Ukraine has successfully tested another interceptor designed to counter Russia’s increasingly common jet-powered Geran attack drones, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on 15 September.

The test comes as Russia rapidly expands the use of faster jet-powered Gerans, creating a new problem for Ukraine’s air defenses: these drones give defenders less time to detect and engage them while allowing Russia to maintain large-scale attacks. A successful interceptor could give Ukraine a cheaper, scalable way to counter that threat without relying as heavily on scarce high-end air-defense missiles.

Zelenskyy said Commander-in-Chief Mykhailo Drapatyi reported the successful test, during which the new interceptor struck a Russian Geran drone.

The system still reportedly needs further work, including improvements to some aspects of its control. But the successful test marks another step in Ukraine’s effort to develop a new layer of air defenses against Russia’s faster drones.

Russia is making its drone attacks faster and larger

Russia has sharply expanded its use of jet-powered Gerans in recent months, adding a faster and more difficult-to-intercept threat to its large-scale drone campaign.

Geran is Russia’s designation for its domestically produced Shahed-derived attack drones, with newer jet-powered variants representing a major upgrade over the earlier propeller-driven models.

Zelenskyy recently said Russia launched around 2,100 drones against Ukraine last week, alongside nearly 1,700 guided aerial bombs and 78 missiles. The attacks have increasingly targeted energy facilities, railway infrastructure, businesses, and residential areas.

The newer Gerans are faster than earlier Shahed-derived drones and can reach targets deep inside Ukraine. Their speed gives Ukrainian air defenses less time to detect, track, and engage them.

Russia has also changed how it uses its drones. Rather than concentrating attacks almost exclusively overnight, Russian forces have increasingly launched waves during the day as well, keeping Ukrainian cities under repeated air-raid alerts.

The result is a growing challenge not only of interception, but of scale. Ukraine must defend a large territory against increasingly large drone barrages while preserving more sophisticated air-defense missiles for ballistic missiles and other threats.

Ukraine is building a new layer of air defense

Ukraine has already been racing to develop such systems. In late August, Defense Minister Yevhen Khmara said four potential interceptor systems capable of shooting down jet-powered Gerans had undergone field testing. Ukraine was aiming to bring them to the required level and eventually produce thousands of units.

Today’s announcement shows that effort continues to produce concrete results.

Ukraine is also expanding other parts of its counter-drone network. Zelenskyy said the country is increasing purchases of electronic warfare equipment and reorganizing mobile fire groups and air-defense positions.

The goal is to build enough layers to cope with Russia’s evolving drone campaign: electronic warfare, mobile fire teams, traditional air defenses, and increasingly specialized interceptors.

Russia is making its drones faster and launching them at greater scale. Ukraine’s response is now moving beyond adapting existing defenses toward developing weapons specifically designed to catch them.

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.

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.