The far-reaching operation was being hailed as the most inventive and bold of the war so far. Indeed, IEEE Spectrum has been regularly covering the ascent of Ukraine’s military drone programs, both offensive and defensive , and for air marine , and land missions. In this article, originally posted on April 6, we described another bold Ukrainian drone initiative, which was applying artificial intelligence-based navigational software to enable killer drones to navigate to targets even in the presence of heavy jamming

After the Estonian startup KrattWorks dispatched the first batch of its Ghost Dragon ISR quadcopters to Ukraine in mid-2022, the company’s officers thought they might have six months or so before they’d need to reconceive the drones in response to new battlefield realities. The 46-centimeter-wide flier was far more robust than the hobbyist-grade UAVs that came to define the early days of the drone war against Russia. But within a scant three months, the Estonian team realized their painstakingly fine-tuned device had already become obsolete.

Related: Ukraine Tech Turns Combat into Real-Life “Game”

Rapid advances in jamming and spoofing—the only efficient defense against drone attacks—set the team on an unceasing marathon of innovation. Its latest technology is a neural-network-driven optical navigation system, which allows the drone to continue its mission even when all radio and satellite-navigation links are jammed. It began tests in Ukraine in December, part of a trend toward jam-resistant, autonomous UAVs (uncrewed aerial vehicles). The new fliers herald yet another phase in the unending struggle that pits drones against the jamming and spoofing of electronic warfare, which aims to sever links between drones and their operators. There are now tens of thousands of jammers straddling the front lines of the war, defending against drones that are not just killing soldiers but also destroying armored vehicles, other drones, industrial infrastructure, and even tanks.

During tests near Kyiv, Ukraine, in 2024, a technician prepared to release a drone outfitted with software by Auterion. Justyna Mielnikiewicz

“The situation with electronic warfare is moving extremely fast,” says Martin Karmin, KrattWorks’ cofounder and chief operations officer. “We have to constantly iterate. It’s like a cat-and-mouse game.”

I met Karmin at the company’s headquarters in the outskirts of Estonia’s capital, Tallinn. Just a couple of hundred kilometers to the east is the tiny nation’s border with Russia, its former oppressor. At 38, Karmin is barely old enough to remember what life was like under Russian rule, but he’s heard plenty. He and his colleagues, most of them volunteer members of the Estonian Defense League, have “no illusions” about Russia, he says with a shrug.

His company is as much about arming Estonia as it is about helping Ukraine, he acknowledges. Estonia is not officially at war with Russia, of course, but regions around the border between the two countries have for years been subjected to persistent jamming of satellite-based navigation systems, such as the European Union’s Galileo satellites, forcing occasional flight cancellations at Tartu airport. In November, satellite imagery revealed that Russia is expanding its military bases along the Baltic states’ borders.

“We are a small country,” Karmin says. “Innovation is our only chance.”

Navigating by Neural Network

In KrattWorks’ spacious, white-walled workshop, a handful of engineers are testing software. On the large ocher desk that dominates the room, a selection of KrattWorks’ devices is on display, including a couple of fixed-wing, smoke-colored UAVs designed to serve as aerial decoys, and the Ghost Dragon ISR quadcopter, the company’s flagship product.

Now in its third generation, the Ghost Dragon has come a long way since 2022. Its original command-and-control-band radio was quickly replaced with a smart frequency-hopping system that constantly scans the available spectrum, looking for bands that aren’t jammed. It allows operators to switch among six radio-frequency bands to maintain control and also send back video even in the face of hostile jamming.

The Ghost Dragon reconnaissance drone from Krattworks can navigate autonomously, by detecting landmarks as it flies over them. KrattWorks

The drone’s dual-band satellite-navigation receiver can switch among the four main satellite positioning services: GPS, Galileo, China’s BeiDou, and Russia’s GLONASS. It’s been augmented with a spoof-proof algorithm that compares the satellite-navigation input with data from onboard sensors. The system provides protection against sophisticated spoofing attacks that attempt to trick drones into self-destruction by persuading them they’re flying at a much higher altitude than they actually are.

At the heart of the quadcopter’s matte grey body is a machine-vision-enabled computer running a 1-gigahertz Arm processor that provides the Ghost Dragon with its latest superpower: the ability to navigate autonomously, without access to any global navigation satellite system (GNSS). To do that, the computer runs a neural network that, like an old-fashioned traveler, compares views of landmarks with positions on a map to determine its position. More precisely, the drone uses real-time views from a downward-facing optical camera, comparing them against stored satellite images, to determine its position.

A promotional video from Krattworks depicts scenarios in which the company’s drones augment soldiers on offensive maneuvers. KrattWorks

“Even if it gets lost, it can recognize some patterns, like crossroads, and update its position,” Karmin says. “It can make its own decisions, somewhat, either to return home or to fly through the jamming bubble until it can reestablish the GNSS link again.”

Designing Drones for High Lethality per Cost

Just as machine guns and tanks defined the First World War, drones have become emblematic of Ukraine’s struggle against Russia. It was the besieged Ukraine that first turned the concept of a military drone on its head. Instead of Predators and Reapers worth tens of millions of dollars each, Ukraine began purchasing huge numbers of off-the-shelf fliers worth a few hundred dollars apiece—the kind used by filmmakers and enthusiasts—and turned them into highly lethal weapons. A recent New York Times investigation found that drones account for 70 percent of deaths and injuries in the ongoing conflict.

“We have much less artillery than Russia, so we had to compensate with drones,” says Serhii Skoryk, commercial director at Kvertus, a Kyiv-based electronic-warfare company. “A missile is worth perhaps a million dollars and can kill maybe 12 or 20 people. But for one million dollars, you can buy 10,000 drones, put four grenades on each, and they will kill 1,000 or even 2,000 people or destroy 200 tanks.”

Near the Russian border in Kharkiv Oblast, a Ukrainian soldier prepared first-person-view drones for an attack on 16 January 2025. Jose Colon/Anadolu/Getty Images

Electronic warfare techniques such as jamming and spoofing aim to neutralize the drone threat. A drone that gets jammed and loses contact with its pilot and also loses its spatial bearings will either crash or fly off randomly until its battery dies. According to the Royal United Services Institute, a U.K. defense think tank, Ukraine may be losing about 10,000 drones per month, mostly due to jamming. That number includes explosives-laden kamikaze drones that don’t reach their targets, as well as surveillance and reconnaissance drones like KrattWorks’ Ghost Dragon, meant for longer service.

“Drones have become a consumable item,” says Karmin. “You will get maybe 10 or 15 missions out of a reconnaissance drone, and then it has to be already paid off because you will lose it sooner or later.”

Russia took an unexpected step in the summer of 2024, ditching sophisticated wireless control in favor of hard-wired drones fitted with spools of optical fiber.

Tech minds on both sides of the conflict have therefore been working hard to circumvent electronic defenses. Russia took an unexpected step starting in early 2024, deploying hard-wired drones fitted with spools of optical fiber. Like a twisted variation on a child’s kite, the lethal UAVs can venture 20 or more kilometers away from the controller, the hair-thin fiber floating behind them, providing an unjammable connection.

“Right now, there is no protection against fiber-optic drones,” Vadym Burukin, cofounder of the Ukrainian drone startup Huless, tells IEEE Spectrum. “The Russians scaled this solution pretty fast, and now they are saturating the battle front with these drones. It’s a huge problem for Ukraine.”

One way that drone operators can defeat electronic jamming is by communicating with their drone via a fiber optic line that pays out of a spool as the drone flies. This is a tactic favored by Russian units, although this particular first-person-view drone is Ukrainian. It was demonstrated near Kyiv on 29 January 2025. Efrem Lukatsky/AP

Ukraine, too, has experimented with optical fiber, but the technology didn’t take off, as it were. “The optical fiber costs upwards from $500, which is, in many cases, more than the drone itself,” Burukin says. “If you use it in a drone that carries explosives, you lose some of that capacity because you have the weight of the cable.” The extra weight also means less capacity for better-quality cameras, sensors, and computers in reconnaissance drones.

Small Drones May Soon Be Making Kill-or-No-Kill Decisions

Instead, Ukraine sees the future in autonomous navigation. This past July, kamikaze drones equipped with an autonomous navigation system from U.S. supplier Auterion destroyed a column of Russian tanks fitted with jamming devices.

“It was really hard to strike these tanks because they were jamming everything,” says Burukin. “The drones with the autopilot were the only equipment that could stop them.”

Auterion’s “terminal guidance” system uses known landmarks to orient a drone as it seeks out a target. Auterion

The technology used to hit those tanks is called terminal guidance and is the first step toward smart, fully autonomous drones, according to Auterion’s CEO, Lorenz Meier. The system allows the drone to directly overcome the jamming whether the protected target is a tank, a trench, or a military airfield.

“If you lock on the target from, let’s say, a kilometer away and you get jammed as you approach the target, it doesn’t matter,” Meier says in an interview. “You’re not losing the target as a manual operator would.”

The visual navigation technology trialed by KrattWorks is the next step and an innovation that has only reached the battlefield this year. Meier expects that by the end of 2025, firms including his own will introduce fully autonomous solutions encompassing visual navigation to overcome GPS jamming, as well as terminal guidance and smart target recognition.

“The operator would only decide the area where to strike, but the decision about the target is made by the drone,” Meier explains. “It’s already done with guided shells, but with drones you can do that at mass scale and over much greater distances.”

Auterion, founded in 2017 to produce drone software for civilian applications such as grocery delivery, threw itself into the war effort in early 2024, motivated by a desire to equip democratic countries with technologies to help them defend themselves against authoritarian regimes. Since then, the company has made rapid strides, working closely with Ukrainian drone makers and troops.

“A missile worth perhaps a million dollars can kill maybe 12 or 20 people. But for one million dollars, you can buy 10,000 drones, put four grenades on each, and they will kill 1,000 or even 2,000 people or destroy 200 tanks.” —Serhii Skoryk, Kvertus

But purchasing Western equipment is, in the long term, not affordable for Ukraine, a country with a per capita GDP of US $5,760—much lower than the European average of $38,270. Fortunately, Ukraine can tap its engineering workforce, which is among the largest in Europe. Before the war, Ukraine was a go-to place for Western companies looking to set up IT- and software-development centers. Many of these workers have since joined Ukraine’s DIY military-technician (“miltech”) development movement.

An engineer and founder at a Ukrainian startup that produces long-range kamikaze drones, who didn’t want to be named because of security concerns, told Spectrum that the company began developing its own computers and autonomous navigation software for target tracking “just to keep the price down.” The engineer said Ukrainian startups offer advanced military-drone technology at a price that is a small fraction of what established competitors in the West are charging.

Within three years of the February 2022 Russian invasion, Ukraine produced a world-class defense-tech ecosystem that is not only attracting Western innovators into its fold, but also regularly surpassing them. The keys to Ukraine’s success are rapid iterations and close cooperation with frontline troops. It’s a formula that’s working for Auterion as well. “If you want to build a leading product, you need to be where the product is needed the most,” says Meier. “That’s why we’re in Ukraine.”

Burukin, from Ukrainian startup Huless, believes that autonomy will play a bigger role in the future of drone warfare than Russia’s optical fibers will. Autonomous drones not only evade jamming, but their range is limited only by their battery storage. They also can carry more explosives or better cameras and sensors than the wired drones can. On top of that, they don’t place high demands on their operators.

“In the perfect world, the drone should take off, fly, find the target, strike it, and report back on the task,” Burukin says. “That’s where the development is heading.”

The cat-and-mouse game is nowhere near over. Companies including KrattWorks are already thinking about the next innovation that would make drone warfare cheaper and more lethal. By creating a drone mesh network, for example, they could send a sophisticated intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance drone followed by a swarm of simpler kamikaze drones to find and attack a target using visual navigation.

“You can send, like, 10 drones, but because they can fly themselves, you don’t need a superskilled operator controlling every single one of these,” notes KrattWorks’ Karmin, who keeps tabs on tech developments in Ukraine with a mixture of professional interest, personal empathy, and foreboding. Rarely does a day go by that he does not think about the expanding Russian military presence near Estonia’s eastern borders.

“We don’t have a lot of people in Estonia,” he says. “We will never have enough skilled drone pilots. We must find another way.”

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Ukrainian forces examining the wreckage of Russia’s nightly drone assaults last week uncovered a new, highly sophisticated weapon, marking a potential escalation in Moscow’s aerial capabilities.

Unlike the predominantly black drones typically deployed by Russia, this newly discovered model was white and boasted an array of advanced features. It was equipped with an advanced camera, an artificial intelligence-powered computing platform, and a radio link enabling remote operation from Russia.

Crucially, the drone also contained new, Iranian-made, anti-jamming technology, according to Serhii Beskrestnov, a Ukrainian electronics expert known as “Flash”. Mr Beskrestnov told The Associated Press that while most Russian attack drones are black, this new one was distinctly white.

Inside, there were no markings or labels consistent with Russian-made drones. Instead, the stickers followed a “standard Iran labeling system,” Beskrestnov said.

Experts who spoke to AP said the labels are not conclusive proof but the English-language words are consistent with how Iran marks its drones. It is quite possible, they said, that it was sold by Iran to Russia to test in combat.

open image in gallery An Iranian Shahed exploding drone launched by Russia flies through the sky seconds before it struck buildings in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Oct. 17, 2022 ( Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved )

Moscow has pummeled Ukraine almost nightly with Iranian-designed drones throughout the course of the war, now in its fourth year. They swarm above Ukrainian cities, their moped-like sound filling the air, as air defenses and sharpshooters take aim. While some carry warheads, many are decoys.

Russia is improving its drone technology and tactics, striking Ukraine with increasing success. But the U.K’s Defense Ministry said Israel’s strikes on Iran will “likely negatively impact the future provision of Iranian military equipment to Russia,” since Tehran had supplied “significant quantities” of attack drones to Moscow.

Israel’s military would not comment on what it struck. Although it has carried out sweeping attacks across Iranian military facilities and the U.S. bombed nuclear sites, the impact on Iran’s drone industry is not yet clear.

The anti-jammer in the latest drone discovered in Ukraine contained new Iranian technology, suggested Beskrestnov. Other components in Russia’s drones often come from Russia, China and the West.

Although Russia’s drones are based on an Iranian design, the majority are now made in Russia.

And because much of the technology to make them, including the Iranian software and technical expertise, has already been transferred to Russia, the immediate impact on Moscow’s drone program could be limited, experts said.

However, if Israel struck facilities producing drones and components — such as engines and anti-jamming units — which are shipped to Russia, then Moscow could face supply shortages, experts suggested.

open image in gallery Serhii Beskrestnov, more widely known as Flash, a Ukrainian electronics expert who hunts drones for the military, stands near his kitted-out black van in Kyiv, Ukraine, Nov. 4, 2024. (AP Photo/Hanna Arhirova, File) ( Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. )

Moscow makes its Shahed — meaning “witness” in Farsi — drones based on an Iranian model in a highly secure factory in central Russia.

The Alabuga plant in the Tatarstan region took delivery of its first Iranian drones in 2022 after Russia and Iran signed a $1.7 billion deal. It later established its own production lines, churning out thousands of them.

The upgrades identified from debris in Ukraine are the latest in a series of innovations that began with Russia buying drones directly from Iran in the fall of 2022, according to leaked documents from Alabuga previously reported on by AP.

In early 2023, Iran shipped about 600 disassembled drones to be reassembled in Russia before production was localized. In 2024, the design was adapted.

Specialists added cameras to some drones and implemented a plan, revealed in an AP investigation, dubbed Operation False Target — creating decoys to overwhelm Ukrainian air defenses.

Alabuga also modified the Shahed to make it more lethal, creating a thermobaric drone which sucks out all the oxygen in its path — potentially collapsing lungs, crushing eyeballs and causing brain damage. The size of the warhead was also upgraded.

Jet-propelled drones and AI

In at least one case, Iran shipped a jet-powered Shahed that Russia “experimented” with in Ukraine, said Fabian Hinz, an expert on Russian and Iranian drones at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.

Ukraine’s air force found two more examples of jet-powered Shaheds in May but it appears they have not been widely adopted.

That’s possibly because the Iranian design uses a very sophisticated jet engine that also powers Iran’s cruise missiles, Hinz said. That likely makes it too expensive to use nightly in Ukraine, he said, even if the engine is swapped to a cheaper Chinese model.

The electronics in the drone most recently found in Ukraine are also very expensive, Beskrestnov said, pointing to its AI computing platform, camera and radio link. It’s unclear why it was deployed but Beskrestnov suggested it could be used to target “critical infrastructure,” including electrical transmission towers.

Previous versions of the Shahed drone could not hit a moving object or change their flight path once launched. They sometimes ended up “traveling in circles all through Ukraine before they finally hit a target,” which made them easier to shoot down, said David Albright of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security.

The radio link means an operator can communicate with the drone from Russia, introduce a new target and potentially control many drones at the same time, the experts said.

The remotely operable Shahed has similarities to drones Russia is already using on the front lines and is particularly resistant to jamming, Beskrestnov said.

There are eight, rather than four, antennas on the drone which means it is harder for Ukraine to overwhelm it with electronic warfare, he said.

The new drone has markings that suggest the anti-jamming unit was made in Iran within the past year and similarities to Iranian components found in older models of the Shahed, said Beskrestnov.

Such advanced antennas, said Hinz, have not previously been seen on drones used in Ukraine but have been found on Iranian missiles destined for Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen.

In a statement, Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense told AP in the past four months it had found drones with eight and 12 antennas made in China and Russia.

Despite sanctions, both Russia and Iran have continued to find ways to procure Western technology.

The drone’s AI computing platform can help it autonomously navigate if communications are jammed. Similar technology was used by Ukraine to attack aircraft deep inside Russia during Operation Spiderweb, when it used drones to target Russian air bases hosting nuclear-capable strategic bombers.

open image in gallery Rescue workers put out a fire of a building damaged by a Russian drone strike on Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, June 10, 2025. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka, File) ( Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved )

Russia is improving its technology at the same time as it is also changing its tactics.

Moscow is flying the Shahed drones at high altitudes where they are out of reach of Ukrainian shooters, as well as lower down to avoid radio detection.

It is also carrying out massive group attacks on cities including where drones sometimes dive-bomb a target, Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense said.

The drones can be used to clear a path for cruise missiles or to exhaust Ukrainian air defenses by sending a wave of decoys followed by one or two with a warhead.

The tactics appear to be working.

AP collected almost a year’s worth of Russian drone strike data on Ukraine posted online by the Ukrainian air force.

An analysis shows that Russia significantly ramped up its attacks after U.S. President Donald Trump was inaugurated in January. And Russian hits have increased markedly since March — shortly before reports emerged that Russia was using Shahed drones with advanced jammers.

In November 2022, only around 6% of drones hit a discernible target but, by June, that reached about 16%. On some nights, almost 50% of drones got through Ukraine’s air defenses.

Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense said the Shaheds’ effectiveness is likely because Russia is firing more drones, including decoys, as well as the change in technology and tactics.

But although Russia appears to have had increasing success striking Ukraine, it is not clear if that will continue.

Israel’s strikes on Iran will “certainly” hurt Russia long-term, Albright said.

Moscow, he said, is “not going to be able to get as much assistance from Iran as it has been.”

A Strategy of Constant Pressure

Russia’s Shahed drone campaign illustrates the changing nature of aerial warfare in an era dominated by inexpensive, mass-produced unmanned systems. For most of the twenty-first century, the focus of aerial attack has been on precision. States use integrated global battle networks to find, fix, track, target, and assess strikes. Entire concepts of joint fires and targeting have evolved, largely driven by a mix of U.S., Russian, and Chinese military theory that emphasize waves of precision strike. In Russian writing, these ideas have tended to include more of a focus on striking critical infrastructure that speaks to a counter value (e.g., civilian targets) and not just a counter force (e.g., military targets). This approach is consistent with what Robert Pape referred to as a punishment strategy in his seminal book Bombing to Win. Seen in relation to competitive strategy, the logic is one of cost imposition, albeit focused more on civilian pressure points than critical military targets.

In addition, nightly waves of Shaheds produce a secondary effect of military value. Even if the low-cost attack drones are easy to intercept, they force the defender to spend limited defense resources to intercept them. That is, the attacks impose costs not just on Kyiv’s leaders through popular pressure but also through attriting air defense assets. The net result is that Ukraine and its backers must find a way to change the cost calculus.

The key insight for defense analysts and strategists is that survival against large-scale drone saturation attacks requires a comprehensive, multi-layered defensive approach. This involves balancing the economic costs of attrition warfare with adaptable defense strategies. In other words, the theory of victory is lowering the cost of intercepting long-range, cost-effective attack drones like the Shahed.

To a large extent, Ukraine has developed ingenious solutions, many of which are linked to wartime innovation efforts run by its Digital Ministry, that lower the cost of intercept. First, Ukraine has fielded a network of tens of thousands of acoustic sensors to detect and track drones. Second, Ukraine has effectively built a common operating system called DELTA that allows it to track attacks and coordinate responses. By fusing data on attack drones with radar coverage and what frequencies systems are using, Kyiv can better allocate a mix of defense measures ranging from deploying mobile anti-aircraft teams to electronic attack and even aerial intercepts using light attack propeller planes. Other measures have included releasing small attack drones from high-altitude balloons and even custom, low-cost interceptor drones.

Yet, for all the battlefield innovations, the rate of Shahed attacks keeps increasing. As a result, new methods to combat drone saturation are needed.

1. Test and Field New Defeat Measures

Given the sheer volume of low-cost, long-range attack drones, Ukraine needs to develop new approaches to protecting its skies. To complement its existing command and control system and network of mobile defense teams, Kyiv should work with partners in the United States and Europe to test and field high-energy lasers to counter drone saturation attacks.

There are large number of high-energy lasers on the market. RTX makes a 50-kilowatt laser mounted on U.S. Stryker combat vehicles (DE M-SHORAD) as well a smaller road mobile 10 kilowatt laser called the H4. This system would align well with the mobile air defense teams Ukraine already uses to hunt Shaheds. There are also palletized options, like BlueHalo’s LOCUST, that can be quickly moved to adapt to Russian targeting.

There are also larger systems that could be integrated with urban power grids. Lockheed Martin manufactures the HELIOS, a 60-kilowatt laser that can be installed on ships.

Other countries also have candidate high-energy weapons that could support defending Ukrainian cities, including the United Kingdom, Turkey (through Aselsan), and Germany (through Rheinmetall), the latter of which has successfully tested a 50-kilowatt laser.

Ukraine presents a win-win opportunity. These firms need battlefield tests of their systems to further refine them. Every Russian low-cost, long-range attack drone shot down with a high-energy laser makes Ukrainian cities safer and sends a clear message to other coercive states.

2. Increase Long-Range Strikes

The best place to destroy a Shahed is on the ground. From factories where the drones are assembled to storage and launch facilities, there are multiple points Ukraine could hold at risk to decrease the number of Shahed attacks. Ukraine has demonstrated its ability to conduct long-range strikes against Russian logistics networks and airbases. These attacks could be complemented by cyber operations that reduce the rate of production, creating, in effect, virtual attrition. They can also involve covert action against the supply chain, a technique recently tried against Russian first-person view (FPV) drone components. In other words, Kyiv needs a campaign for targeting the entire system that produces, launches, and targets Shahed attacks daily that links kinetic and non-kinetic effects as well as conventional and unconventional methods.

3. Counter the Flow of Components

There is also a role for economic policy. The United States can work with European states to finally hold Chinese firms accountable for their support to Russia’s war machine. Earlier in the war, Moscow used sanctions-evading networks of shell companies and third-country trading to import the electronics needed to build long-range precision strike systems. Now, that market has shifted to China. The Main Intelligence Directorate of Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense has identified 200 component parts made in China that fuel Moscow’s punishment campaign. These include critical Controlled Reception Pattern Antennas (CRP) in the Shahed as well as onboard computers used for multiple classes of drones and Kinzhal ballistic missiles. Furthermore, since late 2023, Russia has been using Chinese technology for engines in its long-range attack drones. While the United States and European states cannot stop the flow of technological components, they can take steps to make it more costly, including launching investigations, levying sanctions, and freezing assets.

Conclusion: Weaponized Cost Imposition and the Future of Air Defense

Russia’s Shahed campaign is more than a series of drone strikes—it’s a warning shot about the future of war. In this new battlespace, coercive states don’t need precision to win. They need volume, velocity, and the willingness to deploy cheap systems to break expensive defenses and the will of a populace to resist. The Shahed is not just a drone—it is a coercive instrument in a broader punishment strategy aimed at draining Ukrainian resolve and testing the limits of Western support. It’s a slow grind, a war of wear and will, where the cost of each intercept slowly shifts the burden from offense to defense.

For defense planners and policymakers, the lesson is clear: Surviving drone saturation attacks in the age of autonomy and attrition requires more than exquisite systems and intermittent aid packages. It requires a full-spectrum approach—high-energy lasers for point defense, deeper strikes against production nodes, and a concerted campaign to cut the technological lifelines that connect Chinese components to Russian launch rails. Ukraine’s battlefield improvisation has bought time. What’s needed now is a strategic shift—one that builds layered, resilient, and economically sustainable air defenses while targeting the industrial ecosystems that power drone warfare.

In the end, every Shahed in the sky is a signal. They signal a new phase of military competition—one defined not by singular decisive blows, but by the persistent erosion of capacity and will. The challenge for democracies is to adapt faster than their adversaries escalate. Because if war is ultimately a test of systems—political, economic, and military—then the side that learns faster, fields smarter, and fights cheaper will shape the future battlefield.

Benjamin Jensen is director of the Futures Lab and a senior fellow for the Defense and Security Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Yasir Atalan is a data fellow in the Futures Lab at CSIS.

This brief is made possible by general support to CSIS. No direct sponsorship contributed to this brief.

On a fine day in early June, Ukrainian soldiers launched their latest killer robot. With a click on a screen, the unattractively named Gogol-M, a fixed-wing aerial drone with a 20-foot wingspan, took off from an undisclosed location and soared into a wide blue sky.

This “mothership” travelled 200km into Russia before releasing two attack drones hanging off its wings. Able to evade radar by flying at a low altitude, the smaller drones autonomously scanned the ground below to find a suitable target, and then locked on for the kill.

There was no one on the ground piloting the killing machines or picking out targets. The robots, powered by artificial intelligence, chose the undisclosed target and then flew into it, detonating their explosive load on impact.

Human input was restricted to teaching the drone about the type of target to destroy and the general area in which to search for it.

View image in fullscreen A still taken from video footage showing damage from drone attacks on Russian aircraft during Operation Spiderweb on 1 June. Photograph: UPI/Alamy Live News

The reusable mothership and its killer offspring cost $10,000 (£7,500), all-in. It can travel up to 300km, with the suicidal attack drones able to fly a further 30km.

Such a mission would previously have required missile systems with a price tag of between $3m and $5m, it is claimed. “If we are financed properly, we can produce hundreds, thousands of these drones every month,” says Andrii, whose company Strategy Force Solutions designed the technology for the Ukrainian forces.

The world was dazzled by Operation Spiderweb, in which 117 Ukrainian drones struck airbases deep inside Russia on 1 June, targeting the Kremlin’s nuclear-capable long-range bombers.

View image in fullscreen Footage appears to show Russian warplanes being struck and bursting into flames during Operation Spiderweb. Photograph: Unpixs/Telegram

Released from the top of lorries, the drones had “terminal guidance” software to allow them to fly autonomously to a chosen target in the final mile when Russian jamming systems cut them off from their pilots.

This is, however, not even the cutting edge of what Ukrainians and Russians are using in battle, let alone dreaming up.

Operation Spiderweb relied on a cunning plot to fool Russian lorry drivers into driving the unmanned aerial vehicles close to the targets. The drones were then piloted out of their hiding places. Since that operation was drawn up 18 months ago, a dearth of missile supply to Ukraine from the US, a shortage of homegrown drone pilots and the success of the Russian electronic warfare systems in jamming connections between operators and drones has delivered an extraordinary leap in innovation in the field of autonomous weapons. The Kremlin has followed suit, with Russia also able to exploit a larger production capacity.

All these checks in airports are useless already. You don’t need to bring a bomb to blow up the plane. You can just wait outside with the drone. Anton Skrypnyk, Roboneers

“There is no technology that survives longer than three months as an effective measure against something,” says Viktor Sakharchuk, co-founder at Twist Robotics, which claims to be the producer of the first drones with autonomous terminal guidance systems used by Ukraine’s armed forces.

Undoubtedly, the most advanced systems in the world are being devised in laboratories in the US and China. A Pentagon programme known as Replicator 1 is due to deliver “multiple thousands” of all-domain autonomous systems by August 2025.

A first mission is reportedly imminent for the Jiu Tian, a Chinese mothership drone said to be able to fly at 50,000ft (15,240 metres) with a range of more than 4,000 miles (6,400km), carrying six tonnes of ammunition and up to 100 autonomous drones.

View image in fullscreen Jiu Tian, China’s military’s new unmanned drone, on display at an aerospace exhibition in Zhuhai, China, November 2024. Photograph: Kyodo Photo/Newscom/Alamy

The dubious gift to the world from the war in Ukraine is cheap, scaleable autonomous weaponry, which is increasingly battlefield proven.

“We strive for full autonomy,” says Mykhailo Fedorov, the 34-year-old deputy prime minister of Ukraine and minister of digital transformation overseeing the Ukrainian effort in what he describes as a “tech war”.

“Our models are being trained to recognise targets to understand target prioritisation,” he says. “We do not have full autonomy yet. We use the human factor where we need to, but we are developing different scenarios for taking autonomy further.

“We are also testing some autonomous drones, which we have not announced and are probably not planning to announce, but they have a high degree of autonomy, and they can potentially combine themselves into swarms. We are still facing technical problems and hurdles, but we already see a path forward on this.”

View image in fullscreen Mykhailo Fedorov, deputy prime minister of Ukraine and minister of digital transformation, in Kyiv, 15 September 2023. Photograph: Reuters

Swarm technology involves multiple drones working together to achieve kills – a pack of predators able to devise a plan to close off escape routes and talk to each other as they go about their deadly business.

The targets are not merely tanks, planes, railway hubs and critical infrastructure. The top priority is to kill people.

“There will be cheaper autonomous systems which can target infantry at a smaller scale because this is a key target, because the doctrine of war has changed, heavy equipment is used less and less,” Fedorov says.

“The grey zone [the conflict area outside the frontline] has increased in width, and Russia attacks with small infantry groups. And our goal, our key goal, is to find a counter measure to small infantry groups. So we are looking to develop smaller and cheaper drones to use against infantry.”

The Russians are not “idle” on this either, Fedorov says.

Serhii “Flash” Beskrestnov has become a popular social media presence in Ukraine in recent years, providing real-time information on the technological developments in the war. He travels to the frontline once a month in a black VW van notable for an array of antennas on the roof.

He first came across the Russian version of the Gogol-M about six months ago, and estimates that the Russians are now launching 50 of the drones, known as the V2U, daily to strike targets near the frontlines.

One was found in Sumy city centre, 20km from the front in north-east Ukraine, but they are believed to have a 100km range.

View image in fullscreen One of Russia’s V2U drones, as it was shot down in Ukraine. Photograph: Handout

As with the Ukrainian version, without any communication with the system operator the V2U can enter a given target area using only its visual navigation, and independently find, select and engage the target.

We didn’t know the Terminator was Ukrainian. They can use AI systems that know how you look, and try to find you and kill you Oleg Fedoryshyn, DevDroid

Beskrestnov has witnessed them swarming. “Like doves, they fly on different levels,” he says. “For us, the main problem is that we don’t understand how we can act against them. The jamming doesn’t work.”

It will take time for both sides to scale up this level of autonomy, says Kateryna Stepanenko, Russia deputy team lead and analyst at the Institute for the Study of War.

“The autonomous thinking part is still missing at large, the autonomous thinking where the drone can, just by itself, identify a target and learn from that experience,” she says. “That is where both Russian and Ukrainian forces are still trying to work with the technology and innovate further.”

View image in fullscreen A drone produced by the Ukrainian company Vyriy during the test flight. Photograph: Julia Kochetova/The Guardian

Fibre optic drones, which are connected to their pilots by a wire, are the technology of the moment because they are impervious to jamming, says Olexii, chief of future battle plans in the Khartia, a combat brigade of the National Guard of Ukraine fighting on the north-eastern front in the Kharkiv region.

But the race to perfect remote killing is being run at a furious pace.

Perhaps it is the dark skies above him and the torrential rain hammering on the car windscreen, but as Oleg Fedoryshyn watches his latest unmanned land vehicle, equipped with machine gun turret, being given a run out on a muddy field in west Ukraine, the head of research and design at DevDroid is in a reflective mood.

The Ukrainian defence company is working on making this weapon-wielding machine autonomous, allowing it to operate and target without human intervention, he says.

Considerations include the avoidance of friendly fire – the robots turning on their makers.

View image in fullscreen Pilots in Ukraine direct drones being designed by DevDroid to see and detect the target autonomously, 3 June. Photograph: Kasia Stręk/The Guardian

“We didn’t know the Terminator was Ukrainian,” Fedoryshyn jokes. “But maybe a Terminator is not the worst thing that can happen? How can you be safe in some city if somebody tried to use a drone to kill you? It’s impossible. OK, you can use some jamming of radial connection, but they can use some AI systems that know visually how you look, and try to find you and kill you. I don’t think that the Terminator and the movie is the worst outcome. If this war never started, we will never have this type of weapon that is too easy to buy and is very easy to use.”

Anton Skrypnyk, chief executive of Roboneers, a Ukrainian company that develops ground-based robotic systems, says he believes the developments in Ukraine over the past year should prompt a rethink across the world about security, given the chance of the technology falling into terrorists’ hands.

View image in fullscreen Anton Skrypnyk, chief executive of Roboneers, with remotely controlled weapon stations, Ukraine, 2 June. Photograph: Kasia Stręk/The Guardian

“All these checks that we are going through in airports are completely useless already, so we are just wasting our time,” he says. “You don’t need to bring a bomb to blow up the plane. You can just wait outside with the drone and wait for the plane, for the prime minister.

“You can just fly into an airport, 100 drones, 1,000 drones, in automatic mode. Those drones will not be afraid of the jamming, so all your protection, which does not involve physical destruction, are useless.

“Would you put a remote weaponised station for every airport to shoot them down? What would be the budget of such projects?

“The protection of the cities should start on the level of constantly monitoring all purchases, all routes, scanning faces, understanding the patterns of the behaviour of the people, and analysing it using artificial intelligence.

“The scariest thing is that nobody cares. It is like with 9/11. Until something happens, nobody cares.”

Skrypnyk is not entirely right.

At a two-day UN consultative meeting in New York on lethal autonomous weapons in May, the foreign minister of Sierra Leone, Musa Kabba, was heard in silence. “The proliferation of autonomous weapons systems compels the international community to confront a fundamental moral and legal dilemma. Should algorithms ever be permitted to decide who lives and who dies?” he asked. “Excellencies allow me to reflect on the poem of the famous Irish poet WB Yeats in his Second Coming, when he said: ‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre; The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world; The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere; The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.’”

It’s most important for us to find a technology which will stop the Russians, we will consider regulation of tests after the war Mykhailo Fedorov, deputy prime minister of Ukraine

For eight years, diplomats working under the auspices of the UN’s convention on certain weapons have been meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, to discuss dispassionately and reach a decision by consensus on how international law should adapt to the rise of lethal autonomous weapons.

The questions raised include what level of human intervention should be insisted upon and who should be held accountable when a robot has committed an atrocity.

It has been a largely fruitless exercise. They have yet to agree on a definition of a lethal autonomous weapon let alone what to ban and what to regulate.

View image in fullscreen Sierra Leone’s foreign minister, Musa Kabba, at a Security Council meeting in New York, in January. Photograph: Zuma Press, Inc./Alamy

The UN meeting in New York was born out of frustration and convened after a resolution of the general assembly. Three countries, Russia, Belarus and North Korea, voted against it being held but 166 were in support. Ukraine abstained.

About 120 of the countries represented at the meeting indicated their backing for a new treaty similar to the 1997 anti-personnel mine ban treaty that prohibited their use, production, transfer and stockpiling.

Alexander Kmentt, the director of the disarmament, arms control and non-proliferation department of the Austrian foreign ministry, says: “The integration of autonomy into weapon systems is extremely fast paced. Most of what we see in Ukraine is still not fully autonomous, but it’s getting there.

“The vast majority want to see negotiations of a legally binding instrument as soon as possible. The vast majority, like us, would be very happy if that group of experts in Geneva makes the switch from discussions to negotiations with urgency.”

If attempts to reach a consensus were abandoned, a treaty could be adopted by the UN’s general assembly with a simple majority vote of member states.

The UN’s secretary general, António Guterres, indicated his support, telling delegates that autonomous weaponry was a “defining issue of our time” and that a legally binding instrument should be concluded by 2026.

The threat posed by lethal autonomous weapon systems, machines that “have the power and discretion to take human lives without human control are politically unacceptable, morally repugnant, and should be banned by international law”, he told delegates.

View image in fullscreen One of DevDroid’s unmanned ground vehicles, with turrets for machine guns, which are being developed to become autonomous. Photograph: Kasia Stręk/The Guardian

The landmine agreement, known as the Ottawa treaty, is seemingly falling apart today, with Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland announcing their intention to withdraw. But it had an impact, campaigners say.

In 1997, more than 25,000 people were killed or injured each year by landmines; by 2013, that number had fallen to 3,300.

Representatives of the Stop Killer Robots campaign, made up of more than 250 membership organisations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, were given the floor to address the delegates in May.

Humans did terrible things but they could be held to account, they said. Autonomous weapons could kill more people than intended, or different people. Their low production costs made them attractive to non-state armed groups and they were vulnerable to cyber-attacks, creating new ways for hackers to cause chaos, they said.

Russia’s delegate, sitting four rows down from the Ukrainian representative in the hemicycle at the New York meeting, did not agree. “We do not see any convincing reasons requiring the introduction of any new restriction or bans on lethal autonomous weapons,” she told the meeting.

The US is also among those that believe existing international law and national measures are sufficient to address the ethical and legal concerns.

View image in fullscreen Robot dogs during the parade to celebrate the US Army’s 250th anniversary and Donald Trump’s 79th birthday in Washington DC on 14 June. Photograph: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

Robert in den Bosch, the Dutch diplomat who is chairing the talks in Geneva, concedes that his mandate to consider and formulate “elements of an instrument or other measures” to address the emerging threat is difficult.

But achieving agreement through consensus is worth battling for, he says. Events in Ukraine over the past 12 months have given the extra impetus to the talks in Geneva, he claims – the British delegate was even spoken to recently for talking too quickly for the interpreter.

“Look at the Ottawa treaty,” he says. “No US, no Russia, no China, no India, no Pakistan, all important players, but not parties to the treaty. And then if things go wrong, as right now in Ukraine, with a war, with Ukraine being a party to the treaty, and Russia not. You get a situation in which not everybody is bound by the same rules. Now Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland and Finland have even decided to quit because it’s not a balanced situation.”

The world could not afford to wait, Kabba told the Guardian after his intervention in the New York meeting.

“The Ukraine war has triggered the drive for regulation … and besides also at a micro level, in our sub region in west Africa, drones are used in terrorist conflict there,” he said. “There are over 190 countries in the world, and we understand the measure of the powers that these two countries [the US and Russia] possess – but the collective conscience of humanity will always try to triumph.”

View image in fullscreen Oleksii Babenko, chief executive at Vyriy drone manufacturing company. Photograph: Julia Kochetova/The Guardian

Back in Ukraine, confidence that the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice is more difficult to find after a horrifying three years of full-scale war. Oleksii Babenko, chief executive at Vyriy, a drone manufacturer working on autonomous and swarming technology says there is no alternative. “This war is an existential question for us, and you do or die,” he says.

Speaking from his government office in Kyiv after a few nights of heavy ballistic and drone attacks on the Ukrainian capital, Fedorov says Ukraine cannot afford to slow down.

“I think that parliamentarians and the ministry of defence are definitely thinking about [the ethical questions],” he says. “But it’s most important for us to find a technology which will stop the Russians, and as a democratic nation, we will consider regulation of tests after the war – as soon as the war is over.”

Click to expand Image Kherson Children’s House, an orphanage from which Russian forces allegedly took 49 children in Kherson, Ukraine, November 27, 2022. © 2022 Chris McGrath/Getty Images

The Trump administration has jeopardized efforts to find thousands of Ukrainian children illegally deported to Russia and Belarus, and in doing so, may have compromised evidence of war crimes by Russian officials.

After the US State Department funded Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab in 2022 to work on Ukraine, the lab exposed the scope of Russian deportation of children from occupied areas of Ukraine, a war crime. The lab documented the complicity of Russian and Belarusian officials at all levels and tracked thousands of children whose identities and whereabouts Russia refuses to share.

Human Rights Watch independently documented how some of these children were taken from Ukrainian residential institutions in occupied areas. Families did not consent to hostile occupying forces whisking away their children forever. Russian officials subjected the children to anti-Ukraine indoctrination, military training, and punishment for questioning the war.

The Yale lab unearthed data about the children, who were sent to dozens of residential institutions across Russia. It spotted some children’s names listed on Russian fostering and adoption databases, without their country of origin and with Russian nationality assigned to them. It was actively tracking thousands of children’s locations, a team member told Human Rights Watch.

The Trump administration’s budget cuts stopped the lab’s work. But that’s not all.

Under its contract with the lab, the US government is responsible for the lab’s database. When the government cut off its support, the lab’s team members lost access to the irreplaceable data they had collected.

That data included evidence of war crimes, scrupulously stored and safeguarded by the lab. With US authorization, the lab shared some – but not all – of this evidence with European authorities and the International Criminal Court (ICC), which issued arrest warrants for Putin and another Russian official for deporting Ukrainian children.

A March 19 congressional letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, spearheaded by Congressperson Greg Landsman, expressed concern that the US may have deleted the database.

The State Department denied this, but the US has not informed the lab how or where it is storing the information.

This is a potential disaster for efforts to find the children and for justice for crimes against them.

On March 20, US President Donald Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy about the deported children and promised “to help make sure they were returned home.”

Congress should press Rubio to confirm the integrity and security of the data, and to restore the lab’s access to the data, as well as funding, so it can continue its essential work for justice and find and repatriate abducted Ukrainian children.