Moscow, Russia: Russia has begun fielding a new generation of jet-powered one-way attack drones that fly faster, climb higher and slip past Ukraine's air defences far more often than the propeller-driven aircraft they replace. The clearest measure of the shift comes from the Ukrainian Air Force itself: its units now intercept only about 60 per cent of attacks by the new Geran-5 drone, a rate far below what they achieve against the drones that came before it.

Colonel Yuriy Ihnat, a Ukrainian Air Force spokesperson, gave the figure in an interview on 14 September, comparing it with the roughly 95 per cent interception rate Ukraine's air defences still achieve against other drone variants. The gap between the two numbers, a fall of more than a third in the share of aircraft stopped, is why Kyiv now treats the jet-powered Geran as a different order of threat rather than a faster version of an old one.

Ihnat said Ukraine has been forced into the "very intensive use" of its fighter jets since Russia began flying the Geran-5 in August, with pilots shooting the drones down directly rather than leaving the work to ground-based systems. That is an expensive way of dealing with a cheap weapon, and it burns flight hours, fuel and missiles that Ukraine's small air force can ill afford.

The Geran is Russia's domestically built descendant of the Shahed one-way attack drone, the propeller-driven aircraft that has been at the centre of Moscow's long-range campaign against Ukrainian cities and infrastructure. The jet-powered version abandons the noisy piston engine for a much faster and higher-flying design, and the change is visible in both its shape and its performance.

Russian sources describe a machine built to defeat the defences Ukraine has layered over its cities. The Geran-5 has a straight-winged, cylindrical shape that gives it a silhouette closer to a cruise missile than to a conventional long-range drone. It is said to have a range of up to 1,000 kilometres and a maximum operating altitude of around 6,000 metres, higher than earlier models, and an estimated top speed of about 600 kilometres per hour.

Unlike earlier variants, the Geran-5 is also fitted with technology to resist electronic jamming, stripping Ukrainian defenders of one of their cheapest countermeasures. The combination of speed, altitude and jamming resistance makes the drone particularly difficult for ground-based air defences to intercept, and it helps explain why interception rates have fallen so sharply.

Yuri Knutov, a Russian military expert, has said the effectiveness of the Geran-5 extends beyond its speed and range. The drone, he said, carries machine vision matched to a digital map of the terrain, which lets it pick out and select targets on its own once it reaches defended airspace. That would allow it to correct course without constant guidance and choose its own aim point.

The Geran-5 is not the only jet-powered type now in Russian service. Reporting on the air war describes a Geran-4 flying alongside it, with the two aircraft outpacing and outmanoeuvring the drone-intercept technologies Ukraine has relied on. The attacks now come nearly without pause, and the drones have been linked to a rise in deaths and destruction in cities hundreds of kilometres from the front.

The pressure is pushing Ukrainian planners toward new countermeasures. Defenders are considering AI interceptors and lean neural networks, automated systems that could match the speed of a target travelling at several hundred kilometres per hour. The shift in thinking is itself a measure of the problem: the aircraft are moving too fast for the human-in-the-loop methods that worked against piston drones.

Russia is widening the jet-drone programme beyond the Geran family. Footage broadcast in a report by NTV, the Russian broadcaster, has revealed a jet-powered version of the Garpiya strike drone, a design that had previously been known only as a piston-powered aircraft.

The footage showed two different jet versions of the Garpiya: a transitional model housed in a piston-engine fuselage, similar in shape to the Geran-3, and a newer airframe designed specifically for a jet engine. The two aircraft appear side by side in the video, a record of the programme moving from improvisation toward a purpose-built design.

Analysts who track Russian drone production note that output of the jet-powered Garpiya remains small compared with the jet-powered Geran drones being mass-produced at the Alabuga industrial site. That gap matters, because Alabuga has become the centre of Russia's effort to turn the one-way drone into an industrial weapon, producing at a scale that a single factory line for the Garpiya does not yet match.

A source at the Colonel GSh Telegram channel, which follows the programme closely, described the Garpiya as simpler than its Geran counterpart. "The Garpiya still has no mesh modems or cameras. Only INS + SNC and, occasionally, a laser sensor for air-to-air detonation," the source said, referring to an inertial navigation system backed by satellite positioning and a proximity fuse for detonating in the air.

Until now, the only Garpiya variant known publicly was the Garpiya-A1, a piston-powered kamikaze drone similar to the Geran-2. It is manufactured by the Russian company Izhevsk Electromechanical Plant Kupol, and the jet version represents the same factory reaching into a faster class of weapon while keeping the airframe lineage it already produces.

The state television footage also showed a mobile launch platform mounted on a KamAZ-5350 truck chassis, built to carry several drones at once. Such a platform would allow Russian forces to launch attack drones from virtually any location, without fixed drone ports or airfields, which Ukrainian forces have repeatedly struck in an effort to reduce Russian strike capability.

Russia is also turning the Garpiya into an export product. It is promoting an export version of the Garpiya-A1 under the designation Garpiya-A1E, and the manufacturer says it has enough capacity to fulfil domestic and export orders at the same time. It has also said it is prepared not only to sell the drones abroad but to localise their production in countries friendly to Russia.

For Ukraine, the combined effect of the two programmes is already visible in the interception numbers. A fall from around 95 per cent to about 60 per cent does not simply mean more drones get through; it means a far larger share of every wave reaches the cities it is aimed at, forcing defenders to spend scarce missiles and fighter-jet sorties on targets that a production line can replace quickly.

The mobile launchers compound the problem. Fixed airfields and drone ports can be watched, and Ukrainian forces have shown they can hit them. A launcher that can roll out from any stretch of road or field shortens the warning time and spreads the threat across the whole country, making pre-emptive strikes on launch infrastructure harder to plan and harder to sustain.

The export drive signals that Moscow sees the jet drone as more than a battlefield expedient. By offering the Garpiya-A1E and promising localised production, Russia is positioning the aircraft as a product line for allied states, which would give the design a longer production run, a wider footprint and a revenue stream that outlasts the current campaign.

The air war between the two countries has evolved constantly since the start of the conflict, and the jet-powered drone is the latest stage of that evolution. What the sources indicate next is a continued shift: more jet-powered aircraft launched from more mobile platforms, higher production volumes from the plants that build the Geran family, and an intensifying race between Russian manufacturing and the AI-driven interceptors Ukraine is now weighing.