Russia has fielded a new generation of cheap, jet-powered drones and cruise missiles faster than Ukraine or the US can build defenses against them, according to The Wall Street Journal. The weapons run on Chinese parts that slip past Western sanctions, and they are already getting through air defenses designed to stop slower drones. Analysts say the West underestimated how fast Moscow could move from an idea to a full assembly line.

Russia now leans on cheap, mass-produced drones to swamp Ukraine's air defenses with sheer numbers night after night, and its factories keep growing to keep the attacks coming. The bigger lesson reaches past this war: in a long fight, cheap weapons in large numbers can beat a small stock of expensive ones.

A cheap weapon that gets past Ukraine's defenses

Ukraine had learned to shoot down the Iran-designed Shahed drones Russia was launching. Then Moscow moved the goalposts. The newest model, the Geran-5, looks more like a missile than a drone—Mike Monnik, head of the drone-threat firm DroneSec, called it "essentially a poor-man's cruise missile," and it forced a rewrite of Ukraine's counter-drone playbook. The Geran-5 and the Banderol cruise missiles are each estimated to cost about $100,000. A US Tomahawk costs more than $2 million.

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Built fast, with China's help

Moscow needed only about two years to take each weapon from the drawing board to the battlefield, reworking earlier designs, testing them in combat, and pushing them into serial production. Ukrainian assessments, echoed by the drone-intelligence firm DroneSec, trace the leap to Chinese parts—the turbojet engines, the navigation computers, the radios—most of them off-the-shelf, dual-use gear anyone can buy. The weapons are aimed at Ukrainian cities and infrastructure—a Banderol struck a residential area of Kharkiv in July.

An expensive problem for the West

US forces and NATO have knocked down cheap drones with costly Patriot interceptors and fighter jets, often firing several interceptors at a single weapon. Western firms that built interceptors for slow drones are now scrambling to make faster, jet-powered ones. Kateryna Bondar of the Center for Strategic and International Studies said the West keeps underestimating how fast Russia turns experiments into production, and that Kyiv had years of warning yet was still caught off guard.

"I'm surprised everyone is surprised," she said.

At NATO's July summit in Ankara, members committed more than $40 billion to counter-drone defenses over the coming five years.

A Ukrainian company has unveiled a homegrown strike drone built to fly deep behind Russian lines, Militarnyi reported on 13 September. Octava Defence showed the new long-range aircraft—a bigger version of a drone already used in combat—at the MSPO 2026 defense expo in Kielce, Poland. The company says the smaller drone is built to keep working in electronic warfare conditions without a reliable satellite signal.

Russian jamming is one of the biggest obstacles to Ukrainian strikes deep in the rear, which is why Ukrainian makers keep building guidance that does not depend on satellite signals.

The workhorse is already in the fight

The base FLYCAT, presented in January 2026 by another Ukrainian firm, Venator Technologies, is a strike drone Ukrainian forces have used in combat since March. An improved model went into action in July and August and is now undergoing codification—entry into Ukraine's official weapons register.

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The company says the updated drone can fly more than 80 km, stay in the air for an hour, and carry a warhead weighing up to 3.7 kg. It is built to hunt armored vehicles, artillery, radars, and air-defense systems, as well as lighter shelters and communications gear. It can pair with a scout drone that finds the target and passes the coordinates. Several FLYCATs can also strike a single target together or hit multiple targets at once.

Nearly everything on it is built in Ukraine—the communications, navigation, guidance, and warhead. Only the engines come from abroad. Its two cameras—day-only or day-and-night—feed a terminal-guidance module that picks out the target from 2,000 m as it closes in.

The one that reaches deeper

The FLYCAT SL is a bigger, longer-range version, and it is still in testing. The company says it is built to fly more than 200 km, stay airborne for over two and a half hours, and carry a heavier load of up to 7 kg.

That range is meant to let it go after command posts, armored vehicles, artillery, and air defenses far behind the front line.