Russia Experiments with Jet-Powered Drones in Ukraine, Few Deployed

Ukrainian military officials state that Russia is primarily using jet drones and glide bombs experimentally to test how Ukrainian defenses respond to them.

The Gaze reports on this, citing Business Insider.

In recent months, Ukrainian military and government officials have recorded the appearance of new types of Russian weapons equipped with jet engines that significantly reduce the response time for Ukrainian air defense systems. 

These include Geran-3 jet drones, modeled after the Iranian Shahed-238, as well as guided glide bombs with increased flight range.

According to Deputy Minister of Defense for Innovation Yuriy Myronenko, Russia is using these new systems sparingly, but with the obvious goal of testing Ukrainian defenses and figuring out whether to move to mass production. 

“It's still a small enough number,” said Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine's first Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Transformation. “They're iterating, they're testing, they're changing their tactics.”

The new jet-powered Shahed drones can reach speeds of over 350 km/h, making them much more difficult to intercept. In some attacks in the fall, up to ten jet-powered drones were used simultaneously, without the use of the usual propeller-driven models.

The Ukrainian military notes that this tactic exploits the factors of speed and unpredictability. At the same time, high-speed gliding bombs can be launched at a considerable distance from the front line, beyond the reach of Ukrainian air defense systems. 

Despite this, the new weapon is not flawless. Experts emphasize that jet drones and bombs are significantly more expensive to produce and have a shorter flight range than propeller counterparts. 

Myronenko also notes that Russia may be limited in increasing production due to the complexity of purchasing jet engines.

Despite the increase in the number of attacks using jet weapons, military experts caution that their real impact on the battlefield has yet to be assessed. 

"Slapping a jet engine on a Shahed does not really change the weapon's effect," said Patrycja Bazylczyk, an associate director and associate fellow with the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "Just because you strap a motor to a bicycle doesn't make it a Harley—it's just an electric bike."

Ukraine, for its part, is stepping up efforts to develop new countermeasures. In particular, it is considering creating its own jet interceptors that could effectively combat such high-speed targets.

“We do have countermeasures against these bombs, but they do not always result in interception, and the longer the range, the greater the threat to civilians,” said Myronenko.

Once considered unrealistic by soldiers, the use of small quadcopters to intercept and destroy enemy drones has become a core element of Ukraine’s response to Russia’s mass aerial attacks. Earlier, Ukrainian interceptors downed more than 150 Russian drones in a single assault, prompting the government to push production toward 1,000 units per day.

A major breakthrough comes from the domestically developed STING interceptor drone, produced by the “Wild Wasps” developer group. Serial production launched four months ago now yields thousands of units per month, enabling operators to destroy over 1,000 Shahed- and Geran-type drones. 

Nearly half of these interceptions occurred in October alone, underscoring the system’s rapidly growing impact.

As the Gaze reported earlier, Ukraine has begun full-scale production of its new Octopus drone interceptor, a domestically developed system designed. 

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