Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned airlines, insurers, and other aviation stakeholders on 1 September that Russian airspace is becoming increasingly dangerous as Ukrainian drones operate deeper inside the country.

The warning comes as Ukraine has increasingly carried out long-range drone strikes deep inside Russia, targeting military, energy, industrial, and other infrastructure. Russian authorities have repeatedly reported temporary airport closures and flight disruptions during drone attacks as part of air defense measures.

“We want to warn every airline that uses Russian airspace, every insurer, and everyone who still uses Russia’s key airports: Russian airspace is becoming completely unsafe,” Zelenskyy said.

“Russian airspace will effectively be closing”

Zelenskyy said Ukraine does not intend to threaten civilian aviation or civilian aircraft, but warned that the growing presence of drones over Russia means airlines must account for the risks.

“We in Ukraine do not want innocent lives to be lost. That is why we are warning our partners: the safe days in Russia’s skies are over,” he said.

Zelenskyy accused Russian authorities of failing to properly inform airlines about the risks, saying they have not adequately communicated the growing danger posed by drones in Russian airspace.

“Although the Russian authorities are not properly informing people about this, Russian airspace will effectively be closing,” Zelenskyy said, arguing that Russia’s war against Ukraine is making its own airspace unsafe.

Zelenskyy warned that the growing scale of Ukrainian drone operations over Russia will have to be factored into aviation risks. “There will simply be drones in Russia’s skies on a scale that has to be taken into account,” he said.

He called on foreign ambassadors in Ukraine and Russia to relay the warning to their governments, and said Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry and other institutions would provide international organizations with information about the risks to Russian airspace.

“Drone-infested skies are no place for civilian aviation,” Zelenskyy said.

Ukraine closed its skies in 2022. Russia has kept flying

The warning highlights a stark difference between the two countries. Ukraine has kept its airspace closed to civilian aviation since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022. 

The risk is familiar to Ukraine. Russian forces have repeatedly attacked Ukrainian airports and aviation infrastructure during the full-scale invasion, making the continued operation of civilian aviation impossible.

Russia is also responsible for the 2014 downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 over occupied eastern Ukraine, which killed all 298 people aboard, showing the danger Russia’s military activities can pose to civilian aviation. 

Russia, meanwhile, has continued operating major airports and regular passenger flights despite Ukrainian drones increasingly reaching deep into its territory. EASA has warned that Russian air defenses responding to Ukrainian drone and missile attacks could pose risks to civilian aircraft, including through misidentification, particularly around major airports.

Russian airports increasingly disrupted by Ukrainian drones

Russian authorities have repeatedly restricted or suspended flights at Moscow and other airports during Ukrainian drone attacks. The disruptions have generally come as Russia activates air defenses against drones targeting military, energy, industrial, and logistics infrastructure.

Russia has also moved toward broader restrictions on civilian aviation. In June, Russia imposed new restrictions on light aircraft around Moscow and neighboring regions, while regular passenger and charter flights remained exempt.

The result is a growing disruption to Russian aviation even as Moscow continues to keep its main passenger airspace open: Ukrainian drones are not being used to target civilian aircraft, but their increasing presence is making normal aviation operations more difficult and forcing Russia to restrict or suspend flights during attacks.

Russia is sending jet-powered drones against Ukrainian cities in growing numbers—no longer only the Iranian Shahed-238 it fields as the Geran-3, but the newer, faster Geran-4 and Geran-5. The fear everyone voices is their speed, but speed breaks the cheap layer, not the missiles.

Ukraine's expensive air-defense missiles already routinely shoot down cruise missiles, and to them, a fast drone is just one more target. The strain falls on the cheap layer instead—the interceptor drones Ukraine built to down thousands of Shaheds a month for a few thousand dollars each, a fraction of a missile's price.

Those were designed to catch slow drones, and against jet speed, they struggle. If that layer breaks, the cost of defending Ukraine's skies climbs—and the Defense Ministry has already started paying to keep it from breaking.

The shift is not marginal, and it continues to accelerate. Russia had sent more than 2,500 jet-powered Shaheds against Ukraine by 30 August, against roughly 1,500 in July, informal presidential adviser Serhii "Flash" Beskrestnov wrote—the drones, he noted, were launched practically straight from the factory. Russia fired roughly 1,400 jet-powered drones since the start of 2026 to June, and air defenses recorded about 180 in all of 2025, Colonel Oleksandr Zaruba of Ukraine's State Research Institute said.

A record month, and the weapon built to beat it

Ukrainian interceptor drones destroyed more than 33,000 Russian drones of all types in March 2026—roughly double the February total and a record for the cheapest layer of Ukraine's air defense, then-Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said.

Russia sent Shaheds—cheap, propeller-driven, long-range, lumbering in at about 185 kilometers per hour (115 mph)—in mass raids meant to swamp Ukraine's defenses. Ukraine adapted, with mobile fire teams, electronic warfare, and layered engagement, then added interceptor drones that destroy incoming drones for a fraction of a surface-to-air missile's cost.

As Ukraine got better at catching propeller drones, Russia reached for speed—jet-powered versions that fly more than three times faster than the Shaheds Ukraine spent three years learning to intercept.

By August, Ukraine's military intelligence said Russia had stopped building the Geran-3 and shifted to the newer jets, producing roughly 3,000 of them a month.

Conventional air defense already handles this

The worry centers on velocity: a jet drone flies several times faster than a propeller-driven or electric one, reducing the time defenders have to detect, identify, and hit it. But the fear aims at the wrong place, said Oleksii Kolesnyk, director of the Ukrainian firm Reactive Drones.

"A jet-powered UAV is, in many ways, similar to a cruise missile. For conventional air defense, jet-powered drones are simply another aerial target," he told Euromaidan Press.

Ukraine's surface-to-air systems routinely intercept cruise missiles. A fast drone is standard work for them—though Zelenskyy said in late August that the jets are the hardest to intercept, and that combat aircraft now mainly protect against them.

The strain lands on the interceptor drones

An interceptor drone, unlike a ground-launched missile, has to chase its target down and ram it, which worked against slow Shaheds. Against something near cruise-missile speed, the geometry breaks.

The problem exists almost only for interceptor drones, Kolesnyk said—they were never designed for these speeds. At jet velocities, guidance, target tracking, and the final homing onto the target all hit technical ceilings, and faster interceptors alone will not fix it.

"New technical solutions will be needed," he said.

Interceptor drones are why Ukraine can answer mass raids without firing a missile worth hundreds of thousands of dollars at each incoming drone. Break that math, and the affordability of Ukraine's whole air defense shifts.

The Defense Ministry's answer

Through the defense-tech accelerator Brave1, Ukraine backed 12 technologies under the EU4UA Defence Tech grant program, offering up to €150,000 each for high-speed interceptors capable of reaching 450 kilometers per hour (about 280 mph) or more.

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That push has since produced candidates. By late August, Ukraine had four interceptor systems built to run down the jets, all already in field testing, Defense Minister Yevhenii Khmara said, and the Alexa Spatium had entered service. Ukraine now wants to bring them up to standard and build them in the thousands.

Not a revolution, but an evolution with a long history

Colonel Oleksandr Saienko, a former Ukrainian brigade commander, rejected the idea that any of this is new.

"This is better described as an evolution of unmanned systems rather than a completely new stage of warfare," he said.

Jet drones long predate this war. "The first jet-powered UAVs appeared back in the 1970s," he said, pointing to Soviet reconnaissance drones beginning with the Tu-143 and continuing with the Tu-141 and Tu-243—platforms Ukraine itself later flew in the Donbas war and the full-scale invasion. What has changed is scale, and the problem the drones now solve: arriving before the defender can react.

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Saienko's warning points past the engine.

"The decisive advantage will not belong to whoever simply has a jet engine. It will belong to whoever integrates these platforms into an effective reconnaissance-strike system, protects them against electronic warfare, manufactures them at scale, and keeps costs manageable," he said.

His frame is the kill chain—detect, identify, decide, engage—and every gain in speed compresses that cycle. "If a target is flying at 500 to 700 kilometers per hour, even a delay of several dozen seconds may make interception impossible," he said, adding: "Radars must see sooner, command systems must classify automatically, and operators get less time—until automation becomes a requirement."

Why hasn't every drone gone jet-powered

Speed solves one problem and creates several. "They are simply another category of strike UAV," Kolesnyk said.

Compact turbojets are expensive and hard to source for smaller drones. Bigger airframes have to be reinforced to take the loads and vibration, which adds weight and cost. Fuel burn climbs far above that of the electric or piston drones built for endurance, and higher speed leaves less room for navigation errors.

So, jet drones fill a niche rather than taking over the whole strike fleet. "They are most effective at ranges of roughly 200 to 600 kilometers," Kolesnyk said—fast strikes on high-value or time-sensitive targets, where getting there quickly matters more than flying cheaply or far.

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Ukraine didn't drop first-person-view (FPV) drones when fiber-optic ones arrived, and jam-resistant drones didn't replace the rest. Each capability added a layer rather than erasing the previous one. Saienko expects the same. "The emergence of jet aviation did not eliminate piston-engine aircraft. The same principle applies," he said. Cheap propeller drones are ideal for mass attacks, while jet platforms handle speed.

The next fight is over reaction time

Jet drones force defenders to decide faster, and that is the harder demand. A slow propeller drone is a wasteful target for an expensive missile. A cruise missile demands an instant answer. A jet drone sits in between—and an operator has to sort which weapon meets which target in seconds, while holding scarce interceptors back for the worst threats. Every misjudgment costs something.

"The challenge is no longer only interception—it is detecting, identifying, and assigning the target quickly enough," Saienko said.

Both experts reach the same conclusion from opposite ends: Kolesnyk through the technical limits of the interceptor drone, Saienko through the entire defensive network. Both land on automation—AI-driven target recognition, distributed sensors, and fast data sharing to shrink the gap between spotting a target and hitting it. The winner won't necessarily fly the fastest aircraft. It will process information faster than its opponent.

Over four days at the end of August, Russia fired about 800 jet drones at Ukraine, Ukraine's president said—a type most of Ukraine's cheap interceptors still cannot catch. And the problem won't stay Ukraine's alone. Drones from the same broad Shahed family have already strayed into NATO airspace and turned up in other wars. The interception race Ukraine is running now is one everyone will eventually run.

Ukraine's Armed Forces are forming the 446th Separate Unmanned Systems Brigade, which is recruiting servicemembers while formation continues, MilitaryLand reported. The new unit joins a force that hit 32,485 Russian personnel over the summer alone, the Unmanned Systems Forces (SBS) reported on 1 September.

Ukraine is facing a shortage of military personnel, yet the Armed Forces are forming their second separate unmanned systems brigade this year. The force's commander wants unmanned systems covering the entire front at tactical, operational, and strategic depths.

What is known about the 446th Brigade

Military personnel from other units can apply for a transfer through Army+, according to MilitaryLand.

The first of the two was the 445th Separate Unmanned Systems Brigade Chata, whose formation became known in July. Both units are recruiting for posts running from operators of ground robots, FPV, bomber, and interceptor drones to psychological-support officers, analysts, and accountants, Militarnyi reported.

The deployment of such units is part of the Ukrainian Armed Forces' broader effort to increase the number of unmanned systems in the military. Ukrainian drones accounted for about 96% of Russian casualties in March—33,988 of roughly 35,000 killed or severely wounded—Zelenskyy said in April.

Why Ukraine is turning to drones

The expansion of unmanned systems brigades is part of a broader effort initiated by Robert Brovdi, callsign Madyar, to increase the role of the SBS within Ukraine's Defense Forces, Militarnyi notes.

Brovdi told Reuters in June that he wants to raise the drone forces from about 2.5% of Ukraine's armed forces to 5%, a goal he first stated publicly in September 2025. At that share, the drone units accounted for roughly a third of Russian losses over the previous 12 months, according to figures the force gave Reuters, which said it could not verify them independently.

Then Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Oleksandr Syrskyi described unmanned systems as one of the key factors shaping modern warfare. Current Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Mykhailo Drapatyi stated that one of his priorities is the development and scaling of the unmanned component.

Overall, the SBS struck 58,465 targets in August, its own tally for 1–31 August shows.