Russia has stepped up its combined air attacks on Ukraine. The strikes are aimed at energy and industry - power plants, substations, gas infrastructure, factories and warehouses, as well as cities and transport infrastructure - residential areas, ports, railways and logistics facilities.
Since August 11, the Ukrainian military has stopped regularly publishing complete data on the number of missiles fired and intercepted. This makes it difficult to independently assess the performance of Ukrainian air defense, but there is reason to talk about a decrease in its effectiveness against certain categories of Russian air attack weapons.
The problem is most pronounced in countering jet strike drones and ballistic missiles. According to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, “now the efficiency of shooting down jet drones is about 50–55%, sometimes 60% thanks to Ukrainian aviation.” This is a significantly lower figure compared to conventional piston-powered drones.
Why did Russian Geraniums begin to break through Ukrainian sky defenses more often, how could this affect the course of the war, and how is Ukraine going to respond to new threats?
How serious is it?
In September, the Russian army significantly increased the number of jet drones for strikes on Ukraine, press secretary of the Air Force of the Ukrainian Armed Forces Yuriy Ignat said on September 29. According to him, as of that day, the Russians had launched 3,177 jet UAVs, compared to 2,850 in August.
The next day, Russia launched a massive attack on Kyiv and surrounding areas - as Prime Minister Sergei Koretsky said at the time, this had not been seen “since the end of the last heating season.” Air raid sirens did not subside in the capital for almost a day, the Trypillya thermal power plant was damaged, and four people, including a child, were killed in Kyiv and the region.
In early October, Russia for the first time struck bridges across the Dnieper in Kyiv, partially paralyzing the movement of people and vehicles between the left and right banks.
Attacks are being carried out on many other cities of Ukraine. A major raid with serious consequences occurred on the night of October 7. According to Reuters, the Ukrainian military reported intercepting more than 80% of jet drones, an increase from previous figures. However, Russia simultaneously fired dozens of missiles, which led to numerous casualties and destruction.
Russian ammunition often hits purely civilian targets. For example, on September 30, drones damaged two stores near Kiev, the next day a drone flew into a school building in the Solomensky district of the capital, and in the Odessa region a business center was attacked. On October 8, the territory of a kindergarten school in the Buchansky district of the Kyiv region came under attack from a Russian drone.
The Russian Ministry of Defense says it only attacks military and military-industrial facilities, and if civilian premises are hit, that they were used for the production and storage of weapons.
According to Ukrainian Ombudsman Dmitry Lubinets, between January and August 2026, Russian strikes killed or injured 15,280 civilians, 55% more than in the same period in 2025.
Change of Russian strategy?
Vladimir Putin may have adopted a renewed concept of victory based on long-range strikes to force the enemy to surrender, writes retired Australian general Mick Ryan, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Lowy Institute and the Institute of Modern Warfare at the US Military Academy. In his opinion, four reasons are contributing to the change in Russian strategy.
The first is the situation directly on the battlefield. Putin is seeking to shape his domestic audience, as well as his foreign supporters and admirers, into a sense of Russian success at a time when his troops are suffering huge losses on the ground with minimal results.
The second is strategic coercion. Russia is not able to capture Kyiv or the Dnieper, or even the entire Donbass. However, it can make life much more difficult for Ukrainians in these populated areas, and appears determined to do so throughout the coming winter by attacking various energy infrastructure facilities. Similar attempts have been made before, but now Russia has more opportunities to achieve this goal, the expert points out.
The third is the desire to undermine the economy. According to the Minister of Economy and Environment of Ukraine, Alexander Kravchenko, every hour of business downtime due to air raid warnings costs the country approximately $45 million. “If people are in a bunker, business stops,” he was quoted as saying by the Guardian newspaper. A similar effect is observed if people leave the capital or leave the country.
The fourth reason is the presence of favorable conditions. Jet drones are flying higher and faster, Ukraine is facing a dire shortage of Patriot interceptor missiles, and cold weather is adding to the impact of every power plant failure, writes Mick Ryan.
New threats
Throughout the years of the war, Ukraine managed to compensate in one way or another for Russia’s quantitative and qualitative superiority in weapons. Gradually, Ukrainian air defense adapted to Russian cruise missiles and long-range drones - the vast majority of them were shot down.
With ballistic missiles, things were worse - Ukraine initially had few American Patriot anti-aircraft missile systems and their European analogues SAMP/T, capable of shooting down Russian ballistics, and moreover, it constantly experienced a shortage of anti-missiles.
It is logical that Russia began to rely on ballistics in the war with Ukraine - it increased the production of missiles for the Iskander operational-tactical missile systems, purchased their North Korean counterparts KN-23, and also began looking for other solutions.
In particular, based on the target missile and decommissioned anti-aircraft missiles, the RM-48U Frankenstein missile with a flight range of up to 400 km was developed. For its launches, Russian engineers converted some of the installations of the S-400 anti-aircraft missile system. This creates an additional burden on Ukrainian defense.
And also drones equipped with a turbojet engine came onto the scene.
The first reports of Russia’s use of jet drones of the Shahed/Geran family appeared in early 2024, and the beginning of their mass use became known in mid-2025. At first, many military experts were skeptical about the effectiveness of jet modifications of attack UAVs: with a significant increase in cost - several times compared to drones with a two-stroke gasoline engine - the percentage of hits and damage caused increased slightly.
But the situation was changing quickly. Following the transitional model “Geran-3”, the more advanced “Geran-4” appeared, and then the fundamentally new “Geran-5”, which in its characteristics and appearance is already closer to a cruise missile than to a drone.
In parallel, the Russian defense industry is mastering the production of cheap ersatz missiles of other types - S8000 "Banderol", "Dan-M" and "Dan-T" - and is constantly improving them, based on the experience of combat use.
“One thing is obvious: in September, the effectiveness of intercepting terrorist rockets did not increase, but even decreased,” admits Ukrainian military expert Alexander Kovalenko. “First of all, due to the constant change in the tactics of using jet drones and their ongoing improvements, leading to the appearance of new modifications not every week, but almost every 2-3 days.”
At the same time, fewer difficult-to-intercept missiles were launched in September than in August, but it is too early to evaluate this as a positive signal, writes Kovalenko: “The enemy’s production of all types of missiles has not decreased and their ammunition has not been exhausted, but quite the opposite - an accumulation process is taking place.”
Why has it become more difficult for Ukrainian air defense to cope with attacks?
Jet drones don't look like some kind of superweapon. On the one hand, they are much faster than conventional piston-powered drones. This reduces the time for visual detection and engagement of a target, especially in the final part of the route, and leaves little chance for those mobile fire groups whose fighters are armed only with anti-aircraft machine guns or cannons.
On the other hand, the turbojet engine of a “Gerani”, “Dani” or “Banderoli” is clearly visible on radar screens, such a drone is easy to detect and accompany, and the Ukrainian air defense, it would seem, should have plenty of ways to shoot it down.
The Ukrainian army has a whole line of interceptor drones, the mass production of which has already been mastered. But the problem is that most of them are quadcopter type and were developed to counter relatively slow-moving targets, like the first versions of the Geraniums.
And although some of them, such as the Sting S anti-aircraft drone from the Wild Hornet company or Spys developed by the German-Ukrainian enterprise Quantum WIY Industries, are capable of accelerating over 400 km/h and even shooting down UAVs of the Geranium-5 type on a collision course, they cannot provide a high percentage of destruction.
The Technological Forces of Ukraine association notes that at the early stage of testing against jet targets, specialized interceptors gave only 35-40% of interceptions.
Since August, high-speed jet interceptor drones, such as Alexa Spatium, have begun to enter service with the Ukrainian Defense Forces, but the practical results of their use have not yet been seen.
Manned aircraft, the contribution of which President Zelensky spoke about in repelling air raids, also cannot shoot down everything. First of all, Ukraine has few aircraft and reliably protected locations; The F-16 fighters supplied to the Armed Forces of Ukraine by Western countries require maintenance and not all of them are constantly in service.
In addition, the main close-combat missiles they use, the AIM-9 Sidewinder, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, are unprofitable to use against drones, and the issue of equipping fighters with cheaper means of destruction - radar- or optically-guided guns and air-burst shells - is still being worked out.
Are you late?
To effectively repel air attacks, a comprehensive and multi-level air defense system is required. Along with the listed means, electronic warfare systems, mobile radars and other technical solutions, bundles of various weapons are needed - including light and man-portable anti-aircraft missile systems, cheap anti-aircraft missiles, about the acute shortage of which the Ukrainian Armed Forces warned Ukrainian and Western military experts.
It seems that a new threat - massive attacks by jet drones - has exposed serious problems for the Ukrainian army and the military-industrial complex.
On Tuesday, October 6, Deputy Commander of the Air Force of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Colonel Yuriy Cherevashenko, responsible for unmanned air defense systems, spoke in the Verkhovna Rada at a meeting of the temporary investigative commission to investigate possible violations of Ukrainian legislation in the field of defense.
In response to the question why the Ukrainian Armed Forces were actually unprepared for the enemy’s massive use of jet drones, although they had been known about them since January 2024, Cherevashenko said, while emphasizing that he was expressing only a subjective opinion:
“We saw that the enemy used about four types of jet engines, we understood that he did not have a ready-made solution. Perhaps some intelligence agencies had more information, but I think the reason for this delay was insufficient communication between the units that had the information.”
And Russia has accelerated
“She built a mesh network from Chinese components. Usually two “Shaheds” circle, for example, between Belarus and Kiev, working as repeaters. Through them, Russians can see targets in 8K resolution. The Russians managed to direct the drone directly into the central window of the SBU headquarters. This is a warning about what such systems are capable of."
The American investor is confident that it will be possible to find an effective means of countering Russian jet drones in the near future: “At least five Ukrainian companies have developed solutions and are conducting tests.”
At the same time, it reminds us of other serious problems facing Ukraine: Russian ballistic missiles, which sometimes cannot be shot down; powerful gliding bombs; the likely emergence next year of a Russian Rassvet satellite network similar to Starlink, as well as a possible large-scale mobilization in Russia.
Ukraine could cope with any of these threats separately, but it will be almost impossible to cope with all of them without the help of the West, says Eric Schmidt.
