As Russia’s war machine grinds forward in eastern Ukraine, there is another offensive being waged far beyond the front line. Russia is ramping up nightly drone attacks on Ukrainian cities and civilian infrastructure, and as it rapidly increases its production of those weapons its strikes are intensifying.
Many of the drones aren’t particularly fast or high-tech, but they are cheap enough for the Kremlin to launch more than 700 in one night, in an effort to overwhelm Ukraine’s air defenses and decimate civilian morale, experts say.
After obtaining Iranian designs for Shahed attack drones, Russia built its own massive factory to churn out thousands of these weapons each month. Its evolving tactics are forcing Ukraine to fight back with more expensive ammunition and innovations, as less costly methods of defense become less effective.
The rapid increase in drone strikes shows how warfare has evolved to rely on these unmanned autonomous vehicles.
Ukraine and Russia have been driven to improve drone capabilities to compensate for deficiencies in air force capabilities, a dynamic that isn’t applicable to all Western powers. But experts say that the United States and its European NATO allies are actively working to improve drones and counter-drone operations to retain an advantage in any future conflicts.
“NATO will probably end up using drones on a large scale. Not at the same scale as Russia and Ukraine, because we’ve got these massive air forces that we’ve invested in and that can strike with a lot of power very quickly – but as a complement to that,” Robert Tollast, a research fellow focused on land warfare at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), told CNN.
Taiwan is already looking into developing large numbers of cheap attack drones, Tollast said. Non-state actors across the globe and drug cartels are also increasingly relying on drones. “These are going to pose a huge challenge to unprepared armies around the world,” he added.
This is how Russia’s drone campaign operates – and how Ukraine is working to fight back.
Russia is moving toward producing more than 6,000 Shahed-type drones each month, Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence told CNN. And it’s much cheaper to produce the attack drones inside Russia compared to earlier in the war, when Moscow was purchasing them from Tehran.
“In 2022, Russia paid an average of $200,000 for one such drone,” a Ukrainian Defense Intelligence source said. “In 2025, that number came down to approximately $70,000,” due to the large-scale production at the Alabuga drone factory in Russia’s Tatarstan region.
But cost estimates vary greatly – the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a DC-based think tank, found that estimates for Shahed-136s ranged from $20,000 to $50,000 per drone. By comparison, a single surface-to-air missile interceptor can cost more than $3 million.
That relatively low cost makes it possible for the Kremlin to ramp up its nightly drone attacks, as well as conduct more frequent large-scale attacks. Earlier in the war, major missile-and-drone salvos happened roughly once a month. Now, they occur every eight days on average, according to an analysis by CSIS.
To many civilians, the constant threat of drone attacks is terrifying.
Kyiv resident Bohdana Zhupanyna was heavily pregnant when her family’s apartment was obliterated by a Russian drone strike in July.
“I’m trying to calm down, because such stress at nine months of pregnancy is very dangerous,” Zhupanyna, who has since delivered her baby safely, told CNN in the immediate aftermath of the strike. “I lost a lot in this damn war. My father was killed by the hands of Russians, my apartment was destroyed by the hands of Russians, and my mother was almost killed by the hands of Russians.”
And while Russia uses long-range drones to attack Ukrainian cities hundreds of miles from the front lines, civilians living in cities close to Russian-controlled areas describe being haunted by daily FPV drone attacks. Residents of the Kherson region previously told CNN that no target seems to be off limits, with reported FPV drone attacks on pedestrians, cars, buses and even ambulances.
Russia has repeatedly denied targeting civilians, despite substantial evidence to the contrary.
The percentage of drones that hit their targets has roughly doubled, with a hit rate of close to 20% since April, compared with 2024, when less than 10% hit targets on average, said Yasir Atalan, a data fellow at CSIS. And, the CSIS analysts wrote in their analysis, “it doesn’t matter if an individual Shahed hits its target. What matters is the compound effect the terror weapon has on civilians and the stress it places on air defenses.”
Russia’s tactics are about “keeping the constant pressure,” Atalan told CNN. “Their strategy is now focusing more and more on this sort of attrition.”
Ukraine also counterattacks with FPV drones on the front lines and has attacked infrastructure and weapons facilities inside Russia using long-range drones.
“For every technological development, both sides are already looking for a counter-measure. And the innovation cycle is so fast that within (a) matter of two to three weeks, we already see a counter-adaptation to (a) technological breakthrough,” said Kateryna Stepanenko, a Russia analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think-tank.
“So, some of the approaches that might be effective currently might not be as effective in the coming months,” Stepanenko said.
Now, both Ukraine and Russia are working to develop AI-powered drones that can make their own decisions on the battlefield, as well as creating interceptor drones that could be deployed as a cheaper method of countering aerial assaults than firing missiles, according to ISW.
“There are numerous reports about Ukrainians testing some of these drones, but we haven’t seen them deployed at scale,” Stepanenko said. “The development of interceptor drones would free up Ukrainian capabilities and also help Ukrainian forces preserve some of (their) air defense missiles for missile strikes.”
CNN’s Toby Hancock, Henrik Pettersson and Daria Tarasova-Markina contributed to this report.