Russia is sending jet-powered drones against Ukrainian cities in growing numbers—no longer only the Iranian Shahed-238 it fields as the Geran-3, but the newer, faster Geran-4 and Geran-5. The fear everyone voices is their speed, but speed breaks the cheap layer, not the missiles.

Ukraine's expensive air-defense missiles already routinely shoot down cruise missiles, and to them, a fast drone is just one more target. The strain falls on the cheap layer instead—the interceptor drones Ukraine built to down thousands of Shaheds a month for a few thousand dollars each, a fraction of a missile's price.

Those were designed to catch slow drones, and against jet speed, they struggle. If that layer breaks, the cost of defending Ukraine's skies climbs—and the Defense Ministry has already started paying to keep it from breaking.

The shift is not marginal, and it continues to accelerate. Russia had sent more than 2,500 jet-powered Shaheds against Ukraine by 30 August, against roughly 1,500 in July, informal presidential adviser Serhii "Flash" Beskrestnov wrote—the drones, he noted, were launched practically straight from the factory. Russia fired roughly 1,400 jet-powered drones since the start of 2026 to June, and air defenses recorded about 180 in all of 2025, Colonel Oleksandr Zaruba of Ukraine's State Research Institute said.

A record month, and the weapon built to beat it

Ukrainian interceptor drones destroyed more than 33,000 Russian drones of all types in March 2026—roughly double the February total and a record for the cheapest layer of Ukraine's air defense, then-Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said.

Russia sent Shaheds—cheap, propeller-driven, long-range, lumbering in at about 185 kilometers per hour (115 mph)—in mass raids meant to swamp Ukraine's defenses. Ukraine adapted, with mobile fire teams, electronic warfare, and layered engagement, then added interceptor drones that destroy incoming drones for a fraction of a surface-to-air missile's cost.

As Ukraine got better at catching propeller drones, Russia reached for speed—jet-powered versions that fly more than three times faster than the Shaheds Ukraine spent three years learning to intercept.

By August, Ukraine's military intelligence said Russia had stopped building the Geran-3 and shifted to the newer jets, producing roughly 3,000 of them a month.

Conventional air defense already handles this

The worry centers on velocity: a jet drone flies several times faster than a propeller-driven or electric one, reducing the time defenders have to detect, identify, and hit it. But the fear aims at the wrong place, said Oleksii Kolesnyk, director of the Ukrainian firm Reactive Drones.

"A jet-powered UAV is, in many ways, similar to a cruise missile. For conventional air defense, jet-powered drones are simply another aerial target," he told Euromaidan Press.

Ukraine's surface-to-air systems routinely intercept cruise missiles. A fast drone is standard work for them—though Zelenskyy said in late August that the jets are the hardest to intercept, and that combat aircraft now mainly protect against them.

The strain lands on the interceptor drones

An interceptor drone, unlike a ground-launched missile, has to chase its target down and ram it, which worked against slow Shaheds. Against something near cruise-missile speed, the geometry breaks.

The problem exists almost only for interceptor drones, Kolesnyk said—they were never designed for these speeds. At jet velocities, guidance, target tracking, and the final homing onto the target all hit technical ceilings, and faster interceptors alone will not fix it.

"New technical solutions will be needed," he said.

Interceptor drones are why Ukraine can answer mass raids without firing a missile worth hundreds of thousands of dollars at each incoming drone. Break that math, and the affordability of Ukraine's whole air defense shifts.

The Defense Ministry's answer

Through the defense-tech accelerator Brave1, Ukraine backed 12 technologies under the EU4UA Defence Tech grant program, offering up to €150,000 each for high-speed interceptors capable of reaching 450 kilometers per hour (about 280 mph) or more.

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That push has since produced candidates. By late August, Ukraine had four interceptor systems built to run down the jets, all already in field testing, Defense Minister Yevhenii Khmara said, and the Alexa Spatium had entered service. Ukraine now wants to bring them up to standard and build them in the thousands.

Not a revolution, but an evolution with a long history

Colonel Oleksandr Saienko, a former Ukrainian brigade commander, rejected the idea that any of this is new.

"This is better described as an evolution of unmanned systems rather than a completely new stage of warfare," he said.

Jet drones long predate this war. "The first jet-powered UAVs appeared back in the 1970s," he said, pointing to Soviet reconnaissance drones beginning with the Tu-143 and continuing with the Tu-141 and Tu-243—platforms Ukraine itself later flew in the Donbas war and the full-scale invasion. What has changed is scale, and the problem the drones now solve: arriving before the defender can react.

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Saienko's warning points past the engine.

"The decisive advantage will not belong to whoever simply has a jet engine. It will belong to whoever integrates these platforms into an effective reconnaissance-strike system, protects them against electronic warfare, manufactures them at scale, and keeps costs manageable," he said.

His frame is the kill chain—detect, identify, decide, engage—and every gain in speed compresses that cycle. "If a target is flying at 500 to 700 kilometers per hour, even a delay of several dozen seconds may make interception impossible," he said, adding: "Radars must see sooner, command systems must classify automatically, and operators get less time—until automation becomes a requirement."

Why hasn't every drone gone jet-powered

Speed solves one problem and creates several. "They are simply another category of strike UAV," Kolesnyk said.

Compact turbojets are expensive and hard to source for smaller drones. Bigger airframes have to be reinforced to take the loads and vibration, which adds weight and cost. Fuel burn climbs far above that of the electric or piston drones built for endurance, and higher speed leaves less room for navigation errors.

So, jet drones fill a niche rather than taking over the whole strike fleet. "They are most effective at ranges of roughly 200 to 600 kilometers," Kolesnyk said—fast strikes on high-value or time-sensitive targets, where getting there quickly matters more than flying cheaply or far.

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Ukraine didn't drop first-person-view (FPV) drones when fiber-optic ones arrived, and jam-resistant drones didn't replace the rest. Each capability added a layer rather than erasing the previous one. Saienko expects the same. "The emergence of jet aviation did not eliminate piston-engine aircraft. The same principle applies," he said. Cheap propeller drones are ideal for mass attacks, while jet platforms handle speed.

The next fight is over reaction time

Jet drones force defenders to decide faster, and that is the harder demand. A slow propeller drone is a wasteful target for an expensive missile. A cruise missile demands an instant answer. A jet drone sits in between—and an operator has to sort which weapon meets which target in seconds, while holding scarce interceptors back for the worst threats. Every misjudgment costs something.

"The challenge is no longer only interception—it is detecting, identifying, and assigning the target quickly enough," Saienko said.

Both experts reach the same conclusion from opposite ends: Kolesnyk through the technical limits of the interceptor drone, Saienko through the entire defensive network. Both land on automation—AI-driven target recognition, distributed sensors, and fast data sharing to shrink the gap between spotting a target and hitting it. The winner won't necessarily fly the fastest aircraft. It will process information faster than its opponent.

Over four days at the end of August, Russia fired about 800 jet drones at Ukraine, Ukraine's president said—a type most of Ukraine's cheap interceptors still cannot catch. And the problem won't stay Ukraine's alone. Drones from the same broad Shahed family have already strayed into NATO airspace and turned up in other wars. The interception race Ukraine is running now is one everyone will eventually run.

A rare armored vehicle has made a surprise appearance in the Ukrainian order of battle. A recent official photo depicts a three-person, 49-ton T-64BM alongside tankers from the Ukrainian army's 57th Motorized Brigade. The brigade holds the line in northern Ukraine around 30 km northwest of Kharkiv.

What's unusual is that the 57th Motorized Brigade was known to operate the lighter T-64BV tank, the standard tank in Ukrainian service. Moreover, the Ukrainian army doesn't have many T-64BMs. There were around 80 in the Ukrainian inventory on the eve of the wider Russian invasion in February 2022, and at the time all but a handful belonged to the 1st Tank Brigade and the 12th Independent Tank Battalion.

Both units had a single T-64BM battalion with around 31 tanks.

In 54 months of hard fighting, the 12th Independent Tank Battalion and 1st Tank Brigade—the latter now reorganized into the less tank-heavy 1st Heavy Mechanized Brigade—has lost around a quarter of their T-64BMs. Even if the units cannibalized a few T-64BMs from training grounds, today they'd both struggle to field a full battalion of T-64BMs.

Given the thin supply, where did the 57th Motorized Brigade's T-64BMs come from? It's a question that vexes French historian Stevius. And it may point to a growing shortage of the best tanks in the Ukrainian armed forces as losses deepen and years of combat take their toll on vehicles' material condition. "The use of a few specimens from training units to fill the gaps ... would tend to show that the Ukrainians have practically exhausted their stock of tanks that they can bring back to operational condition," Stevius noted.

Overall, the Ukrainians have lost no fewer than 1,400 tanks, according to a tally by the Oryx open-source intelligence collective. That's more tanks the the Ukrainian armed forces had in their inventory in 2022. The Ukrainians have largely made good their losses by restoring old stored T-64s and T-72s while also accepting donations of hundreds of surplus tanks from foreign allies.

But even with the restored and donated tanks, there's still a shortfall. It's fortunate, then, that tanks are growing less important by the day as tiny drones—which are lethal to tanks—fill the sky over the 1,200-km disputed gray zone in Ukraine.

Up-armored T-64

The $2.5-million T-64BM is a better-protected variant of the standard T-64, which the tank factory in Kharkiv produced first for Soviet forces and, later, for Ukrainian forces. To produce a T-64BM, the Kharkiv Tank Plant swapped in the 125-mm main gun from the newer T-80 tank, tweaked the fire controls and added slabs of Nozh modular armor on the front of the hull, the turret face and the roof.

The problem was, and still is, that the add-on armor weighs three tons. "The weight of the Nozh armor modules unbalances the tank toward the front and strains the shock absorbers," Stevius explained. Even replacing the T-64's 700-hp diesel engine with a more powerful 850-hp model didn't fully compensate for the added weight. That "results in the T-64BM Bulat suffering from underpowering, regularly causing engine overheating," Stevius pointed out.

Still, the type fought hard in the initial Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine starting in 2014. And eight years later, T-64BMs with the 1st Tank Brigade successfully defended the city of Chernihiv from invading Russian forces. "The faster autoloader on the T-64 allowed Ukrainian tank crews to achieve significant damage against surprised Russian units," Mykhaylo Zabrodskyi, Jack Watling, Oleksandr Danylyuk and Nick Reynolds wrote in a 2022 report for the Royal United Services Institute in London.

As the war ground on and drones replaced heavy vehicles as the main means of attack and defense for both sides, the T-64BMs lost some relevance. Yes, both sides still deploy tanks—but mostly as mobile artillery firing at targets located by drones many kilometers away.

The lighter usage of tanks belies the shortage of functional tanks owing to combat losses and wear and tear, however, especially on the Ukrainian side. A sweeping reorganization of Ukrainian force structure last year eliminated many tank battalions, but the tank shortage persisted even after the unit reduction.

Stevius is stumped. "The presence of a T-64BM Bulat in the 57th Motorized Brigade, which until now has only used T-64BV, is therefore a surprise because their number is insufficient to equip both two or even one tank battalion of the 1st [Heavy Mechanized Brigade] and the ranks of the 12th Independent Tank Battalion," Stevius mused.

The likeliest explanation is the most worrying. The Ukrainians stripped tanks away from training units while also compelling front-line battalions to go into battle with fewer tanks. All in order to make sure all the tank units have at least a few tanks.

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On Monday, a small team of Russian infiltrators reportedly slipped 10 km behind the line of contact between Russian and Ukrainian troops just north of Kostiantynivka in eastern Ukraine's Donetsk Oblast.

Sneaking into the town of Druzhkivka, 10 km north of Kostiantynivka along the H20 highway, the Russians reportedly ambushed, captured and executed a group of three or four unarmed Ukrainian drone operators.

It's possible the drone operators had just arrived in Druzhkivka when the Russians appeared. According to analyst and mapper AMK Mapping, Ukrainian drone operators pulled out of the village of Oleksijevo-Druzhkivka—which lies between Kostiantynivka and Druzhkivka—owing to the increasing threat from Russian KAB glide bombs. "It's likely that Russian forces monitored the withdrawals of Ukrainian drone operators and sent in [an infiltration group] after the new position was identified," AMK Mapping concluded.

The atrocity underscores the Russian military's new approach to ground warfare as Russia's wider war on Ukraine grinds through its 54th month. An army that once counted on its own artillery to suppress enemy artillery in order to allow mechanized forces to advance now uses precision bombs, small cruise missiles, tiny drones, and, yes, some artillery to suppress the Ukrainian drone teams that represent the main obstacle to a swift Russian advance.

And when the Russian firepower manages to suppress Ukrainian drone operators, allowing small teams of infantry to advance, the infantry's objective is often to take out the same drone operators whose suppression was a necessary pre-condition of any successful assault.

In short, the Ukrainians largely defend with drones. That means the Russians are fixated on first striking the drone teams in order to prevent them from launching their tiny lethal robots—and then, when they can, assaulting the drone teams' positions in order to capture or kill them. Or capture then kill them, as reportedly happened in Druzhkivka.

The Russians have learned the hard way that they can't advance without first finding and attacking Ukrainian drone operators. That hard experience has driven a profound transformation of the Russian way of war in just the last few years.

Precision suppression

As 2025 wore into 2026, Ukrainian forces finally deployed enough $500 drones to effectively halt any sustained Russian advance along the 1,200-km gray zone stretching across eastern and southern Ukraine. Between February and July, the Russians captured around 260 sq km of Ukrainian soil, according to a tally by the Black Bird Group. That's barely a fifth as much ground as they seized in the same six months in 2025.

Realizing they couldn't just fire an artillery barrage and then roll out the tanks the way they used to, the Russians have mostly parked their thousands of armored vehicles. Now they advance in small teams of lightly equipped infantry that, Russian commanders reason, stand a better chance of avoiding detecting and destruction by drones.

"Broadly speaking, current Russian military theory appears to emphasize restoring the ability to maneuver," Sidharth Kaushal and Sam Cranny-Evans wrote in a new study for the Royal United Services Institute in London. But the infantry infiltrators who do most of the maneuvering these days don't march out without support. A lot of it.

In the early months of the wider war in 2022 and 2023, the Russians counted on artillery—lots of artillery—to support the maneuver forces. But massed artillery is just as exposed to drone attack as massed tanks are, so Russian fire support has had to evolve, too.

Today, the Russians still fire artillery from fewer but more spread-out guns. But they also launch their own drones, small cruise missiles, and—perhaps most important—KAB glide bombs to force Ukrainian defenders, including drone teams, into their dugouts before the infantry dash across the gray zone. "Russian theorists appear to see the solution in highly mobile units designed to exploit lower-risk tunnels created by
precision strike," Kaushal and Cranny-Evans explained.

It's explosive choreography requiring careful communication between the infantry, the artillery, drone teams and the air force. "Sustaining momentum in the face of adversary precision strike is a considerable challenge," Kaushal and Cranny-Evans wrote. But a necessary one as the Russian military "contemplates how it can break the current positional deadlock" in Ukraine "and avoid future ones."

But when it works, it works to catastrophic effect for Ukrainian defenders. As those unfortunate, murdered drone operators found out.

The suppress-then-advance method, but with precision munitions and small teams of infiltrators, works for both sides, of course. The Ukrainians can do it, too—and they recently did in some unspecified sector of the gray zone.

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On the same day the Russians executed those drone operators, fellow Ukrainian drone pilot Dmytro Putiata reported a small Ukrainian mechanized advance. "At one of the direction at the front line, one of the Ukrainian brigades used four [infantry fighting vehicles] during the attack," Putiata wrote. "They have managed to break through up to three km; dismounted infantry and all of the vehicles managed to retreat."

They break through with the help of friendly drones units that suppressed Russian troops along the assault route, Putiata explained. "How did they manage not to be targeted by drones? The battlefield was prepared for that."

Russia is now building its TOS-1A thermobaric rocket launchers with factory armor wrapped around the rocket tubes. The tracked TOS-1A and its flame-producing 220-mm rockets are a powerful and terrifying weapon. But the launcher is also extremely vulnerable to Ukraine's drones and artillery. The add-on armor may be the only way the launchers can survive.

The TOS-1A is a T-72 with the turret swapped out for 24 thermobaric rockets, and the newest ones arrive inside a welded steel shell that lifts open when the tubes elevate. Russia is armoring the launcher the way it armors the tanks it's built from. What happens when the armor fails is not the same.

The TOS-1A adds a 24-round launcher onto the hull of a T-72 tank. The system's MO.1.01.04M rocket travels as far as 6,000 m with a payload of fuel that, once ignited, burns as hot as 3,000 degrees Celsius. The fuel can spread across the ground and into buildings and bunkers, allowing even a single TOS-1A to scorch a wide area.

It's not for no reason that the TOS-1A is one of Russia's preferred siege weapons. TOS-1As rolled into action early in Russia's wider war on Ukraine. In one of their first actions, in May 2022, TOS-1As staged on hilltops overlooking the city of Lyman, in eastern Ukraine's Donetsk Oblast, rained fire down on the front-line city. A few days later, Russian troops temporarily occupied Lyman.

The best day the TOS-1A ever had came at Bakhmut. In early April 2023, Russian crews fired across the Bakhmutka River at entrenched Ukrainian positions and opened a 300-m gap in the line, US Army analysts later reconstructed. Wagner mercenaries poured through and covered 1.25 km in a single day. At Pavlivka, thermobaric fire breached the Ukrainian line and the settlement eventually fell—though it took five months and cost Russia two wrecked naval infantry brigades.

With its origins firmly in the 1970s, the TOS-1A was designed for a different era, however. An era where rocket launchers could, with a little support, safely approach to within a few kilometers of the enemy. Artillery is an ever-present danger, of course. But artillery can be suppressed—usually by other artillery.

The era of relative safety for the TOS-1A ended as tiny explosive drones began filling the sky over Ukraine in 2023. Even the tiniest of these tiny drones has the range to hit a TOS-1A before the TOS-1A can get into position to fire its rockets. Worse, the TOS-1A's thermobaric rockets are extremely volatile—and tend to explode in massive fireballs when struck.

"Nasty weapons—and also great targets" for anti-tank missiles and other munitions, is how Czech analyst Jakub Janovsky described the TOS-1A in the war's opening days, before the drones even arrived.

The launcher has a weather problem, too. Its rockets carry an oxidizer premix, which means crews can't fire them in the rain or from high ground.

Deep losses

The Russians started losing TOS-1As almost immediately. Retreating from Kyiv Oblast on 1 April 2022, they left behind at least three launchers—two of them knocked out by Ukrainian Stugna-P missiles, one captured intact. Then the losses began piling up.

Today, 54 months into the wider war, the Ukrainians have destroyed, damaged or captured no fewer than 36 TOS-1As. 27 of them burned. Ukrainian crews turned at least one captured launcher on its former operators, firing it near Kreminna during the 2023 counteroffensive.

The losses are a problem for the Russians. US Army analysts estimated Russia's prewar TOS-1A fleet at 48 launchers, only a portion of which ever went to Ukraine. Documented losses now stand at 36, and Oryx counts only what it can see in a photograph. How much of that gap Russian factories have refilled isn't public.

What the losses did not do was change the war. For all its ferocity, the TOS-1A has had little to no effect on the conflict's outcome, US Army analysts concluded—and they name the short reach as the reason. A weapon that has to park within 6,000 m of the enemy is a weapon the enemy can find.

Armor, not range

The Russians got to work improving the TOS-1A and building more copies. The Omsk transport machinery plant, Omsktransmash, has turned out fresh batches for the defense ministry in September 2022, November 2022, November 2024 and again in November 2025, its parent concern Uralvagonzavod announcing each handover. It's unclear just how many replacement launchers the Russians acquired, but it's safe to assume they number in the dozens.

They also changed how they use the thing. Russian units now move single launchers up to the line under covering artillery fire rather than travelling in groups, reducing the likelihood of detection, the same US Army analysts reported. And the latest copies are up-armored against drones, with a shell of additional armor protecting the 24 launch tubes and their highly flammable rockets.

That isn't a brand-new idea. An earlier drone-protection variant was showcased in April 2024, and a different, serially produced kit went onto the batch shipped in November 2025. What circulated this month is fresh footage of the up-armored TOS-1As working out at a training range in Russia's Saratov Oblast.

The add-on armor is apparently factory-standard at this point, and it's a purpose-built enclosure rather than the improvised slat and mesh Russian regiments tend to weld onto their tanks before sending them across the drone-patrolled gray zone. The function is the same: put something between the drone and the thing that matters.

The best up-armored "turtle tanks" have been known to absorb dozens or even scores of drone impacts. A TOS-1A crew should hope the launcher's new armor is equally tough. After all, the consequence of a turtle tank losing its shell and taking a direct drone hit is often immobilization: the tank throws a wheel or a track or loses power and simply can't move anymore.

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Armor is the cheap answer, and it isn't the real one. The real one is a launcher that doesn't have to park 6,000 m from a Ukrainian drone operator.

Uralvagonzavod says a modernized TOS-1A on a T-80 chassis is nearing the end of trials, with better accuracy, more automation and a longer reach. How much longer, the company hasn't said. Analyst Alexey Tarasov expects a new launch module able to take longer-range rockets, perhaps carrying the system to roughly the 15 to 20 km of the wheeled TOS-2. Until then, the crews get a steel box.

It had better hold. The earlier, cruder answer didn't: a TOS-1A wearing a field-built metal cage burned anyway when a Ukrainian FPV drone found it. And if a TOS-1A's armor fails, the next drone hit could trigger 24 rockets each weighing 217 kg and packed with concentrated fuel that's primed to explode.

Russia's Kinzhal air-launched ballistic missile, a version of the ground-launched Iskander, travels as far as 2,000 km at a claimed 10 times the speed of sound while packing a 500-kg warhead. It was one of a clutch of purported super-weapons that Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin revealed in a dramatic announcement in 2018.

Launched in mid-air by specially modified Mikoyan MiG-31 interceptors in order to boost its speed and range, the Kinzhal is, in theory, a powerful deep strike munition capable of blasting right through all but the best and rarest air defenses.

In practice, it kept missing. Russia stopped building the $4.5-million missile in April, Maj. Gen. Vadym Skibitskyi, Ukraine's deputy chief of defense intelligence, told RBC-Ukraine—and the rocket fuel and components that had gone into Kinzhals now go into Iskanders, sea-launched Kalibr cruise missiles, and air-launched Kh-101 cruise missiles instead.

A missile of this class needs to land within five to seven meters of its aim point to be worth firing. The Kinzhal, according to Skibitskyi, lands within 30 meters or more. "We can hardly recall a single instance where this missile hit the target precisely," he said. Satellite imagery of the Ukrainian air base at Starokostiantyniv, a favorite Kinzhal target, shows the craters ringing the airfield rather than sitting on it.

The Kolomna Machine Building Design Bureau reportedly contracted 44 Kinzhals in 2024 and 144 in 2025, Militarnyi reported from Russian defense ministry documents. The line climbed for two years and then stopped dead.

The Kinzhal isn't the only munition reportedly getting the ax. The Kremlin is also halting production of the Kh-32 air-launched cruise missile, which Russian engineers repeatedly failed to improve before the program was sent back for further work. "This would explain why Russia has not launched any Kinzhals for multiple months, and very few Kh-32s," AMK Mapping noted.

At least one analyst anticipated this development years ago. Way back in 2022, then-CNA analyst Michael Kofman wrote that he didn't "understand the interest in Russian use of Kinzhal. There's nothing special or particularly exciting about this system." It is, according to Kofman, just an Iskander but with a more complicated and expensive launch method.

It may have taken the Russians a few years to come to the same conclusion. The last Kinzhal strike might have been on 14 May, when the Russians launched three Kinzhals as part of a wider strike on Ukrainian cities involving 731 missiles and drones.

The purported Kinzhal shutdown, if true, could orphan the boutique fleet of around two dozen MiG-31K/I interceptors whose main role is to haul a Kinzhal to high altitude before launch. The Kinzhal carriers account for around 20% of the wider MiG-31 fleet, whose main mission is air defense over the vast Russian interior.

The MiGs may end up as victims of ruthless efficiency-seeking. If Skibitskyi is right, the Kremlin simply can't afford to keep every munition in production as it seeks to escalate its bombardment of Ukrainian cities amid growing economic losses from Ukrainian deep strikes targeting Russian strategic industries.

It's possible the only way the Russians can boost production of their best deep strike munitions is to cut production of the underperforming ones. According to the pro-Ukrainian Conflict Intelligence Team, the savings in fuel, components, and funds from the suspended Kinzhal and Kh-32 assembly lines "were redirected to other types of missiles."

Production winners and losers

That's how, in July, Russia reportedly produced 65 Iskanders, surpassing its target of 60 by nearly 10%. Meanwhile, production of Kh-101s reached 140% of the monthly target. Kalibr production 111%. Across its main missile lines, Russian industry is running at 110 to 120% of plan. Certain Russian munitions may soon disappear from the sky over Ukraine, if they haven't already. But only because more copies of better munitions are taking their place.

Ironically, the Kinzhals and their carriers are fading away at the same time Ukraine's own deep strike forces may have landed their most powerful blow against the aerial hypersonic strike force. On 15 August, a barrage of Ukrainian drones and cruise missiles struck a range of targets deep inside Russia.

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Among the targets was Savasleyka air base, in Nizhny Novgorod around 785 km from Ukraine. "Direct hits and fires reported," WarTranslated noted.

Among other aircraft, Savasleyka air base hosts some of the MiG-31Ks that carry Kinzhal missiles. Or once carried them, if Skibitskyi is correct and the missile has fallen out of use. It's unclear whether the attack on Savasleyka damaged or destroyed any MiG-31s.

Even if the Kinzhal launchers burned to the ground, it may be too late to matter. The Russians may have rendered the planes and their missiles irrelevant before the Ukrainians could drone them.

Russian forces may have finally found a way to protect their tanks from Ukrainian first-person-view drones. And it's not the usual add-on armor applications that have defined mechanized combat in Ukraine since the early months of Russia's wider war.

No, the Russians have begun deploying tanks fitted with the Arena-M active protection system (APS), which detects incoming FPVs and automatically fires a small projectile at them. The first few assaults by Arena-M-equipped tanks ended in defeat for the Russians, but limited combat footage shows the system can destroy incoming FPVs.

At least one Arena-M did work against FPVs—it just did not work long enough to save the tank. Observer Andrei_bt stressed that a reported 12-round loadout "does not match modern realities." Footage published on 7 August showed Ukrainian FPVs attacking an Arena-M-equipped T-72B3M near occupied Volodymyrivka, though the Institute for the Study of War assessed that it likely showed the late-July mechanized assault. Ukrainian drone operator Dmytro Putiata reported that one Arena-M shot down seven FPVs before Ukrainian forces destroyed the tank.

That is a smaller problem than the one the Russians had a month ago, and it is why the burned-out tanks along the road in Donetsk Oblast are not the whole story. Russia has spent three years accumulating tanks it cannot safely send anywhere—thousands of them, rebuilt and parked for want of a defense against $500 drones. An Arena-M that does not run dry halfway to the objective is the thing that would let those tanks out of the yard.

The good news for Russian mechanized forces is that developers now know Arena-M needs a bigger ammo loadout. The bad news is that packing more projectiles into the system could prove extremely difficult. The main problem: adding any further bulk to the turret-mounted projectile launchers could block a tank's engine compartment, preventing access for maintenance.

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If there's a workaround, it may involve redesigning the Arena-M to fire smaller but more numerous projectiles.

Ammunition may not even be the binding constraint. Ukrainian aviation expert Anatolii Khrapchynskyi put the Arena-M's engagement range at 20 to 30 meters and its detection range at around 50—numbers that leave very little time against a drone diving from above, however many charges are in the launchers.

The Institute for the Study of War, for its part, assesses that the Arena-M alone is currently insufficient to protect Russian mechanized assaults from Ukrainian drones because the system can be saturated, though it raises the cost and effort required of Ukrainian forces.

An Arena-M with more rounds could be the development Russian commanders were waiting for as they continue stockpiling new and refurbished tanks and fighting vehicles. Doubling down on production of T-90 and T-72 tanks, the Kremlin has more than made good its combat losses in the first 54 months of the wider war.

Tank-led assaults have been rare in the last year of fighting as Russian forces have pivoted to infantry-led infiltration tactics. That may change as infantry losses deepen and commanders gain confidence in the Arena-M to protect tanks from drone attack.

Combat debut

The Arena-M, designed by the Kolomna Engineering Design Bureau, uses Doppler radar to spot incoming rockets, missiles, and drones, and counter-munitions meant to shred a threat shortly before impact. The concept is old: the Soviets fitted the Drozd system to modernized T-55ADs in the 1980s, and Russian designers have been chasing active protection since their tanks were mauled in Chechnya.

Three decades on, the Russian government daily Rossiyskaya Gazeta conceded on 7 August that there is still no generalized battlefield data on how the Arena-M performs, and that its potential against threats attacking from above needs further study.

Anti-Drone Armor Evolution

Evolution of Russia's anti-drone protection of tanks

From crude cages to shooting back—four years of trial and error

2022

Cope cage

Metal slats or mesh bolted over turrets to block incoming FPV drones

Spring 2023

Turtle tank

Entire vehicles wrapped in drone-blocking metal shells

Spring 2025

Porcupine

Hundreds of thick rebar spines welded to cope cages and shells

Autumn 2025

Hedgehog & dandelion

Thousands of thin aluminum hairs; branching stalks with Kevlar mesh

July 2026

Arena-M

Radar-cued charges shoot drones down instead of blocking them—reported fielded loadout: 12 rounds

Chart: Euromaidan Press

The system had its major combat debut in Ukraine on and around 23 July, over several days of Russian mechanized attacks in the Dobropillia sector of eastern Ukraine's Donetsk Oblast. The Russian Center Group of Forces rolled a large mechanized assault group along the road through the village of Pankivka, roughly 36 km southwest of Kramatorsk and its twin free city of Sloviansk.

Ukrainian drones spotted the tanks coming, and attacked. When the smoke and dust cleared, the Russians had lost at least nine tanks. Reportedly seven of them were T-72B3A models with Arena-M installations.

The losses belie the Arena-M's effectiveness. The protection systems shot down drone after drone, and only stopped shooting down drones when they ran out of projectiles. "In general, it took from 15 to 20 FPV drones to destroy a tank," Ukrainian drone operator Dmytro Putiata reported.

While some of the best-protected turtle, porcupine, and hedgehog tanks have been able to withstand more than 20 FPVs before being immobilized, the add-on metal plates and bars that comprise turtle, porcupine, and hedgehog installations are extremely heavy—and tend to ruin a tank's transmission, weigh on its mobility, and prevent it from rotating its turret and aiming its main gun.

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Russia took the cages off its newest tanks. The new Arena-M shield bought them a few minutes.

In other words, the add-on armor prevents tanks from fighting like tanks—using their speed and firepower to close with and destroy the enemy.

The Arena-M installation is bulky but it's not heavy. With Arena-M, a tank can defend itself from drones without sacrificing its mobility. If an Arena-M had, say, 24 rounds instead of just 12, an attacking tank might be able to fend off drones long enough to reach its objective across the disputed gray zone.

But only barely. "15 to 20 FPV drones to destroy a tank is a perfectly viable rate," Czech analyst Jakub Janovsky noted in a comment on Putiata's social media. "At those numbers, Russia could throw its entire [armored fighting vehicle] fleet at the Ukrainian front line over a few months without achieving much more than creating a future low-grade iron ore deposit."

What if the Russians could fit 36 rounds in an upgraded Arena-M installation? Would that be enough?

No one knows for sure until they try. What we do know is that "the Russian military is learning and is experimenting in how to employ armor on a drone-saturated battlefield," explained Rob Lee, an analyst with the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. "The Arena-M APS demonstrated effectiveness and will likely be improved."

And those improvements could unlock those thousands of tanks the Russians have parked for want of drone defenses.

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On 16 July, one-way attack drones from the Ukrainian state security service—the vaunted SBU—motored 800 km to strike Engels-2 air base in western Russia. At the time, there were reportedly five bombers on the ground at the base: four Tupolev Tu-22Ms and a single Tupolev Tu-95.

The drones struck the four-engine, propeller-driven Tu-95. "According to preliminary data, the plane suffered critical damage," the SBU claimed. "It completely tore off the tail part." That particular aircraft, the SBU added, had been used systematically to launch massed missile strikes on Ukraine. Satellite imagery later confirmed the bomber's destruction.

Nearly a month later, we finally know which drone type the SBU flung at Engels-2 and its parked bombers. They were MICH 2000s—Ukrainian aircraft that began as copies of the Chinese ZTK-150, built after Beijing stopped selling. Ukrainian website Oboronka, which visited the factory, broke the news. "Today, the Mich' is no longer just a Chinese plane, but a drone that is exclusively used by the SBU Special Operations Center 'Alpha.'"

According to Oboronka, whose report was agreed in advance with the manufacturer and the SBU, the MICH 2000 flies as far as 2,000 km with a warhead weighing 25 to 60 kg. "The list of targets hit by this drone is updated every week," Oboronka noted. They include Russian ports, military and industrial sites around Moscow and Engels-2.

The Engels-2 raid might be the most immediately impactful. After the 16 July raid, the Russians may be down to 43 Tu-95s, only a dozen of which are usually active at any given time.

The plane that came from China

The MICH 2000 started as someone else's drone. In the summer of 2023, Beijing restricted exports of the civilian aircraft Ukrainian units had been buying and converting into deep-strike munitions. At the end of that year, a team of Ukrainian developers flew to China to buy some anyway.

At the factory, they found dozens of ZTK-150s coming off the line—Shahed lookalikes distinguished mainly by a pair of forward canards. The Chinese intermediaries floated selling the production technology outright, and Ukrainian commanders liked the idea. But when the team came back ready to buy, the factory's management refused.

The intermediaries wanted the deal anyway. They offered to assemble the drones somewhere without export restrictions—and to train Ukrainian pilots. The team took the training. "We came there to teach pilots to fly Chinese drones," one member told Oboronka. "And in parallel with the training we photographed everything that was there. Everything from the production process to the arrangement of the shelves and cabinets." They flew home with trained pilots and eight Chinese drones.

Two years later, the Ukrainian version costs $48,000 in its basic configuration. The Chinese original costs $50,000. And according to the manufacturer, almost nothing of the Chinese drone survives in the MICH 2000 now except its outline.

Whittling down the bomber fleet

Ukrainian drones are slowly chipping away at the Tu-95 fleet. A 2022 drone raid badly damaged one of the lumbering turboprop bombers at Engels-2, potentially leaving no more than 51 intact Tu-95s in the Russian air force inventory at the time. Smuggling tiny explosive drones across Russia in trucks on 1 June, 2025, the SBU hit at least seven more Tu-95s as well as four Tu-22Ms, among other aircraft.

The 16 July raid is the more recent Ukrainian effort to shrink the Russian bomber force, but it surely won't be the last. The Russians' roughly 120 bombers—Tu-95s, Tu-22Ms and Tupolev Tu-160s—launch the cruise missiles that routinely blast Ukrainian cities and power plants.

Struggling to intercept all Russian deep strike munitions in the target zone, in part owing to a deepening shortage of the best air defense missiles, Ukrainian forces increasingly aim to prevent the Russian munitions from even launching—by smashing munitions factories or, yes, destroying irreplaceable bombers. Of the three Russian bomber types, just one—the Tu-160—is still in production, albeit at a rate of barely just one every year or two.

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Expect more MICH 2000 raids. The type's anonymous builder churns out 6,000 MICH 2000s a year but aims to boost output to 10,000 a year. And the firm customizes the drones to suit particular missions.

According to Oboronka, there are eight main versions. "Fighters can choose what kind of communication they need: analog, digital or Starlink. They can choose the warhead, the size of the fuel tank, the possibility of additional guidance." The navigation system can be made more jam-proof by adding additional jam-resistant controlled reception pattern antennas.

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Russia has figured out how to stop Ukraine’s most powerful missile

Drone strikes by MICH 2000s and other drone types aren't the only ways Ukrainian forces are trying to blunt Russian attacks on Ukrainian cities and power plants. Ukrainian drone teams are also trying to take out the last five warships in the battered Russian Black Sea Fleet that can fire Kalibr cruise missiles.

On 11 August, drones struck at least three of the ships in the port of Novorossiysk in southern Russia. The frigates Admiral Essen and Admiral Makarov and the corvette Bykov all suffered visible damage.

Russia has been shooting down most of Ukraine's best long-range cruise missiles as fast as Ukraine can launch them. Just one or two of the $500,000 Fire Point FP-5 Flamingo missiles have hit their targets in recent weeks.

That means Russian air defenses are working for now. Whether they'll continue to work is the critical question for Ukrainian strike planners.

Under the cover of darkness on 6 August, the Ukrainian army's 19th Missile Brigade launched at least three of the six-ton, jet-propelled Flamingos toward Tyumen Oblast in western Siberia. The missiles traveled around 2,500 km before disappearing, according to mapper AMK Mapping.

The apparent shoot-downs capped a difficult week for Ukraine's deep strike campaign. AMK Mapping claimed the Russians shot down 10 of 11 launched Flamingos since 1 July. That count is one mapper's, based on open-source tracking, and no official Ukrainian or Russian figures exist to check it against.

The mapper may be off by one. Between 24 and 25 July, at least one Flamingo struck the Vyatka Machine-Building Enterprise Avitek missile plant in Kirov Oblast 1,300 km from the border with Ukraine. Michael Bohnert, an analyst with the RAND think tank in California, concluded that two Flamingos hit the plant, causing visible damage.

It was a potentially powerful blow. Among other things, Avitek produces parts for the Tor medium-range surface-to-air missile system. Slowing Tor production "will have the most impact," Bohnert explained. And the Ukrainian system that a Tor slowdown might benefit the most is ... the Flamingo.

After all, the Tor is one of the air defense systems the Russians could use to shoot down Flamingos. "Any slow-down in the production of these could greatly improve the prospects of FP-5 performance over time," Bohnert noted.

Aerial defenses

At present, however, it seems that the Flamingo's biggest problem is in the air, not on the ground. Russia is shooting down most of the incoming FP-5s because it has eyes in the sky.

The Russian air force's fleet of lumbering Beriev A-50U radar early-warning planes now has one mission and one mission only: the A-50Us with their fuselage-mounted radars patrol over the likeliest flight paths for Flamingos motoring into the Russian interior to strike strategic industries.

The A-50Us are effective in the role. As recently as June, more Flamingos were getting through Russian defenses. Between 9 and 10 June, the 19th Missile Brigade launched five Flamingos at the VNIIR-Progress electronics plant in Cheboksary, in western Russia, 960 km from the Ukraine border.

Two missiles struck the plant, punching right through anti-drone protections and inflicting major blast and fire damage with their 1,150-kg warheads, the biggest on any Ukrainian deep strike munition.

Russia adapted fast. On 4 July, an A-50U helped missile batteries on the ground spot and shoot down five FP-5s flying toward Votkinsk, 1,360 km from Ukraine. From its perch thousands of feet in the air, the A-50U has a much longer detection range against low targets than any radar on the ground can manage.

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To catch Ukraine’s cruise missiles, Russia is risking the scarce A-50 radar planes it has no way to rebuild

Targeting A-50Us on the ground and in the air in a series of drone and missile ambushes, the Ukrainians have destroyed two A-50Us and damaged at least two others, reducing the fleet to no more than five. Russia has no way to build replacements. But those five planes are now fully committed to the anti-Flamingo fight.

On 7 July, the Russians reportedly launched four of the irreplaceable planes at the same time in order to coordinate the Flamingo shoot-downs. Now, almost all Flamingos go down in flames before they reach their targets.

Ukraine isn't powerless. Fire Point has been working hard to improve the Flamingo and make it harder to shoot down. Perhaps most importantly, it seems the company tweaked the missile's altimeter in order to help it fly lower. The lower a missile flies, the better chance it has of hiding among the radar clutter created by surrounding terrain.

But if a lower-flying Flamingo is harder to shoot down, the improvement hasn't yet registered in the statistics. For now, Russia has figured out how to take out almost all of Ukraine's heaviest deep-strike missiles.

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Russia is running out of its best eyes in the sky

Frustrated by Ukrainian electronic warfare, Russia transformed its drone arsenal to be harder—or impossible—to jam.

Most of Russia's tiny first-person-view drones now send and receive signals via jam-proof fiber optic cable instead of wireless radio. For heavier one-way attack drones that travel too far for fiber optics, the Russians have mostly switched to jam-resistant mesh radio networks made up of many interconnected senders and receivers.

In both cases, China is key. Chinese companies sell Russian companies the optical fibers and mesh modems that the Russians install in their drones. In other words, Beijing is the critical enabler in Moscow's ongoing aerial aggression.

That's the unsurprising yet sobering conclusion that Tatarigami, the founder of the Ukrainian Frontelligence Insight analysis group, reached in a recent investigation.

It's not enough for Ukrainian forces to shoot down or otherwise defend against Russian drones, or to fight back with their own drones. To win the drone war, Ukraine and its allies must "step up pressure on Chinese manufacturers," Tatarigami wrote.

As the drone war over Ukraine ramped up in 2022 and 2023, most Russian FPVs were wireless models. And most heavier one-way attack drones navigated via satellite. Both classes of drone could be jammed. A cottage industry of Ukrainian electronic warfare producers sprung up. Each firm offered some variation of a radio noisemaker that can ground or misdirect wireless and satellite-guided drones.

The jamming worked. Combined with kinetic defenses—guns and missiles—and add-on protections such as mesh, cages and netting, the jamming blunted the impact of Russia's drone arsenal. But the Russians adapted. The turning point came in the spring of 2025, when Russia's elite Rubicon Center drone group led the counterattack against Ukrainian troops occupying parts of Kursk Oblast in western Russia.

Rubicon's fiber optic FPVs wreaked havoc on Ukrainian forces in the Kursk salient, damaging or destroying hundreds of trucks and other vehicles in the span of a few weeks. Starving for supplies and in danger of being cut off, the Ukrainians retreated.

But the Russian adaptation was just beginning. The Russians are now launching 10,000 FPVs a day. And in certain key sectors, 60% of the FPVs were fiber optic models, according to Tatarigami. The Ukrainians can shoot down these drones and block them with armor, nets and earthworks. They can also strike at the Russian FPV teams before the Russians can launch their FPVs.

But there's one thing the Ukrainians can't do: they can't jam the drones.

Unjammable drones

Jamming continued to work against many one-way attack drones that must travel hundreds or even thousands of kilometers—too far for optical fiber. Another turning point came in February, when Elon Musk's Starlink bricked Russia's thousands of smuggled and stolen satellite terminals, some of which Russian forces used to control the approximately 5,000 Geran attack drones they launch every month.

The Starlink shutdown compelled Russian developers to accelerate the transformation of the one-way attack drone force. "Russia's second adaptation was mesh networking, routing data through mesh modems to keep communications alive across both short and long-range drones," Tatarigami explained.

It's possible to jam a mesh radio network, but it's hard. Every drone in a given network is a node. It's not enough to jam a few of them; you have to jam all of them.

If there's a constraint on Russia's switch to fiber optics and mesh networks, it's that Russian industry can't produce all the necessary hardware. "Unable to meet domestic demand, Russia turned to China," Tatarigami wrote.

The Washington Post reported Chinese optical fiber shipments to Russia growing from 119,000 miles in May 2025 to 328,000 miles that August. China sent Ukraine 72 miles the same month. For mesh networking, the Russians came to depend on XK-F358 modems from China's Shenzhen Xingkai Technology.

Ukraine's overstretched air defenses can't shoot down every Russian attack drone. Ukrainian troops and vehicle crews can't hide from 10,000 Russian FPVs a day. To defeat Russia's jam-proof drones, Ukraine and its allies must cut off the supply of Chinese parts, Tatarigami stressed.

They should extend export controls to modem-makers and producers of optical fiber, reels for the fiber and equipment associated with fiber production. "The recommendation is to expand sanctions beyond individual firms to the entire supply chain," Tatarigami advised.

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Some Ukrainian bomber drones aren’t carrying bombs anymore. They’re carrying robots.

Ukraine's latest deep strike drone is one of a kind. The Triada Robotics Bravo features a "blended wing body" design that's rarely seen on a drone. The special platform maximizes lift and minimizes drag, helping the drone fly farther for a given speed and payload than a conventional "tube and wing" drone can do.

A stubby jet drone appeared fleetingly in a video shot from the ground during a strike on the Ufa refinery cluster in Bashkortostan on 2 August, more than 1,700 km from the Ukrainian border. Ukrainian forces hit the three Bashneft plants at Ufa on 1, 2, and 5 August.

No official body has identified the aircraft in the footage. Online observers compared the silhouette to the American F-117 Nighthawk; the outline is also consistent with the renders Triada publishes of the Bravo. The clip runs a few tenths of a second.

Everything that has reached that deep into Russia until now has been propeller-driven, plodding along at less than 200 km/hr. A jet Bravo cruising at 600 km/hr covers the same 1,700 km in under three hours instead of nine and a half. That is the difference between an air defense network with all morning to work out where a drone is going and one with a couple of hours.

Exactly what the drone in the video was aiming for, and whether it struck its target, is unclear. But that's not stopping Russian observers from panicking. "Shooting down a drone is practically impossible," one Russian blogger moaned.

It's untrue. Motoring along at 600 km/hr—Triada claims around 800 km/hr in the final phase of flight—the jet-propelled Bravo is neither the fastest Ukrainian deep strike munition nor the slowest. If Russian air defenses can take down 950 km/hr Fire Point FP-5 Flamingo cruise missiles, they can take down Bravos, too. Detecting one is a separate question: Triada says the Bravo's composite airframe reduces its radar cross-section.

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But invulnerability surely wasn't the main goal when Kyiv-based Triada Robotics designed the Bravo over the past couple of years. Efficiency was the objective. Which is probably why the firm chose the blended-wing-body arrangement for the one-way explosive drone, which it lists at around 174,000 euros—roughly $200,000.

The blended shape "provides many different aerodynamic benefits over conventional aircraft design," Oliver Johnson and Sam Dakka wrote in a 2019 article in International Journal of Aviation, Aeronautics and Aerospace.

Most drones, like most manned aircraft, have the same layout: a tube-shaped body and separate wings jutting from the body. These tube-and-wing aircraft are the easiest to conceptualize and the most straightforward to assemble, as the fuselage and wing can be built independently and attached during production.

The problem is drag, especially at the junctures between body and wing. A draggier airframe suffers a range and speed penalty compared to a less draggy airframe.

Alternative shapes

There are alternatives to tubes and wings. Flying wing aircraft such as the US Air Force's B-2 and B-21 stealth bombers, both built by Northrop Grumman, are all wing—and have neither an identifiable fuselage nor horizontal or vertical stabilizers. They look like boomerangs.

At subsonic speed, that shape is less draggy than a tube and wing shape is, and thus more efficient for long-range flight. At the same time, a flying wing's lack of sharp angles reduces its radar reflectivity. In short, it can be very stealthy and hard to detect on radar.

The downside of a flying wing is that it's unstable and requires sophisticated flight controls to keep it in the air.

A blended wing body shape is a kind of compromise between a flying wing design and a tube and wing design. There's a fuselage and a wing and stabilizers, but the fuselage and wing blend into each other. A blended wing body isn't as stealthy as a flying wing is, but it's easier to control.

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And it's still less draggy than a tube-and-wing type. "The improvements increase the overall lift to drag ratio providing a higher performance aircraft saving 27% fuel burn per passenger mile that of the modern conventional configuration," Johnson and Dakka wrote.

That benefit is apparent in the Bravo's performance specifications. The drone reportedly ranges 2,000 km with a warhead of 100 to 200 kg and AI-assisted targeting, flying as high as 5,000 m. It's unclear how the Bravo navigates, but it's probably via some combination of satellite and inertial systems.

It's an impressive set of stats. A $50,000, propeller-driven Fire Point FP-1 ranges slightly farther—2,300 km—but the FP-1 cruises at just 180 km/hr and packs a 60-kg warhead. The Bravo is more than three times as fast and carries at least half again as much explosive, and possibly triple, while still flying far enough to reach deep inside Russia.

Yes, the Bravo costs four times as much as the FP-1 does, probably in part because of the jet propulsion, but that could change if Triada Robotics can scale up production. Co-founder Artem Veselov has said the company aims for a first pre-series batch of 100 by the end of the year. For now, the Bravo is a rarity. But it may become much more common in the sky over Russia in the coming months.