Ukraine has developed its own jet-powered drone, as the arms race is pushing Kyiv to produce answers to Russia's new fast Banderol and Geran-3 drones. Ukraine's “Bars” missile-drones currently consist of more than 74% Ukrainian-made components, but their turbojet engines are still imported, the developer of the “Bars” missile-drones said in an interview with RBC-Ukraine on 7 September.

The “Bars” jet-powered drone can carry out strikes at a range of up to 1,000 km, and the team plans to increase its range in the future, the developer said in the interview. To speed up and increase production of such drones for the Ukrainian army, the team is trying to make the jet-powered drone consist of as many domestically produced parts as possible. This will remove the limitation on how many such jet-powered drones Ukraine can produce and deploy in response to Russia’s use of similar drones against Ukrainian cities.

“Without exaggeration, we source them from all over the world,” the Bars developer said in the interview about the imported engines.

The UAV strikes the Russian army both in occupied territories and deep inside Russia

The developer calls Bars a missile-drone: it resembles a missile because it has a jet engine, and a drone because it can be controlled by a pilot.

The basic characteristics of Bars include a warhead weighing up to 60 kilograms, a range of up to 1,000 kilometers, and a speed of more than 700 kilometers per hour, the developer added. He also explained that the UAV’s system is a modular platform that allows the drone to be used “in different planes.”

“Our basic modularity allowed ‘Bars’ to receive three main categories of use: DeepStrike, ‘middle-strike,’ and ‘front-strike,’” the developer said in the interview.

He also said that there have been more than 40 “engineering officially” modifications and iterations of the UAV alone.

A Bars production facility is already in Europe and will begin operating in early September

The first batch of Bars drones is planned to be delivered as early as 10 October, according to the interview.

“As of today, the only limitation to scaling up the production of ‘Bars’ is the so-called ‘bottleneck,’ and it is not so much the volumes as the delivery times of turbojet engines,” the developer said.

It was previously reported that Ukraine and Germany had signed an agreement on the joint production of Bars drones. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said this on 8 July 2026. He said that at the first stage of the project, Germany would finance the production, while all manufactured UAVs would be transferred to the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

On the afternoon of 4 September, a Russian drone struck the building of Ukraine's Security Service in Kyiv, flying straight at the office of the acting chief, Oleksandr Poklad. One source close to the security services was blunt about the mood afterward, telling LIGA.net that everyone was "not just furious — everyone is absolutely livid."

It was a rare direct hit on a top government building — the first time the SBU headquarters had been struck in the four-and-a-half-year war. The central building stands on Volodymyrska Street opposite St. Sophia's Cathedral, a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Poklad was unharmed, and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he had ordered a response that mirrors the attack.

Beskrestnov: a planned operation, guided from the ground

Serhii "Flash" Beskrestnov, President Zelenskyy's adviser on defense technologies, argued the strike was too precise to be a stray hit.

"My personal opinion: the Geran was controlled and guided online through a MESH radio relay with internet access, which a Russian agent switched on somewhere nearby — within five kilometers — for a short period during the attack," he wrote.

Such a relay is small, about the size of half a school backpack, he said. He added that no other jet-powered Gerans were in the air over Kyiv at the moment of the strike, which, in his view, rules out the drone being flown along a relay chain reaching back into Russia and points instead to local control.

Europe calls it a major escalation

Katarína Mathernová, head of the EU Delegation to Ukraine, said the drone hit near where she and her colleagues live and work, and her Kyiv staff again had to leave their desks for shelter. Under her post, former EU Ambassador to Ukraine José Manuel Pinto Teixeira called Russia a terror state.

"Time for Ukrainian drones visiting the center of Moscow," he said.

Estonian Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna said Russian drones had struck "the very heart of Kyiv," and pressed for tighter sanctions and deeper isolation of Moscow.

"The Kremlin’s objective remains unchanged: inflict maximum carnage, sow terror, and trample every norm of international law," he said.