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.

Russia attacked Kyiv overnight into 8 September with ballistic, cruise, and anti-ship missiles and jet-powered drones, killing two people and injuring ten, Ukrainian local authorities and the Air Force reported. Ukraine's foreign minister says Moscow launched it the moment the US peace envoys left the capital, and the country's president says the weapons were combined deliberately to cause the greatest possible harm to life. Strikes the same night reached six other regions.

The strike came as the pause expired

US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner made their first visit to Kyiv on 6 September. Ukraine halted strikes on Moscow for three days around the trip, while the Kremlin said its pause on Kyiv ran only to Monday. Nothing else stopped, and Ukraine logged impacts at 11 sites while the delegation was in Moscow.

Russia launched another massive attack on Kyiv the moment the envoys left, damaging residential areas and killing at least two people, Ukraine's Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said.

"[Russian President Putin's] ballistic missiles speak louder than his words on diplomacy. Strike after strike on residential buildings brings him no closer to winning this war—it is nothing but senseless terror," the minister wrote.

Russian forces resumed strikes on the capital after a three-day break tied to the American visit, RFE/RL's Belarus service reported.

What Russia launched

The attack ran from 18:00 on 7 September through the night, the Ukrainian Air Force reported, without giving the total number of launched ballistics. 

Russia fired Oniks anti-ship missiles, ballistic Iskander-M, S-400, and KN-23 missiles, and 32 Kh-101 cruise missiles from four of its regions and occupied Crimea, along with 166 Shahed-type drones, more than half of them jet-powered, and decoys launched from two Russian regions and occupied territory. Air defense downed or suppressed 175 targets by 08:30: two ballistic missiles, 31 cruise missiles, and 142 drones. Kyiv Oblast and Odesa Oblast were the main axes.

"It was a hard attack, which the Russians deliberately tried to calculate for the greatest possible harm to life," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said.

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Results against cruise missiles were very good, he said, while ballistics remain especially hard, and Ukraine proves that need for interceptors to its partners every day. He said he had already discussed it with the Americans and Europeans and would meet states and companies the same day about supplies and about Ukraine's FREYJA anti-ballistic system.

Ukraine has 67 companies working on interceptors, three to five with real results. 

Two dead and 13 rescued in the capital

First explosions in Kyiv came at 03:30. Fires and damage reached at least 16 locations in five districts, the Kyiv Military Administration reported. Warehouses, garages, and cars burned, fire spread from a garage to a business center, and a strike on a 26-story non-residential building wrecked structures at the 23rd floor, the State Emergency Service said. Ten people were freed from a blocked five-story block, the service said, and rescuers saved 13 in all, according to Zelenskyy. Morning drone attacks added a warehouse fire, the city said, and the night's damage forced it to reroute a series of bus, tram, and trolleybus lines.

Beyond Kyiv

Two Russian drones hit the locomotive of the Kyiv–Sumy train in the morning, which a monitoring team had stopped in time to evacuate passengers and crew without casualties, Ukrainian Railways board chairman Oleksandr Pertsovskyi said.

Outside Odesa the strike damaged pavilions at the 7th Kilometer market, the country's largest wholesale market for non-food goods, and hospitalized its 58-year-old guard, oblast head Oleh Kiper said. 

In Kharkiv two people were injured, one of them a 17-year-old, and Russian forces most often target energy sites, according to oblast head Oleh Syniehubov, who said they struck settlements across the oblast almost 800 times last week alone.

Zelenskyy said Kyiv Oblast's critical infrastructure, Zaporizhzhia, and Dnipropetrovsk Oblast were also hit.