Picture a tiny monoplane with a 6-metre wingspan, more than 100kg of explosive on board and a scooter-like engine, lined up in the rain beside a crew working under faint green and red lamps chosen to be hard to spot. A jet booster kicks it into the dark. Its target is more than 200 miles away. The Guardian watched this happen in September with Ukraine’s 413 Raid drone regiment, and it is now routine, repeated nightly by dozens of crews.
The shift is that Ukraine’s drone war has moved from shooting at what flies over it to shipping its own damage hundreds of miles into Russia.
An orchestra of cheap aircraft
The Fire Point FP-2, which Ukraine only acknowledged publicly last September, is built for mid-range strikes on hardened targets and Russian logistics. Skipper, once an IT worker and now a Raid commander, told the paper the unit can fly ten times more than when it began, back when a single crew managed two missions weekly.
Bigger raids work differently. A long-range raid can put as many as 300 drones up at once, and the target is 1,000 in a night, in what soldiers call an “orchestra”: cheap decoys find an air corridor and the final target follows. The long-range FP-1 costs $75,000 and has been used against warehouses and refineries as deep as 1,800 miles inside Russia. The Guardian, citing the International Energy Agency, linked the strikes to a 7.7% drop in Russia’s crude oil production over a year, with interest rates held at 14%. “Both sides are getting better at translating deep strikes into economic effects,” said Sidharth Kaushal at the Royal United Services Institute.
Moscow, September and October
A Moscow refinery some 300 miles from the border was put out of action on 20 September. A day later Zelenskyy listed the weapons used in the large strike on the Moscow region, naming the FP-1, Liutyi, Flamingo and others and singling out the Pelican, used for the first time. Al Jazeera reported at least three dead. Moscow’s mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, said air defences had intercepted more than 1,600 drones, with 450 of them aimed at the capital. Analysts are debating whether the Pelican is a drone or a tactical ballistic missile, with Ukrainian media linking it to Fire Point’s FP-7.
The numbers keep climbing. On October 6 the Guardian reported that Ukraine’s defence ministry claims that over half of Russia’s refining capacity for oil is gone. “Fifty-one per cent of struck refining capacity is a significant blow,” said Yevhenii Khmara, the defence minister. Russian officials have released no damage figures. Putin did concede the cost to the Valdai Club, saying the attacks had cost his country about 1% of GDP, and that Kyiv had reached its goal “partially.”
Russia answers with jets
Moscow is not standing still. Since May it has put jet engines in its Shahed-type drones. The Geran-4 flies at 300km/h to 550km/h and the Geran-5 nearer 600km/h, faster than the interceptors built for the old piston-engined version. Interception rates against Shaheds, once over 90%, have fallen to 60% against the new models, the Guardian reported.
Watch this space: both sides now aim for factory output, not single spectacular hits.
Sources
- The long-range drone war: Ukraine and Russia scramble for supremacy in the skies
- Is it a missile? Is it a drone? What's the Pelican used by Ukraine?
- Ukraine war briefing: Kyiv claims half of Russia's oil refining capacity destroyed
