Ukraine's former top general, now its ambassador to Britain, says Russia's jet-powered Geran drone is a glimpse of where war is heading, where high technology keeps getting cheaper. Valerii Zaluzhnyi told a London defense-technology showcase that an expensive Cold War missile had evolved into a cheap weapon that can be fired in bulk, Interfax-Ukraine reports.

During his tenure as Commander-in-Chief, Zaluzhnyi acknowledged that it had been a mistake to believe that the sheer number of casualties inflicted on Russia could bring the war to a halt, per UkrInform. By 2025, he had turned that lesson into a doctrine. Given Ukraine’s population, he argued, it cannot win a war of attrition and can wage only a high-tech war of survival. His doctrine was later echoed by former minister Mykhailo Fedorov and the current Yevhen Khmara.

The drone has become a missile in all but name, Zaluzhnyi said, and that is the point. Now, such missiles are affordable to any side, not only to wealthy countries.

The jet Geran flips the economics

The danger such cheap weapons pose is financial as much as military: if a country spends far more on each interceptor than the enemy spends on each target, its defense cannot scale, and the rich risk losing to the poor, Zaluzhnyi believes.

Future wars, he argued, will be decided less by who fields the more sophisticated systems than by who can turn them out cheaply and in volume.

Ukraine needs its own component base

Ukraine has already built much of a modern defense industry on exactly that logic, Zaluzhnyi continued, with combat driving its makers to develop the unmanned systems that now do much of the killing on the ground.

"No other country can offer more relevant experience for developing new weapons, modernizing them, and the ways of using them," he said.

The bottleneck, he added, is components: much of the parts base for Ukrainian weapons still sits abroad, capping how far production can scale and modernize.

He urged partners to pour long-term private investment into Ukrainian defense production, framing it as a two-way deal. Backing Ukraine's makers, he argued, both weakens Russia and builds the partners' own defenses, with Ukraine's battlefield experience as the foundation for weapons fit for the wars to come.

Ukraine is getting closer to home-built interceptors designed to hunt down Russia's fast jet Gerans. Those interceptors have shown very positive early results, and the harder job now is producing enough of them to match the speed at which Ukraine downs the slower drones, Serhii Bratchuk, spokesperson for the Ukrainian Volunteer Army, said on Radio NV.

The jet-powered Geran is the problem Ukraine has been racing to solve. It flies too fast for the mobile gun teams and light interceptors that bring down the slower, piston-engine version. Alongside ballistic missiles, those drones have already done strategic damage: they helped Russia destroy about 90 percent of Ukraine's modern warehouse capacity.

A working interceptor changes that only if Ukraine can field it in numbers, which is why Bratchuk framed the fight ahead as one of production rather than invention.

Interceptors show early promise

However, Bratchuk would not put a date on their release, saying that "right now, our developers are testing our jet interceptor drones."

"We can't talk about details, but from what I know and what I see, the results are very positive, and we are counting on them," he shared.

Four Ukrainian companies already have interceptor drones in field trials, and President Zelenskyy has said that 67 firms in all are working to shoot down the jet drones en masse.

Production must catch up

Ukraine has to lift jet-drone interception to the level it has reached against the conventional Gerans, Bratchuk said, the ones Ukrainians nickname "mopeds" for their buzzing engines. Only then, he argued, can Ukraine say it is closing the sky to the fast drones as it has to the slow ones.

Russia keeps firing both types, in the south and elsewhere, and often at night, precisely to overload Ukraine's air defenses.

Russia scales, and Ukraine must too

Bratchuk gave Russia its due on the one thing that will decide this contest, its ability to turn out weapons in volume.

"Credit to the Russians. They know how to scale," he said.

Ukraine has to learn the same lesson, he argued, and he believes it can, having pulled off fast build-ups before.

"There are examples where we really do learn fast and scale up the relevant processes. So when it comes to jet interceptor drones, we very much want that scaling," he added.