Russia is winning the drone war

In early July, the Ukrainian military invited a number of manufacturers to test a new generation of interceptors developed to combat jet-powered attack drones, which Russia has used to devastating effect in recent months.

According to two sources from the British agency, everything did not go according to plan.

Many of the interceptor drones proved difficult to control at speeds that sometimes exceeded 400 kilometers per hour. Some crashed into nearby fields and forests, the sources said.

The exercise highlighted the challenge Ukraine faces as it heads into another winter, without enough Western air defense systems to counter Russian ballistic missiles and with no clear answer to Moscow's faster and more powerful drones.

Russia has increased its use of jet-powered drones by about six times over the three summer months, according to Ukrainian military data seen by Reuters.

Much can change in two months in a war marked by rapid technological innovation. Yet a senior commander openly admitted on Friday that Kiev is lagging behind in the crucial area of ​​jet-powered drones.

“When it comes to jet drones, we have completely lost the initiative again, that is a fact,” said Maksim Zhorin, deputy commander of the 3rd Army Corps, on the Telegram app.

"The Russians have established mass production and use of Shahed jets, and we don't even know what to do against them."

Yuriy Cherevashenko, deputy commander of the Ukrainian Air Force, acknowledged that developing faster interceptor drones is a difficult task, but said that Ukraine is close to introducing a whole range of low-cost solutions for mass production.

"I am confident that we could soon have a whole class of weapons that will be effective in combating jet-powered drones," he told Reuters.

The skies over Kiev are teeming with jet drones

The sudden increase in Russian production of jet-powered drones has allowed Moscow to bombard Ukraine, especially Kiev, with a huge number of aircraft that are much harder to shoot down than their propeller-driven predecessors due to their speed.

After Russia began launching thousands of cheap, propeller-driven Shahed drones into Ukraine in 2022, Kiev developed increasingly effective ways to destroy them, increasing the interception rate to around 90 percent.

Moscow has responded by ramping up its drones, the latest step in a technological race that has shaped the battlefield during nearly five years of war.

The change comes as Russia continues to relentlessly deploy significantly more powerful ballistic missiles, while Ukraine faces a shortage of the advanced interceptors needed to counter them.

Russia is already producing about 3.000 jet-powered drones a month, Ukrainian military intelligence estimates. Some resemble Shaheds with triangular wings, while others have tubular fuselages and small wings, making them look more like cruise missiles.

Russia launched about 450 drones in June, flying at speeds between 240 and 500 kilometers per hour, while that number rose to about 2.850 in August, the data showed. A typical Shahed drone, a low-cost propeller-driven attack drone based on an Iranian design, flies at speeds of less than 200 kilometers per hour.

The capital Kiev and the surrounding region were the most common targets, with almost a fifth of all drones launched, the data shows.

Cherevashenko said areas in and around Kiev, as well as around the Black Sea port city of Odessa, a major hub for Ukrainian maritime exports, suffered the brunt of the attacks.

"In the coming period, the total number of such drones in attacks will grow," Cherevashenko said.

According to him, in some attacks the share of jet-powered drones already exceeds 70 percent.

Sword against shield

In recent weeks, jet-powered drones have been hitting targets in central Kiev.

"The main danger of these drones is that they are guided, which means that they can change their flight path and altitude at the operator's command," Cherevashenko said.

Officials and military analysts believe that the drone that struck the headquarters of Ukraine's SBU security service last Sunday, hitting its chief's office with great precision, was manually guided.

Samuel Bendet, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, said the war in Ukraine represents a constant battle of "sword against shield," in which the adversary quickly finds a response to every new capability and innovation.

“The current Russian advantage will be eroded over time by Ukrainian countermeasures, in the form of fast and cheap interceptors capable of destroying jet-powered drones,” he said.

To counter the thousands of Shahed drones that Russia has been launching every month over the past year, Ukraine has developed interceptor drones that typically cost less than $2.000 and have been able to shoot down a high percentage of incoming drones.

However, these assets cannot compete with jet-powered drones.

Boris Dolina, commander of the drone interceptor unit, said that it is sometimes possible to hit certain models of jet-powered drones when they slow down for maneuvering. However, he warned that Russia is already introducing and improving built-in systems that detect approaching objects and automatically increase speed.

Ukraine already has more than a thousand trained teams to operate drone interceptors. Companies are rapidly trying to build faster interceptors, some of which are themselves jet-powered, but as a failed test in July showed, progress has been uneven.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said more than 60 Ukrainian companies are working on jet-powered drone interception systems, although only a few have shown concrete results so far.

A source in the Ukrainian drone industry said that some prototypes may be too large and too slow for use in combat conditions, where opportunities to engage fast-moving targets are very short.

New solutions

One of the most promising solutions, according to officials and experts, is a new generation of cheap guided missiles. Ukraine's stockpile of expensive air defense missiles, which it received from the West, is limited, and they were never intended to defend against massed attacks by jet drones.

Cherevashenko said that some of the new missiles are already being tested and will be significantly cheaper than the drones they are supposed to shoot down.

Ukraine has previously managed to divert some Russian drones from their paths by sending them false GPS data, but a drone industry source said that many jet drones use advanced 16-channel antennas, making them highly resistant to jamming and signal disruption.

Anatoly Khrapchinsky, director of development at Ukrainian defense company Fly Group Ukraine, told Reuters that individual systems would no longer be enough and that the solution lay in a networked approach, in which multiple devices act as a single “organism” to confuse enemy navigation systems.

“The drone still thinks it is flying towards its target, but its autopilot, relying on false coordinates, gradually changes course on its own and directs the aircraft away from cities, towards safe areas.”

A drone industry source said that today's interceptor drones, while slower than their targets, could be adapted to attack from the front, rather than chasing the drones from behind. This would require artificial intelligence-based guidance systems capable of accurately calculating the trajectory of an approaching drone.

Cherevashenko said that there have already been successful head-on interceptions, using both automated guidance software and drones manually controlled by operators. While the technology needs further refinement before widespread use, he said it represents the future of air defense.

For now, however, much of the burden falls on military aircraft, which are fast enough to keep up with jet-powered drones. Dwindling supplies of air-to-air missiles are forcing pilots to increasingly rely on aircraft cannons, a dangerous tactic because of the risk of colliding with parts of a downed drone.