with these missile-like drones has put Kyiv squarely in the crosshairs. According to a Reuters map based on August figures, the central region recorded the highest number of attacks with these projectiles last month (478). Four and a half years after the start of the bloody offensive, Russia’s latest escalation is making the capital look like some of the cities located right on the front lines in the eastern part of the country.
“The first of these kamikaze drones was used on Ukrainian territory in January 2024,” Ukrainian military analyst Oleksandr Kovalenko writes in a message exchange. “Over two years these means of destruction were modernized taking the enemy’s needs into account, and the conditions were created for their mass production.” According to the analyst, “effective” interception of these attack aircraft requires the use of short-range missiles, man-portable air-defense systems, or air-combat systems. “However, these resources are scarce and are not enough to cover the entire airspace,” Kovalenko adds.
That is why a well-known Ukrainian military officer, Maksym Zhorin, deputy commander of the 3rd Assault Brigade and formerly of the Azov Battalion, wrote on a social network last Friday that Ukraine had lost the initiative. “In short: we have neither those drones nor the means to counter them,” he said.
“In 2026, Russia expanded production of these drones faster than Ukraine developed means to counter them,” Kovalenko explains. “That does not mean the problem can’t be solved, but it will take time, and Russia is taking advantage of the opportunity to strike while Ukraine lacks these countermeasures in sufficient quantities.” Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has said that 60 local companies are racing to develop interceptors that can hunt down these aircraft.
The challenge for Kyiv is daunting. While the first Geran-model drones, based on Iran’s Shahed, could fly at about 110–125 miles per hour, the spearhead of the current Russian offensive, the Geran 5, can reach 370 miles per hour. In statistical terms the Russian qualitative leap is clear: with the older attack aircraft, Ukraine’s interception rate was around 90%. Even mobile artillery units could detect that type of drone several miles away and move to neutralize it. With the jet-powered craft, Ukrainian defense systems barely reach a 60% shoot-down rate.
Speed is the key, achieved by engines that use air and combustion to fly. Russia’s industry has designed a projectile with a tubular body similar to a cruise missile and straight wings — unlike the delta wings of earlier models. It incorporates improved target-fixing systems, aided by artificial intelligence, and features to avoid interception through jamming. The most advanced model has a range of roughly 620 miles.
Beyond the scale of Russian production, Kyiv has denounced that the aerial vehicles devastating Ukrainian cities today include — as earlier models did — foreign parts in their assembly. The intelligence service of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry (GUR) has dissected the Geran 5. Among its components are the Telefly turbofan engine, made in China; nine parts of U.S. origin — some produced by Texas Instruments, already familiar to Ukraine’s sanctions department — and even a receiver board for a satellite navigation system manufactured in Germany.
There is a caveat to the success of these drones: their cost (around $100,000–$150,000) is higher than that of the early Shahed-type drones, so production cannot scale up as much as the Kremlin would like. Last June, General Oleksandr Syrskyi, then commander of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, said Moscow planned for 50% of its drone inventory to be models with jet engines.
If the gamble pays off, Russia would first gain a comparative advantage over cruise missiles well-known to the Ukrainian public such as the Kh-101 or the Kalibr, which costs around $2.3 million per unit. In addition, mass-producing these devices, which are halfway between a drone and a missile, allows Russia to reserve ballistic missiles — and thus bulk up those arsenals — for more complex strategic targets.
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