FLASH
Shkruar nga Marta Serafini
These "deceptive" attacks weaken Ukrainian interceptors: bombing is cheaper than defending yourself.
They are cheap (they cost around $20,000 each), lightweight (the latest models are even made of polystyrene), deadly (they kill civilians and military personnel every day in Ukraine). Whether bombing Ukrainian cities, Russian military targets, and now NATO territory, warfare is now synonymous with drones.
After the Iranian and Turkish monopolies ended, the Russians began producing new, cheaper but equally deadly models. The skies are now dominated by the Geran (Russian analogues of the Iranian Shahed), the Garpiya (made with Chinese components), and the Gerbera (low-cost decoys that mimic the Shahed on radar but carry little or no explosives, designed to weaken Ukraine’s expensive interceptor missiles).
The first models produced by Tehran were white; in their current form, the low-cost Shaheds measure approximately 3.3 meters and despite weighing 180 kilograms, they move almost invisibly through the night sky, wrapped in black carbon fiber bodies to evade radar.
Over the past year, Ukrainian technicians have identified at least five types of warheads, including thermobaric, incendiary, and high-explosive charges in fragmented steel containers of varying weights. Some samples analyzed this spring weighed up to 90 kilograms. Now the Tsar’s drones are equipped with Ukrainian modems and SIM cards that connect to cellular networks; newer models have more than one, to switch to a new phone number in the event of a connection failure. Thus, interference with “jamming” techniques has become increasingly difficult.
After taking over the Iranian designs, to produce thousands of them every month, Russia built a giant factory in Tatarstan where it employs cheap labor (mostly foreign women and students) and opened a new production line next to the Izhevsk Electromechanical Plant, where the Garpiya drones are already produced. The key to everything is cost. The Russian-made Geran-1 (also known as the Shahed 131) and Geran-2 (Shahed 136) models cost between $20,000 and $50,000.
"In 2022, Russia paid an average of $200,000 for a drone of this type," a Ukrainian Defense Intelligence source explained to Corriere. One more zero.
"By 2025, that figure has dropped to around $70,000," thanks to large-scale production. By comparison, a single surface-to-air interceptor missile can cost over $3 million. In other words: today it's cheaper to bomb than to defend.
Not coincidentally, according to a calculation by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Russia has carried out at least 37,000 airstrikes against Ukraine since the beginning of the year. And the increase, confirmed by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), was registered after the resumption of bilateral talks between Ukraine and Russia in Istanbul, Turkey, on May 15.
Between January and May 2025, Russian drone attacks averaged about 120 per day. From May to August, the average was 185. A significant increase, considering that at the beginning of the war, the most massive missile and drone salvos were launched only once a month. This, from a purely military perspective, means that the resumption of negotiations between Moscow and Kiev has had only one effect: an increase in attacks on civilian targets in Ukraine.
As for the attack in Poland, according to Ukrainian military expert Ivan Stupak, it is possible that the drones used were not combat drones, but specifically designed to fly over Polish territory to test security systems. Stupak, a former agent of the Ukrainian security services, explains that the attack may have enabled Russia to track the sequence of Polish radar responses and observe which aircraft took off.
Kirill Shamiev, a researcher at the European Council on Foreign Relations, adds that the attack “is a signal that the situation could escalate into a regular stream of Russian “roaming” drones, made of wood and duct tape, towards Polish and Baltic airports and other logistics centers.” The strategy? “To show that Moscow can significantly worsen the lives of Europeans without crossing the perceived threshold of a military escalation, while simultaneously offering “concessions” in exchange for European “understanding” of Moscow’s interests in Ukraine,” Shamiev writes.
Of course, drones are not the only protagonists of the conflict between Ukraine and Russia. "NATO is likely to end up using drones on a large scale. Not like Russia and Ukraine, because we have invested in these giant air forces that can strike with great power and speed, but as an addition," explains Robert Tollast, a researcher at the Royal United Services Institute.
Taiwan is already evaluating the development of a large number of low-cost attack drones. Even non-state actors, such as drug cartels, increasingly rely on drones for their activities. A challenge for all the armies of the world that have not kept pace./ Corriere della sera
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