KYIV, Ukraine — Russia is still using fast jet-powered drones to batter Ukraine’s energy facilities, bridges and other critical infrastructure at speeds beyond the reach of most of Kyiv’s drone interceptors, despite U.S. President Donald Trump’s unilateral announcement on Sunday of an energy ceasefire between the two countries.
Russia began using the jets heavily in July, when their numbers jumped fivefold from the previous month. They can now reach speeds of up to 373 mph (600 km/h) — more than three times the speed of the propeller-driven Geran-2 drones they evolved from — far exceeding the top velocity of the average Ukrainian interceptor drone, air force officials told lawmakers last week.
To stop the drones, Ukraine must instead rely on F-16s, newly installed machine gun turrets that use artificial intelligence to aim and costly air-defense missiles that are in short supply globally.
“Ukraine did not strike Russian oil refining and the energy sector in general for two days after the American president announced a ceasefire in the energy sector. But Russia did not listen to the American president,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote after jets seriously damaged a gas production facility in the northeastern Kharkiv region on Sunday night.
Russia launched 167 missiles and drones overnight Tuesday into Wednesday, including 77 jet-powered drones, which officials said struck one of Kyiv’s main power plants and left 600,000 without power.
Ukraine’s Air Force says they are beginning to field more effective countermeasures, but with Russia continuing to optimize the design of jet-powered drones to destroy critical infrastructure, the development of jets and anti-jet interceptors has become the latest neck-and-neck technology race on the battlefield.
Iran shipped Russia its first Shahed-131 and Shahed-136 drones in mid-August 2022, and Moscow rebranded them the Geran-1 and Geran-2 and was firing them at Ukrainian civilian infrastructure by that October.
Those propeller-driven drones were slow enough for Ukraine to build an economical defense around mobile fire teams and cheap interceptor drones rather than spending scarce missiles on every Shahed, and in February the interceptors accounted for more than 70% of Shahed downings over Kyiv.
The jet-powered Gerans are outrunning that defense, and Russia has since stopped building the slower Geran-3 and ramped up production of the Geran-4, which cruises at 217 to 311 mph (350 to 500 km/h), and the missile-shaped Geran-5, which carries a 90-kilogram (198-pound) warhead, Militarnyi reported in August, citing Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, known as HUR.
“The Geran-5 flies 150km/h faster than the Geran-4, so the goal is to intercept from the front rather than the rear — a much harder problem to solve,” an engineer at a Ukrainian defense contractor told the Kyiv Independent.
And they are still getting faster, with the Air Force projecting speeds of 500 to 560 mph (800 to 900 km/h), though none have been recorded yet, its deputy commander, Col. Yurii Cherevashenko, told a parliamentary commission Oct. 6.
A Geran-4 version Russia began flying this autumn is built to take out infrastructure, navigating by a U.S.-made magnetometer and an optical system and carrying a new warhead designed to cut bridges and power line supports, HUR said in an Oct. 5 statement.
The new 88-pound (40-kilogram) warhead “was created specifically to destroy high-voltage pylons and iron bridge structures,” Serhii “Flash” Beskrestnov, an EW expert and adviser to Zelenskyy, wrote on Telegram Sept. 30 when Russia was first spotted using the upgrade on a jet drone.
These optimized Russian jet drones hit Kyiv’s South Bridge, which carries cars and metro trains across the Dnipro River, at least five times on Oct. 1 and 2, once exploding near a pier as a train crossed overhead, then struck the city’s North Bridge on Oct. 3, officials said.
Ukrainian interceptors stopped roughly 90% of the older propeller-driven drones, but against the jets, the interception rate has been significantly lower.
“Initially, we saw a very low interception rate in Ukraine. It then rose to more than 30%, and in recent nights it has increased to over 50%,” Matthias Lehna, vice president of German drone maker Quantum Systems, told Ukrinform last week.
Air force officials reported downing 77% of incoming jet-powered drones on Tuesday night.
Ukraine put its first jet interceptor, the Alexa Spatium, into service only on Aug. 21, and a handful of other prototypes, including Wild Hornets’ STING S and SkyFall’s P1-SUN Jetkiller, have successfully downed a small number of Geran-5s, according to officials speaking to the Kyiv Independent.
Fourteen companies are flight-testing jet interceptors with the Air Force, and three have shown promising results, but the deputy air force commander said officials don’t expect the jet interceptors to be delivered at the scale Ukraine needs until the end of November at the earliest.
Jet drones already make up approximately 40% of the drones Russia launches and the Air Force expects that share to reach up to 80% of total attacks.
