Russian weapons engineers are on track to quadruple the number of kamikaze drones launched against Ukraine and, thanks to nearly three years of use in this war, the Kremlin’s robot aircraft are harder to intercept and more lethal than ever before.
Russian state media in a Sunday broadcast profiling assembly workshops of the Alabuga industrial zone in Tatarstan, where the Kremlin manufactures the Iranian Shahed drones under license, reported production figures for the most common explosives-toting drone launched by Russia at Ukraine – the Shahed-136 – are jetting higher.
According to that official broadcast Russia’s Alabuga plant in the central region Tatarstan is on track to manufacture nine times more aircraft compared to 2024. The main product, the Shahed kamikaze drone, an Iran-designed flying wing carrying 50 kg. Of explosives in early models.
Russia’s first attacks with a few dozen of the propeller-driven aircraft with a 2-meter wingspan took place in September 2022. The largest confirmed Russian air assault against Ukraine thus far in the Russo-Ukraine War took place on July 8, 2025, when Russia launched 728 flying weapons, almost all Shahed drones or decoys imitating Shaheds.
The Kremlin’s most recent aerial assault, taking place overnight July 20-21 2025, was composed of 426 Shahed attack drones and decoy drones, along with 19 cruise or ballistic missiles. Ukrainian Air Force spokespersons said air defense troops shot down or jammed 224 incoming weapons. One Ukrainian died and two were injured in the attacks focusing on three cities including the capital, Kyiv, official statements said.
Maj. Gen. Christian Freuding, the German defense ministry’s commander of planning and command staff, said in a Saturday Bundeswehr-published interview that Russia’s objective to increase the size of its strikes massively, by ramping up Shahed drone production.
“They (the Kremlin) want to expand the drone attacks…The ambition is to be able to deploy 2,000 drones simultaneously,” Freuding said.
The Washington DC-based think tank Institute for the Study of War (ISW) in a Sunday situation report echoed Freuding’s warning, pointing out that since May the number of Russian drones invading Ukrainian airspace has increased 30 percent – or more – every month. If Shahed production continues to accelerate at that pace, Ukrainian air defenses could expect a 2,000-drone raid by November, the ISW report said.
Ukraine’s air defense command deploys a complex network of modern radars, digitally-linked acoustic sensors, truck-mounted machine gun crews, conventional anti-aircraft cannon and anti-aircraft missile batteries, modern fighter planes, and even attack helicopters and training airplanes with a gunner aboard armed with a shotgun in a nation-wide effort to intercept incoming Russian drones.
To penetrate those defenses, Russian mission planners usually launch two to four days’ of relatively small (50-150 UAVs) to probe Ukrainian air defenses, and then follow up with one or two days of mass drone strikes targeting a few Ukrainian cities, most recently overnight Sunday-Monday.
Aside from increasing drone production, since 2022, Russian weapons engineers have fielded dozens of enhancements to the originally relatively primitive Shahed-136 drone. The current attack drone, although still relatively cheap, costing an estimate $50-75,000 a drone, has been upgraded during its use in nearly three years of war.
Key updates include on-board computers able to recognize a jammed GPS signal and switch the drone to inertial guidance, terminal attack programming, and radar-absorbing surface materials and paint making the drone difficult even for fighter radars to detect at a distance, and satellite-linked communications allowing an operator sitting in Moscow to pilot a Shahed from its launch in west Russia to a target anywhere in Ukrainian territory.
Serhii “Flash” Beskrestnov, a Ukrainian drone developer, in a March interview with Defense Express magazine pointed to Russia’s installation of 16-element CRPA antenna making Ukrainian jamming of a Shahed “harder to stop — but far from unstoppable.” Other sources have reported the latest Shaheds are being equipped with a Chinese protected 8-channel GPS antenna specifically designed to resist Ukrainian jammers.
Ukrainian intelligence in Fall 2024 first reported the warhead carried by a Shahed, as designed in Iran 50 kg. of conventional explosive sufficient to demolish an apartment, had been beefed up to 90 kg., simply by reducing the amount of fuel carried by drone, and replacing the saved weight with explosives.
By early 2025 Ukrainian military reports said Shahed debris found on the ground by Ukrainian military searchers had identified four (or five, reports have varied) new warheads developed by Russia for the Shahed, two using thermobarbic explosive technology.
An explosives technology favored by the Kremlin for nearly century, thermobarbic devices deploy and then milliseconds later ignite a petroleum-based vapor cloud setting off a blast several times more powerful than a similar weight of conventional TNT and creating a fireball with temperatures above 2,000 Celsius. The new 52 kg. Warhead, called a B Bch-50, if detonated successfully (thermobarbic fusing can be finicky) can level half of a multi-story apartment building, Beskrestkov wrote.
Ukrainian combat reports surfacing first on June 23 reported another new Shahed warhead, an incendiary device, that was filled with a viscous mixture that burns even when mixed with sand. Kyiv fire department statements in late June and early July, as well as eyewitnesses, have reported increasingly frequent use of Shahed drones designed to set fires.
Russian mission planners seeking to kill and wound people with a Shahed, in late 2024 or early 2025, reportedly received two warheads designed to do precisely that. One is filled with tungsten ball bearings designed to cut through walls. The second disperses fragmentation submunitions from 200–250m height above the target. Ukraine’s Emergency Situations Ministry in early July in a civil defense statement warned the public not to touch the black, tube-shaped submunitions.
According to Ukrainian military media reports, the Russian military wants to put into production a fully-overhauled version of the Shahed drone, called the Shahed-238, which would be equipped with a jet engine doubling or even tripling (to 0.58 Mach at 10,000 ft MSL) the aircraft’s 230 kph (0.19 Mach at sea level) speed and pushing operational altitude to 2,800 meters (9,200 feet) – well outside the tactical range and above the effective altitude of many Ukrainian ground-based air defense systems, such as the ubiqitous ZU-23-2 (Ukraine’s most commonly used 23mm anti-aircraft artillery, or AAA, gun) which has a tactical effective altitude of 1,500 meters.
The jet-powered Shahed is equipped with a smarter guidance system and a larger warhead, and its first battlespace test use probably took place in February, Ukraine’s national military intelligence agency HUR reported.
According to a February analysis by the Britain-based Institute of Strategic Studies, Ukraine’s national air defense network since Russia’s February 2022 invasion has combined domestic and foreign donor technologies to nearly close most of Ukraine’s airspace to manned aircraft and cruise missiles, but that sometimes struggles with drone swarms, and the bigger the swarm, the more difficult the defense becomes.
“We (Ukraine and its allies) essentially need countermeasures (to Shahed drones) that cost two, three, four thousand euros,” Freuding said.