Drone warfare is turning the tables for Ukraine against Russia

The country's war effort was at a nadir. But mass drone production has come to the rescue

On the battlefield, Russia's ground forces have struggled to make headway under the constant threat of Ukrainian drones, even after the onset of spring eased conditions for fighting. Photo by Diego Fedele/Getty Images

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Kyiv has taken the war to its enemy while slowing Russia’s advances on the battlefield — despite reduced support from Donald Trump’s United States.

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“We do ambushes near Russian airports,” Shtilierman said as he described a tactic against enemy aircraft used in recent weeks in occupied Crimea. He added that pilots equip fixed-wing FP-1 “mother ships” with two bomb-laden quadcopters — UAVs propelled by four rotors — so they can “sit near a Russian airport, wait until a plane comes to the airport, and then demolish it”.

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Months after the country’s morale hit a nadir and its allies despaired, Ukraine’s turnaround has challenged the long-held conventional wisdom that Russia’s bigger and better-equipped army can outlast Kyiv’s — boosting Ukrainians’ self-assurance to a level not seen in years.

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“This month saw changes in the dynamics in our favour, in Ukraine’s favour,” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said last week. “We are holding more positions and inflicting more damage.” He added that the country’s long-range hits on Russia were “especially significant”.

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Indeed, days after Shtilierman walked past assembly lines churning out FP-1 wings and engines, scores of the cheaply produced weapons would fly hundreds of kilometres to Moscow and beyond in Ukraine’s biggest bombardment of the Russian capital since the war began.

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The drones zipped through Russian air defences before plunging into oil refineries, sparking massive fireballs and plumes of black smoke visible from space.

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Alyona Getmanchuk, head of Ukraine’s mission to NATO, says her country is “now in one of its strongest positions since the beginning of the war” as it depends less on its partners.

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Ukrainian military officials and western experts agree that the country’s military is stronger than at any time since Trump’s return to office, as it fills gaps left by the U.S. through increased European aid and greater self-sufficiency.

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In particular, the mass production of UAVs — at a scale and speed hard to imagine just a year ago — allows Kyiv to wage the long-range drone war and maintain a shorter-range “kill zone” along the front line. This has largely compensated for Ukraine’s shortage of troops, slowing Russian offensives many feared would accelerate last year and this spring.

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The Kremlin still holds out hope of overrunning Ukrainian forces this year and is inching forward most months. But the war’s new phase marks a dramatic contrast with the start of the year, when Moscow held the initiative on the battlefield and a Russian winter air campaign destroyed much of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, bringing Kyiv — a city of around four million residents — to the brink of catastrophe.

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Unease in Moscow

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Ahead of Moscow’s Victory Day parade on May 9, an annual commemoration of the defeat of Nazi Germany and display of military might, Russian authorities appeared unusually uneasy. Amid speculation that Ukraine might target Red Square with drones, security was tightened and celebrations scaled back to include only foot soldiers.

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The parade went ahead but not before Zelenskyy mockingly “authorized” the event to proceed, issuing an official decree on the presidential website promising not to strike Moscow.

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In Russia, resentment is deepening over a war that has crept ever closer to home. Ukrainian drone strikes are a regular occurrence as far from the frontline as the Ural Mountains.

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State pollster Vtsiom’s index of “personal protest potential”, an indicator of respondents’ willingness to take part in demonstrations, rose to 25 per cent in April — its highest level since the war began.

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“Everyone is furious. People [in the Russian elite] are in full agreement this is a catastrophe,” a senior Russian businessman says. “It has to be resolved somehow.” He adds that Vladimir Putin, who has run Russia since the turn of the century, is “overwhelmingly unpopular” but also “old and stubborn”.

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On the battlefield, Russia’s ground forces have struggled to make headway under the constant threat of Ukrainian drones, even after the onset of spring eased conditions for fighting.

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Ukraine’s defence minister Mykhailo Fedorov said last week that some 35,000 Russians had been “killed or severely wounded” in both April and March — figures corroborated by a Ukrainian system that rewards combat units with new equipment for confirmed kills.

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Kyiv, which estimates that Russia enlists an average of 29,500 new soldiers a month, says that for five straight months its foe has lost more personnel than it can mobilize.

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Fedorov’s goal is to take 50,000 Russian troops a month off the battlefield, a number Kyiv maintains could be decisive in the war.

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Some intelligence reports indicate that a staggering 1.2 million Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded since February 2022, a casualty figure no major power has suffered in a single conflict since the second world war.

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On Wednesday, Anne Keast-Butler, the head of GCHQ, Britain’s cyber intelligence spy agency, said that almost half a million Russian soldiers had now been killed, adding: “Putin is going backwards on the battlefield.”

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The Ukrainian military also has a manpower shortage. Its forces have probably suffered somewhere between 500,000 and 600,000 casualties, according to western estimates. Neither Moscow nor Kyiv publishes official figures of the dead and wounded.

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But manpower is no longer solely a Ukrainian problem. “The Ukrainian army is exhausting the Russians,” says Robert Brovdi, the commander of the country’s Unmanned Systems Forces that have done so much to turn the tide of the war.

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Scaling up

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Backed by some €90 billion in EU loans, Kyiv is pouring resources into domestic arms production in a bid to reduce dependence on western weapons and the political constraints that often accompany them.

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It has moved at breakneck speed to scale up the manufacture of land, sea and air drones, artillery systems, electronic warfare equipment, and even ballistic and cruise missiles.

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In the first four months of this year, the Ukrainian defence ministry has reported exponential growth in the production of reconnaissance drones (up 441 per cent on the total for all of 2025), mid-strike drones (up 312 per cent) and deep-strike systems (up 53 per cent).

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According to the figures provided by the ministry, which cannot be independently verified, the output of fibre-optic first-person view drones has increased by 179 per cent.

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Such FPV drones offer far greater precision and manoeuvrability than their more conventional predecessors since they offer pilots a high-resolution view even when the UAV is moving at high speed and can be impervious to jammers.

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Stanislav Gryshyn of General Cherry, a leading Ukrainian drone manufacturer, says that in March an FPV made by his company brought down a Russian Ka-52 attack helicopter — a much more expensive piece of equipment.

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“FPV drones are fundamentally changing conventional warfare,” he adds.

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Long gone are the mass mechanized assaults with tanks and other heavy armoured vehicles that gave Russia an advantage.

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Franz-Stefan Gady, a Vienna-based military analyst who frequently travels to the front, says that by deploying swarms of FPVs to establish the 20 kilometre-deep kill zone, Kyiv has regained “parity or superiority along select sectors of the frontline in drone warfare”.

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He adds: “Ukraine is arguably in a better military position in May 2026 than it was in May 2025, and Russian problems are more systemic in 2026 than they were in 2025.”

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In the meantime, Ukraine is expanding from long-range strikes that wreak havoc on the oil and gas sector bankrolling the Kremlin’s war machine to medium-range drone operations to disrupt Russian logistics and supply lines.

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Several new mid-range drones including Fire Point’s FP-2, General Cherry’s Khmarynka, and the Hornet — a product made by the U.S.-based Swift Beat, a company founded by former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt — are now able to reach Russian targets previously out of reach.

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This month Ukrainian forces have published videos of drone strikes on targets 30 kilometres to 65 kilometres beyond the front line, as well as a hit by Fire Point’s FP-2 drones on a headquarters of the Russian FSB intelligence agency and another on an air defence system near the entrance of the occupied Crimean peninsula more than 200 kilometres away.

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Zelenskyy claimed around 100 Russian operatives were killed or wounded in the FSB strike.

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In a further sign of the disruption caused by Ukraine’s drone campaign, Russia also adopted a law on Wednesday allowing its central bank and other financial institutions to shoot down and jam drones — as long as they pay for such measures themselves.

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Dmytro Putiata, a former serviceman in Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, says the campaign has hit targets “at distances that had not been struck since at least 2024”, when the country still had greater stocks of U.S. and European longer-range missiles and launch systems such as Atacms, Himars and Storm Shadows.

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“With the appearance of so-called ‘middle-strike’ drones, stopping the Russian offensive at such depths has become substantially easier and more effective,” he adds, arguing that at present the Russian army “has no way to counter the systematic destruction of its depots, air defence systems, radars and so on”.

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Such developments are forcing the Russian military to reduce fuel usage and lengthen logistical routes by moving depots to 120 kilometres -150 kilometres rather than 80 kilometres away — and in some cases even on to Russian territory.

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On Wednesday, Fedorov, Ukraine’s defence minister, said the country was “scaling middle-strike operations to systematically destroy enemy logistics and supply lines”, posting on social media that “the enemy’s rear is no longer a safe haven”.

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Rybar, a Russian military Telegram channel run by pro-Kremlin bloggers, wrote this week that Ukrainian middle-range strikes in occupied southern regions including Crimea were “becoming increasingly threatening”.

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It added that a rise in the number of strikes against goods transports since early May increased the “risk of shortages of certain goods on the peninsula”, adding that petrol sales were already “limited”.

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“Attacks on cargo carriers on the [Crimean] peninsula directly impact the combat capabilities of the Russian Armed Forces on the southern fronts, where the situation is already precarious,” the Russian account said.

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Andriy Zagorodnyuk, a former Ukrainian defence minister now at the Centre for Defence Strategies, a Kyiv-based security think-tank, was among the first to emphasize the importance of medium-range strikes two years ago — a drive he says Ukraine is now benefiting from.

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“Russia currently is in a precarious position — they don’t have many options,” he says. “They don’t have a path to prevail.”

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How does it end?

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In an evening address this month Zelenskyy sought to capture the sense that the war is shifting.

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“Our long-range capabilities are significantly changing the situation and, more broadly, the world’s perception of Russia’s war,” he said.

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“Many partners are now signalling that they see what is happening and how everything has changed — both in attitudes towards this war and in the reachability of Russian targets on Russian territory.”

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After a year of largely fruitless diplomacy led by the Trump administration, many Ukrainian officials now believe negotiations will only become possible when Russia is put under greater pressure than it can comfortably sustain.

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Zelenskyy has refused to concede the eastern territory of the Donbas, which the Kremlin’s forces have failed to capture since their first, covert invasion of the region in 2014.

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Kyiv aims to weaken Russia’s capacity to sustain the war while convincing Moscow that the costs of continuing it will keep rising.

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To date, however, Putin has shown no indication of dropping his hardline demands, which Ukraine says would amount to capitulation.

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At an event to celebrate war veterans last week, he reiterated his call for Ukrainian troops to surrender, claiming Kyiv’s forces were on the verge of collapse. He then led a feeble chant of three cheers that the Kremlin subsequently wiped from its website.

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The Russian leader believes his forces can capture the rest of the Donbas by the autumn, after which he intends to escalate his territorial demands, according to people who speak to him. One adds that Russia’s main hope for an early end to the conflict is for the US to put enough pressure on Ukraine to accept Moscow’s terms.

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But three organizations that track battlefield developments in Ukraine — Deep State, Black Bird Group and the Institute for the Study of War — all report Russia’s territorial gains have slowed, although the groups’ assessments differ slightly in the amount of territory gained or lost.

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Last month, according to Black Bird Group data, Russia’s gains were a mere 94 square kilometres, one of the lowest totals of the past two years; in February it lost ground.

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Fedorov said Ukraine was helped by Elon Musk’s move that month to prevent Russian forces’ “unauthorized use” of his Starlink satellite system. He added that the Kremlin has been unable to “find a full replacement, giving Ukraine a critical battlefield advantage”.

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In Moscow some pro-war commentators have even begun to argue that ending the invasion on the current front lines — far short of Putin’s goals — would mark an acceptable end point.

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Vasily Kashin, a professor at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, wrote in an essay for the foreign policy journal Russia in Global Affairs last week that “securing [currently occupied] territory for Russia… would be a good result and a complete military victory” if combined with limits on Kyiv’s armed forces and a ban on Ukraine participating in military alliances or hosting foreign troops.

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He added that it was not in the country’s interest to “endlessly set on fire [its] resources at Mala Tokmachka,” a frontline village Russia’s forces have failed to capture for more than a year, “while pursuing imaginary goals”.

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A war far from won

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Experts caution it is too early to say momentum has fully swung behind Kyiv.

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“The Russians have been regrouping and have only recently increased their operational tempo,” says Gady, the military analyst.

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He points to Moscow’s renewed activity along three axes of attack as well as the years-long and bloody battle for Ukraine’s “fortress belt”, the country’s heavily fortified bulwark against Moscow’s full-scale invasion.

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Russian forces are bearing down on the cities of Dobropillia, Kostyantynivka, Druzhkivka, Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, erasing what they cannot easily capture through devastating glide bombs, and hunting anything that moves with fibre-optic FPVs.

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The loss of any of the cities could significantly increase the pressure on Ukraine’s defences.

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Ukraine’s drones still require humans to operate them and the country’s manpower shortage is a continuing challenge. Salary increases, the possibility of transferring units and other incentives have not attracted large numbers of new recruits.

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Despite its mounting losses, Russia retains deeper reserves of manpower and resources, while continuing its own deep strike campaign against Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in an effort to exhaust civilian morale and economic resilience. Moscow warned this week that it would launch fresh strikes on Ukraine’s “decision-making centres” in Kyiv.

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In the meantime, the number of countries participating in an initiative to buy ammunition for Ukraine has halved since December from 18 to nine.

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For Ukraine to prevail, the country must sustain mobilization, industrial expansion and fiscal stability all at the same time while much of its economy remains under wartime strain, experts say.

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Gady says “the next few months of fighting” will signal whether Kyiv’s strategy has proved successful. At the moment, he adds, Ukraine has the “qualitative upper hand in unmanned warfare, but Russia retains quantitative advantages across all fronts”.

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He also cautions that “if Russia effectively adapts to recent Ukrainian advances in mid-range strike and unmanned warfare more broadly, the situation on the frontline could look different by summer.”

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For now, Ukrainian soldiers on the front lines tell the FT that morale is at its highest point in the past year.

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In Kyiv and other cities pummelled with missiles and drones, Ukrainians may be exhausted but they also remain resolute in their desire to defeat Russia, says Yevhen Hlibovytsky, head of the Frontier Institute, a Kyiv-based think-tank that tracks social change.

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Getmanchuk, the head of the mission to NATO, says there is “a broad perception that the most difficult phase of the war is behind us”.

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She adds: “Ukrainians increasingly believe they will be able to withstand whatever comes next.”

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© 2026 The Financial Times Ltd

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