By Max Hunder and Tom Balmforth
KYIV/LONDON, Sept 15 (Reuters) - In early July, Ukraine's military invited a large group of producers to test a new generation of interceptors developed to counter the jet-powered attack drones Russia has used to devastating effect in recent months.
According to two sources familiar with the exercise, it did not go to plan.
Many of the interceptor drones proved difficult to control at speeds sometimes exceeding 400 kilometres per hour. Some crashed into nearby fields
and forests, the sources said.
The exercise underscored the challenge Ukraine faces heading into another winter without enough Western air defences to counter Russian ballistic missiles and with no clear answer to Moscow's faster, more powerful drones.
Russia increased its use of jet-powered drones roughly sixfold over three months this summer, according to Ukrainian military data seen by Reuters.
Much can change in two months in a conflict marked by rapid technological innovation. But on Friday, a senior commander openly complained that in the key area of jet-powered drones, Kyiv was lagging.
"With the jet drones, we completely screwed up the initiative again, that's a fact," said Maksym Zhorin, deputy commander of the 3rd Army Corps on the Telegram messaging app.
"The Russians have set up mass production and use of jet Shaheds, and we don't even know what to do about them."
Yuriy Cherevashenko, a deputy commander of Ukraine's air force, acknowledged the difficulties of developing faster interceptor drones but said Ukraine was close to fielding a range of mass-produced, low-cost solutions.
"I'm confident that soon we could fully have a class of weapons that will be effective at countering jet-powered UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles)," he told Reuters.
JET DRONES SWARM SKIES OVER KYIV
Russia's rapid expansion of jet drone production has allowed it to bombard Ukraine, particularly Kyiv, with overwhelming numbers of weapons whose speed makes them far harder to shoot down than their piston-powered predecessors.
After Russia began launching thousands of cheap, propeller-driven Shahed drones at Ukraine in 2022, Kyiv developed increasingly effective ways to destroy them, pushing interception rates to around 90%.
Moscow responded by making its drones faster, the latest step in a technological race that has shaped the battlefield throughout nearly five years of war.
The shift comes as Russia continues its relentless use of far more powerful ballistic missiles, while Ukraine struggles with shortages of advanced interceptors needed to counter them.
Russia already produces about 3,000 jet-powered drones a month, Ukraine's defence intelligence estimates. Some resemble the triangular-winged Shaheds, while others have tubular bodies and small wings more akin to cruise missiles.
Russia launched around 450 drones with a speed of between 240 and 500 kilometres per hour in June, a figure that rose to about 2,850 in August, the data showed. A typical Shahed-type drone — a cheap, piston-powered attack drone based on an Iranian design — flies at less than 200 km/h.
The capital Kyiv and its surrounding region were most heavily targeted, accounting for nearly a fifth of all drones launched, the data showed.
Cherevashenko said areas in and around Kyiv and the Black Sea port city of Odesa, a main hub for Ukraine's seaborne exports, had borne the brunt of the attacks.
"Going forward, the overall number of such drones in strikes will increase," Cherevashenko said.
In some attacks, he said the percentage of jet-powered drones is already over 70%.
'SWORD AGAINST SHIELD'
In recent weeks, jet-powered drones have been slamming into targets in central Kyiv.
"The main danger of these drones is that they're guided: meaning they can change their flight route and altitude, through an operator's command," Cherevashenko said.
The drone that struck the headquarters of the SBU security agency last week, hitting the office of its chief with pinpoint accuracy, is thought by officials and military analysts to have been manually guided.
Samuel Bendett, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, said the war in Ukraine was a constant "sword vs. shield" struggle, with each new capability and innovation quickly countered by the adversary.
"The current Russian advantage will eventually be eroded by Ukrainian counter capabilities in the form of fast and cheap interceptors capable of going after (jet powered drones)," he said.
INTERCEPTOR DRONES ALMOST INEFFECTIVE
To counter the thousands of Shahed-type UAVs fired every month last year, Ukraine developed interceptor drones that typically cost less than $2,000 and were able to down a high percentage of incoming drones.
However, these weapons cannot keep up with jet drones.
Borys Dolyna, a commander of an interceptor drone company, said it was sometimes possible to hit certain models of the jet-powered UAVs when they slowed to manoeuvre. But he warned that Russia was already deploying and refining onboard systems that detect approaching objects and automatically accelerate.
Ukraine already has over a thousand trained interceptor drone crews. Companies are rushing to make faster interceptors, some powered by jets themselves, but as the July test failure showed, progress is patchy.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has said that more than 60 Ukrainian companies are working on intercepting jet-powered drones, though only a handful have demonstrated results.
One Ukrainian drone industry source said that some prototypes can be too large and slow to deploy in combat, where opportunities to engage fast-moving targets are brief.
NEW SOLUTIONS
One of the most promising solutions, officials and experts say, is a new generation of cheap guided missiles. Ukraine's stocks of expensive Western-supplied air-defence missiles are limited and were never designed to counter massed attacks by jet drones.
Cherevashenko said some of the new rockets were already undergoing testing, and would be significantly cheaper than the drones they are designed to down.
Ukraine was previously able to divert some Russian drones by feeding them false GPS data, but the drone industry source said many jet drones were operating on advanced 16-channel antennae, making them highly resistant to jamming and signal disruption.
Anatoliy Khrapchynskyi, director of development at Fly Group Ukraine, a defence company, told Reuters that individual systems would no longer be enough and that the answer lay in a networked approach, with multiple devices operating as a single "organism" to confuse enemy navigation systems.
"The drone continues to think it is flying toward its target, but its own autopilot, relying on the false coordinates, gradually changes course on its own and steers the craft away from cities into safe areas."
The drone industry source said today's interceptor drones, despite being slower than their targets, could be adapted to attack head-on rather than chase from behind. That would require AI-driven targeting systems capable of precisely calculating an incoming drone's flight path.
Cherevashenko said there had already been successful head-on interceptions using both automated guidance software and manually piloted drones. While the technology still required further development before large-scale deployment, he said it represented the future of air defence.
For now, however, much of the burden falls on military aircraft, which are fast enough to keep pace with jet-powered drones. Dwindling supplies of air-to-air missiles are increasingly forcing pilots to rely on cannons, a hazardous tactic that risks collision with a drone's debris.
(Reporting by Max Hunder and Tom Balmforth; Editing by Mike Collett-White and Ros Russell)
