Russia is raining hellfire on Ukraine

Mint

26-05-2025

A YEAR AGO, for 30 drones to strike Ukraine in a single night was considered exceptional. Now Russia is saturating Ukraine's air defences with hundreds of them. On May 25th the Kremlin pummelled the country, with what it called a 'massive strike" against Ukrainian cities, featuring 298 drones, probably a record. Russia is using more missiles, too: 69 were fired on the same night. As a result, Ukraine is once again stepping into the unknown. If the current ceasefire talks fail, which seems highly probable, air-defence units will need to ration their interceptors. More Russian missiles and drones will get through, to strike towns, cities and critical industry.
Russia's air war stepped up at the start of the year (see chart), with a marked shift in the hardware it uses. Ballistic missiles, many supplied by North Korea, are now centre-stage; alongside a new, more lethal, generation of Shahed attack drones. The ballistic missiles are hard to stop because of their speed; only Ukraine's dwindling stock of Patriot PAC-3 missiles offers any real chance of interception. Meanwhile, the Shaheds, now in their sixth modification since the first of them were shipped to Russia by Iran in 2023, are using machine-learning to strike well-protected targets like Kyiv. On May 24th drones took chunks out of buildings in the northern suburbs of the capital. Two weeks earlier, one drone equipped with a fuel-air warhead made a hole in a shopping centre just nearby, blowing out windows as much as 300m away. The same week, another, stuffed with delayed-action cluster munitions, hit a training range on the south-eastern edge of the city.
The main challenge facing Ukraine's air-defence crews is the sheer number now flying at them. Last year the Kremlin was producing around 300 Shahed drones a month; the same number now rolls out in under three days. Ukrainian military intelligence says it has documents that suggest that Russia plans to increase its drone production to 500 a day, suggesting that attack swarms of 1,000 could become a reality. That is probably a stretch, cautions Kostiantyn Kryvolap, a Ukrainian aviation expert. Russia's arms industry runs on bluster and false reporting, he says. 'But it's clear the numbers are going to increase significantly." Even if Ukraine manages to stabilise the front lines in the east, the difficulties of protecting the skies will only grow.
In a skunkworks in a hidden corner of Kyiv, a ragtag group of engineers are pulling apart the innards of a Russian-made Shahed drone. Every piece of metal that falls on Ukrainian cities ends up in laboratories such as this for a complete post-mortem. The aim is to document the weapons' tricks; to re-engineer anything that works, and send a version of it back from whence it came. In the past month, there has been no let-up in the work. Despite hopes of a ceasefire, Russia is finding more and more ways to cut through Ukraine's air defences, which face mounting difficulties from a shortage of interceptor missiles, changing enemy tactics and unfriendly American politics.
As they continue to dissect the latest Shahed delivery, the engineers say one of their biggest worries is how the Russian drones are now being controlled. The newest models are unfazed by Ukraine's electronic warfare, they say. This is because they no longer rely on jammable GPS , are driven by artificial intelligence, and piggyback on Ukraine's own internet and mobile internet networks. The team say they recently discovered a note inside one of the drones they were dismantling—presumably left by a sympathetic Russian engineer—which hinted at the new control algorithm. The drones are controlled via bots on the Telegram social-media platform, the note indicated, sending flight data and live video feeds back to human operators in real time.
Not long ago, most of the drone-hunting was done by mobile crews with cheap machine guns, shoulder-fired missiles and short-range artillery. Now, says Colonel Denys Smazhny, an officer in the air-defence forces, the drones routinely manoeuvre around these groups. They initially fly low to avoid detection, then climb sharply to 2,000–2,500 metres as they near cities, breaching the threshold for small-calibre guns. So Ukraine is turning to helicopters, F-16 fighter jets and interceptor drones, which have begun to show good results. A senior official says the air defences around Kyiv are still knocking out around 95% of the drones that Russia throws at it. But the 5% that slip through cause serious damage.
Ukraine still has a fighting chance against drones and cruise missiles. But the outlook against ballistic threats is bleaker. Only a handful of countries have systems that can counter such fast and destructive weapons. In the Western world, the American Patriot system has an effective monopoly on the ballistic air-defence business. Ukraine now has at least eight Patriot batteries, though at any given time some are damaged and under repair.
Their crews operate them with impressive skill. Since spring 2023, they've knocked down more than 150 ballistic and air-launched ballistic missiles. But the systems have been largely concentrated around Kyiv. Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine's president, says Ukraine needs at least ten more, with corresponding stockpiles of the PAC-3 interceptors the system uses, to start to make its cities feel secure. He insists the country is ready to pay whatever it takes, presumably using European money. The White House response has been non-committal.
The problem is that Ukraine has slipped from being a priority for the Biden administration to just one of only many potential customers competing for limited production under Donald Trump. Lockheed Martin, which builds the Patriot systems and their PAC-3s, is increasing its output to 650 missiles per year. But this is about 100 fewer than projected Russian production of ballistic missiles, with a Ukraine government source estimating the Kremlin has a 500-missile stockpile. It usually takes two PAC-3 interceptor missiles to intercept a Russian ballistic missile.
For China hawks in the Trump administration, a Patriot system or missile sent to Ukraine is one fewer that can be sent to the Pacific theatre. Even the most Ukraine-friendly administration—which this one is not—would find it hard to keep pace with the persistent Russian threat. Ukraine has asked for the right to produce its own version of the PAC-3 under licence, but knows that is unlikely. Production is due to begin in Germany, but only at the end of 2026. There are other joint-production projects in the pipeline too. But in all cases the breakthrough point is at least a year away.
Ukraine may have to develop a survival strategy that pairs air defence with air offence and deterrence. 'We will have to destroy Russian launch complexes, the factories and the stores," says Mr Kryvolap, the aviation expert. 'We should be under no illusions."