Situation Report: Russia's 2025 Shahed Drone Offensive
Overnight on July 8 - 9, Russia launched the largest air assault of the war, the latest in an escalating series of drone-led attacks in 2025.
By Dan White and guest co-author Elena Davlikanova, Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington D.C. and the Sahiadachnyi Security Center in Kyiv.
Special thanks for help in preparation of the material goes to Yevhenii Malik, Veteran of the 36th Marine Brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
Since January, Russia has dramatically increased the number of long-range strikes it has launched on Ukraine. By the end of June, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha noted that Russian strikes had become an almost daily occurrence in 2025, stating,
“We see that they have intensified attacks on cities. They strike civilian objects to influence the mood of our population. Since the beginning of this year, there have been only two days when Ukraine was not attacked by Russian missiles and drones.”
The growing frequency and intensity of the nightly attacks has been driven by increased numbers of long-range drones.
OVERVIEW:
The Most Intense Month of Bombing of the War
According to the Ukrainian Air Force, June was the most intense month of bombing of the entire war. In June Russia attacked Ukrainian cities with over 5,438 long-range drones. The month capped off with the largest air assault of the war on the night of June 28 to the morning of June 29.
This record was quickly broken during an attack from July 3 to July 4 with 539 drones and 11 missiles. On the night of July 8 to the morning of July 9 Russia launched an even more massive 728 drones alongside 13 missiles.
Russia’s Initial Use and Production of Shahed Drones
Russia now conducts most long-range strikes on Ukraine using Shahed drones. Initially developed by the Iranian company HESA in the early 2010s, Shaheds are long-range kamikaze drones. Initial tranches of Shaheds were transferred to Russia, along with their underlying technology, in the summer of 2022. Russia has made significant improvements to the original model since then.
Early versions of Shahed drones were either fully assembled in Iran or partially completed within Russian territory. Russia was able to decrease its dependence on Iranian imports by establishing its own large-scale production capabilities in 2023, notably in the city of Yelabuga in Tatarstan. These drones were rebranded as Geran-2.
By late 2024, Russia started testing experimental Geran-3/Shahed-238 variants equipped with turbojet engines, thermobaric warheads and thermal guidance systems.
Viktor Taran, head of the UAV operator training center "Kruk," has identified four major models of the Shahed/Geran drones currently used against Ukraine:
Russian Modifications and Technical Enhancements
Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence (HUR) has documented a range of structural and technological upgrades Russia has made to Shahed drones since early 2025:
Increased warhead weight: The warhead mass has been boosted from 52 kg in the Iranian original to 90 kg in Russian-modified models. This required a reconfiguration of the drone’s airframe.
Component relocation: The flight controller, power distribution block, and battery were moved from the nose to the tail, enabling better balance and possibly accommodating the heavier warhead.
Enhanced communications systems: Drones are now equipped with multi-channel Controlled Reception Pattern Antennas (CRPA), that are better able to distinguish real satellite signals from spoofed ones and reject interference from electronic warfare (EW).
Enhanced onboard navigation: New Shaheds feature the “Kometa” controller, an internal guidance system. Originally developed by Ukrainian engineers, the Kometa works with satellites and inertial sensors, to not only track a drone’s position in flight, but store flight routes, identify deviations, and autonomously adjust navigation when communication links are lost. This allows new Shahed models to continue flying to their targets if jammed using internal mapping.
Tactical Shifts and Operational Use
Russia has substantially transformed its operational tactics involving Shaheds over the past year. According to Viktor Taran, these tactical shifts include:
Higher flight altitude: Shaheds, which previously flew low to the ground, now operate at as high as 5km. This puts the drones beyond the maximum range of the machine guns and some shoulder-fired missile systems employed by mobile anti-drone fire teams operating outside urban areas.
Coordinated swarm attacks: Shaheds are now launched in waves from multiple directions and with changing flight patterns. These more complex swarm attacks have made it more difficult to anticipate the destination of Russian drones and coordinate Ukrainian air defenses across the country.
Aggressive dive attacks: New models are capable of steep dive attacks at angles up to 60 degrees. Such rapid descents create narrow intercept windows for anti-drone teams. These windows are even narrower during periods of reduced visibility, such as at night when most of Russia’s air assaults occur.
Decoy and reconnaissance roles: Increasingly, Shaheds are used as decoys to identify Ukrainian air defense positions. New Shahed models collect data on the locations of radar activity which allows Russia to direct follow-up missile strikes on air defenses with harder to intercept missiles.
Multi-phase strikes: According to Taran, a new and recurring tactic Russia is employing in its air attacks is a multi-phase strike to destroy large buildings such as residential high rise apartments.
“First, they ‘destroy’ the upper floors of the facility they are interested in with drones, then the lower floors, and when the basement, where, let's say, a certain production facility is located, is left unprotected, missiles from the "X" category, Kinzhal, Iskander, finally arrive there and break through the last concrete slab or plate and additional protective partitions that were there with a warhead weighing about 500 kg.
At least we observed similar strikes on June 17 and 23 in Kyiv and Kremenchuk.”
Challenges Posed to Ukraine’s Air Defenses
These evolving technologies and tactics present significant challenges to Ukraine. According to Ukrainian aviation expert Konstantin Kryvolap, Ukraine’s intercept rate for Shahed drones has declined in the past three to four months, when Ukraine was able to destroy or redirect 95–100% of attacking Shaheds.
The increasing volume of airborne targets is overwhelming existing air defense resources. The response time for intercepting drones is becoming shorter as drones arrive in waves or from unpredictable directions. Improvements in multi-channel communications and internal navigation have also made Shaheds increasingly resistant to EW measures that had previously been an effective means of defending against mass drone attacks.
Russian Production Ambitions
Russia is reportedly preparing to scale production of Shaheds dramatically, aiming to produce up to 400–500 drones per day. These would include both traditional propeller-driven models and experimental variants like the Shahed-238/Geran-3 equipped with jet propulsion and thermal targeting systems.
This indicates a shift not only in the quantity of drones deployed, but also in quality, speed, and tactical roles—ranging from strike and decoy to reconnaissance and precision-guided demolition.
China also appears to be playing a significant role in helping Russia scale its production. Chinese specialists are consulting with Russian manufacturers to speed up product iteration. Chinese parts now increasingly substitute for critical components Russia once had to smuggle from the West.
RUSSIA’S CAMPAIGN STRATEGY:
There are several possible objectives the Kremlin is pursuing with its growing campaign of long-range drone strikes:
Degrade Civilian Morale
Russian military planners may be hoping that an intensified campaign of strategic bombing will erode the morale of the Ukrainian civilian population and generate popular pressure for negotiated settlement, one which would potentially destabilize the current Ukrainian government.
This strategy is unlikely to work, especially as Russian advances along the frontline have stagnated amid high casualties.
Strategic bombing does not have a strong track record of success. There have been few if any successful historical examples of strategic bombing campaigns which succeeded in breaking civilian morale through indiscriminate strikes on cities.
Russia has repeatedly tried to break the will of the Ukrainian population during the war by bombing critical infrastructure including power plants and dams, as well as hospitals, schools, churches, museums, libraries, theaters, malls, residential buildings, printing houses for Ukrainian language books, Holocaust memorials, and more, with little to show for it.
Exhaust Ukrainian Air Defense and Foreign Military Assistance
Another objective of Russia’s intensified long-range drone strikes is to exhaust Ukraine’s air defense resources through sheer volume. In response, Ukraine and its allies should prioritize scaling up existing cost-effective anti-drone solutions—such as interceptor drones—which are significantly cheaper than advanced but costly systems like the Patriot, which remains essential for intercepting ballistic missiles.
Ukraine does not have enough Patriot missiles and other air defense systems to defend against existing Russian attacks. The stock of air defense missiles is also running low in the West due to previous military aid packages to Ukraine and the US’s conflicts in the Middle East. The production of new air defense missiles in the West has also been slow and insufficient to meet Ukraine’s needs.
This Russian strategy may enjoy some short-term success, but increased Western investment and Ukrainian adaptation is likely to neutralize its effectiveness over the long-run. Ukraine’s partners, including the Trump administration, have committed to providing new air defense systems. The US military is also vastly expanding its procurements of air defense systems, including quadrupling its purchases of Patriot missiles in fiscal year 2026.
Instill Confidence in the Russian People that War Can Be Won
A less obvious objective of Russia’s long-range strike campaign is to convince the Russian people that the “special military operation” is succeeding. A special consideration in this objective is satisfying the demands of “turbo-patriots” frustrated with the Russian military’s inability to make a breakthrough after years of fighting in Ukraine.
In this sense, the strategic bombing campaign appears to be succeeding. Public opinion polling conducted by the Levada Center in June 2025 shows that the Russian public’s confidence in the direction of the country and the Russian armed forces has remained high in 2025. Anecdotal evidence, from celebratory social media posts by Russian mil bloggers in the wake of nightly drone strikes suggests the Russian ultra-nationalists are pleased with the strategy.
Trigger a New Migration Crisis
A final objective of Russia’s growing long-range strikes may be to provoke a new wave of Ukrainian refugees fleeing Ukrainian cities for Europe. The Russian military has previously triggered waves of migration to threaten European political unity as part of its hybrid warfare strategy. The Russian military has targeted Ukrainian cities and energy infrastructure since the beginning of the war to amplify pressures for Ukrainians to migrate.
This strategy to weaponize migration is popular among Russian ultranationalists who view it as a prerequisite for the Russification of Ukraine, but it is not a plausible theory of victory.
Outflows of Ukrainians have stabilized since the start of the war, with many Ukrainians actually returning home. Russia’s 2025 long-range drone offensive against Ukraine has not yet triggered a significant exodus from the country either, and Ukrainians are adapting to life under Russian bombardment.
Support for Ukrainian refugees in Europe remains high. European countries have been able to better integrate Ukrainian refugees into their societies and workforces than previous waves of migrants. This has allowed many Central and Eastern European countries to derive significant economic benefits from Ukrainian refugees.
UKRAINIAN DEFENSIVE ADAPTATIONS:
To counter the growing threat, Ukraine can adopt a combined adaptation strategy proposed by Kruk’s Viktor Taran and Anatoliy Amelin of the Ukrainian Institute of the Future: mass-producing affordable interceptors while expanding existing acoustic detection networks.
To this end, Ukraine is currently scaling up production of air-defense interceptor drones with the eventual goal of producing three interceptors for each attacking drone. A related drone interceptor technology is currently in production and expected to be patented soon.
Ukraine is also currently conducting field trials for the Tryzub system, a directed energy weapon that disorients or destroys drones by targeting critical components with a high energy laser. Directed energy weapons offer a potential long-term targeting solution for countering drones at lower cost and risk than missiles.