Mykhailo Lopatin, Julia Muravska and Mark Opgenorth
The spring and summer of 2025 have seen Russia unleash an attritional aerial campaign against Ukraine, repeatedly launching massed salvoes of Shahed-type one-way attack drones. These attacks have targeted civilian areas and infrastructure as well as military sites. Consisting of both one-way attack and decoy drones and frequently combined with both cruise and ballistic missiles, they aim to exhaust and overwhelm Ukraine’s air defense systems. The massed attacks have a grim psychological purpose as well: to demoralize the civilian population and destroy its will to resist aggression.
Russia began using Shahed-131 and -136 drones against Ukraine in late 2022, initially as loitering munitions for long-range strikes, to compensate for cruise missile shortages. What we see now, well into the fourth year of the war, is a sharp increase in the pace and scale of attacks—Russia launched 728 one-way attack and decoy drones against Ukraine on July 9—as well as continuous technological improvements to the drones themselves.
Despite deploying a level of innovation, agility, and civil-military collaboration that is simply unmatched in NATO nations, Ukraine seems unable to get ahead of this threat and remains critically vulnerable to it.
Asking Difficult Questions
In 2022, mobile fire groups were quickly formed and deployed in response to Ukraine’s shortage of traditional air defense interceptors, holding off the initial threat from various types of enemy drones. Ukrainian forces also began deploying electronic warfare early on, and these systems are continually improved and widely used today. Ukraine has recently prioritized the development and deployment of specialized drone interceptors.
Yet, any advantage won against Shahed-type one-way attack drones has proven fleeting and fragile, while the impact of the attritional warfare enabled by these systems is high and far-reaching. Not only is this impact measured in lives lost, but if the threat is not neutralized, it can have grave strategic consequences—specifically, Ukraine’s military defeat. The enemy’s use of Shahed-type one-way attack drones is aimed at crippling Ukraine’s economy and critical infrastructure; these attacks are central to Russia’s strategy of waging war against all of Ukraine’s society, directly. The Kremlin has judged that it can break the front by decimating the rear.
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