Russia’s Biggest Drone Nights Mostly Run Light on Jets

KYIV, Nov. 2 — RussiaRussia sent 433 drones at Ukraine overnight into Sunday, its most in a night since Oct. 15, by the count of Ukraine’s Air Force. It counted only 64 of them as jet-powered. The night before, it had counted 72 jets of 134; the night after, 75 of 193.

Of the five biggest nights since Oct. 12, the Air Force split four by type, and on those four, jets were 9 to 25 percent of its tally. On 16 of the other 17 nights it split, they were more than 35 percent. The biggest, 580 drones on the night to Oct. 15, came without a split.The CountThe Air Force’s preliminary morning report covers the night from 6 p.m. Its main tally puts Shahed-type drones, its jet count among them, in one total with Gerbera drones, Parody decoys and, some nights, the S8000 Banderol, which Ukraine’s military intelligence lists as a turbojet-powered cruise missile. So the rest of the tally is not all propeller-driven.

Those four nights were big because of the rest of the tally: propeller-driven Shaheds and other types, decoys among them. The difference matters because jets and the rest pose different problems for Ukraine’s air defense.

The effectiveness of countering conventional Shaheds “already exceeds 90%,” the defense minister said in October. “The challenge now is jet-powered drones, which require different interception speeds,” the minister, Evgeniy Khmara, told journalists on Oct. 11, in Ukrinform’s English account. The Air Force’s own counts since then show the shape of it: the volume comes in the rest of the tally, and the drones it does not report downing are disproportionately jets.

The challenge now is jet-powered drones, which require different interception speeds.

The Count

By this paper’s tally, the main drone counts in the Air Force’s 22 morning reports from Oct. 12 to Monday add up to 4,376; that leaves out nine Banderol/Dan-T loitering munitions it reported separately on Oct. 13. On the 21 nights the Air Force split by type, 1,510 of 3,796 were jets, or 40 percent. That is close to the “about 40%” of all drones deployed across Ukraine that Col. Yurii Cherevashchenko, the Air Force’s deputy commander for air defense, gave on Oct. 6, in Ukrinform’s account, though he did not say how that figure was counted.

The jets did not grow with the raids. On the 21 nights the Air Force split, they numbered 26 to 110, and the four biggest of those nights carried 31, 59, 64 and 69, each below the median of 74. The most jets, 110, came on the night to Oct. 22, in a raid of 210.

On those four big nights, 223 of 1,314 drones were jets, or 17 percent; on the other 17, it was 1,287 of 2,482, or 52 percent. The one exception among the 17 was the night to Oct. 18: 180 drones, 26 of them jets. Whether the 580-drone night to Oct. 15 fit the pattern, the reports don’t say.

Fewer of the jets were stopped. Over the 20 nights with full counts, Ukraine reported downing 75 percent of the jets and 88 percent of the rest of the tally, so the jets, 39 percent of what was launched, were 57 percent of what was not reported downed. The jets fared worse on 16 of the 20 nights, narrowly on some. The rates were level on the night to Oct. 26, and on the nights to Oct. 24, 28 and 30 a larger share of the jets than of the rest was reported downed.

These are Ukraine’s own preliminary counts, as of 7:30 to 9:30 a.m. Kyiv time, with drones still in the air, more than 40 of them on Sunday; downed means shot down or suppressed. A drone not reported downed has not necessarily hit anything, and the rest of the tally includes decoys. On Oct. 14 the Air Force’s figures by type don’t add up, and that night is left out of the comparison.

The seven morning reports from Oct. 26 to Nov. 1 add up to 1,300 drones. President Volodymyr Zelensky put the week’s total at 1,940, without saying which days it covers or how it was counted; this paper has not reconciled the two.

The Weekend

On Sunday morning the Air Force reported 371 of the 433 downed or suppressed by 7:30 a.m., 47 of them jets; weapons had hit 16 locations. Monday’s report was of 193 drones, 75 of them jets, and 154 downed by 8 a.m., 58 of them jets. By one of the Air Force’s own measures the smaller night was the worse one: weapons hit 26 locations, against 16.

Both nights went for the grid. Mr. Zelensky wrote on Sunday that substations, transformers and power lines had been hit overnight in four regions. “As things stand, hundreds of thousands of families remain without electricity,” he wrote, in the Kyiv Independent’s translation. On Monday morning Ukrenergo, the grid operator, reported emergency outages in some regions and new outages in nine regions, Vinnytsia and Kharkiv among them, and, in some regions through the end of the day, hourly cuts covering all categories of customers and limits on industrial power.

Mr. Zelensky counted 1,940 attack drones, more than 1,580 glide bombs and 44 missiles, 36 of them ballistic, for the week, and wrote that Russia was trying to make the most of a shortage of interceptors for ballistic missiles. Ukraine raises its need for Patriot missiles with its partners every day, he wrote, and the deliveries cannot wait years. Russia’s Defense Ministry said its air defenses destroyed 235 Ukrainian fixed-wing drones over Russia overnight into Sunday, and 212 overnight into Monday. Neither side’s counts can be checked independently.

The war reached the warning apps on Sunday night. At 11:02 p.m. in Kyiv the Air Force said the official Air Alert app had probably come under enemy influence and that there was no radiation threat; false alerts of nuclear, chemical and street-fighting threats had gone out, the Kyiv Independent reported.The AppAir Alert was made by the Digital Transformation Ministry with Ajax Systems, a security technology company, the Kyiv Independent reported. The app’s team said outsiders had interfered with it; the team switched off push notifications and suspended the app, then brought it back with the display of targets on its map still suspended. Hours later Russia’s Emergencies Ministry said its own app had been hit by a “massive cyberattack,” in the Kyiv Independent’s translation, and used to send fake information to the public.

Different Russian hacker groups claimed the hack of Ukraine’s app, BBC News Ukrainian reported. Atesh, a Ukrainian partisan movement, said pro-Ukrainian hackers had broken into the Russian app, UNN, a Ukrainian news site, reported, noting that there was no independent confirmation. Who carried out either attack, and whether the two are linked, has not been independently established.

The Answer

Speed is the difference. The earlier, propeller-driven Shaheds flew at roughly 180 to 200 kilometers an hour, against about 300 for an interceptor drone, a source at the drone company BlueBird Tech told IEEE Spectrum in September; the practical limit of propeller-powered interceptors is around 450, the source said. The jet-powered Geran-3 reaches up to 370 kilometers an hour and the Geran-4 around 500, the magazine reported.The GeranRussia makes the Iran-designed Shahed as the Geran at Yelabuga, in Tatarstan, IEEE Spectrum reported. The jet-powered versions cost about $80,000 each, about twice the propeller-driven ones, it said.

Ukraine is buying for both. Mr. Khmara said on Oct. 11 that Ukraine already had Bars interceptor drones able to counter jet-powered Shaheds and was scaling up their production, Ukrinform reported; of large-caliber gun turrets used against the jets, he said, “Their number in our arsenal is already in the hundreds.” Colonel Cherevashchenko said on Oct. 6 that interceptors in the quantities required were not expected until at least the end of November.The InterceptorsThe interceptors then in testing fly at “about 460–500 kilometers per hour,” Colonel Cherevashchenko said, in Ukrinform’s account. “Some manufacturers claim speeds of up to 700.”

The counts carry a narrower lesson than they seem to. On the four biggest nights it split, the Air Force reported downing or suppressing 989 of the 1,091 drones in the rest of its tally, 90.7 percent by this paper’s arithmetic, decoys included and with drones still in the air. On the 20 nights with full counts, the jets, 26 to 110 a night whatever the size of the raid, were the larger part of what it did not report downing. The counts cannot say why Russia mixes its raids as it does, and three weeks is a short record.

Colonel Cherevashchenko predicted in October, without giving a date, that jets would come to “about 80%” of attacks. In this series their share of the tally was 39 percent in the week of Oct. 12–18, leaving out Oct. 15, which had no split; 47 percent in the week of Oct. 19–25; and 34 percent in the week of Oct. 26–Nov. 1. And the shortage Mr. Zelensky named was elsewhere, in interceptors for ballistic missiles.

What to watch: whether interceptors reach the quantities the Air Force needs, which it said on Oct. 6 it expected no earlier than the end of November; whether the jets’ share climbs; and Ukrenergo’s outage schedules this week.