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.

Ukraine has not had enough of the right weapons to shoot down Russia's jet-powered drones, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said at a press conference with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in Calgary on 10 September. He put the remaining obstacles at time and money rather than engineering, and used the appearance to press partners for joint production. Russia attacks Ukrainian cities with drones every night, and the defense against the fastest of them is still being built.

"We did not have enough means"

Zelenskyy was answering a question about the Russian drone found at Leipzig airport in Germany and the drone that delayed his own flight out of Moldova.

"We have to be very frank: we did not have enough means to destroy all these fast drones," he said. "Yes, we are on the way, more than 60 companies are already working on this. Yes, we will get a result, but it takes time."

Three days earlier, he noted that only three to five of the firms show real results.

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The bottleneck is money

He then went past the engineering.The problem is not only technology, he said, but the funding to build thousands of interceptors every single day.

That arithmetic sends Ukraine abroad with its blueprints. 

"That is why we talk about joint production, about production lines in one country or another," Zelenskyy said.

Russia now builds about 3,000 jet-powered drones a month, by Ukrainian military intelligence's count, and fired some 800 of them in four days at the end of August. They fly faster than propeller Shaheds and are harder to bring down, which has stretched air raid alerts nationwide. Ukraine's Air Force cannot yet rely on usual interceptor drones against them.

One drone, of the kind that turned up at Leipzig or crossed Moldova, is not a problem for Ukraine, Zelenskyy said. Thousands of fast drones a day are.

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What a night without enough interceptors looks like

The same night, Russia sent 161 long-range attack drones at Ukraine, decoys among them, along with a cruise missile.That is an ordinary night now, and its damage spreads thin across the map instead of landing in one place.

A Russian strike set a nine-story apartment block alight in Kyiv, burning the facade up to the fifth floor and a flat on the second. Firefighters carried seven people out and handed seven more to medics. Russian drones injured eight people in the capital overnight. 

North of the city, Russia burned warehouses in the Bucha district, then struck the same site again while the crews were still dousing the flames. 

In Dnipro, the drones kept coming back, more than ten times from the evening on, damaging a plant and a row of garages and injuring seven people.

Farther out, Russia injured a mother and her son in Zaporizhzhia and damaged a plant in Zhytomyr Oblast, and the waves ran west far enough that NATO jets went up over Romania.