600 Km Per Hour Drones Launched In Waves: How Russia Is Rewriting War Rules

Top Speed: Over 600 kilometres per hour. Operational ceiling: 6,000 metres. Weapon class: Drone. Specialty: Blurring the line between drones and cruise missiles. Objective: Overwhelm Ukrainian air defence, sap its arsenal of interceptor missiles, and dent its resolve. But no technical specifications provide a better testimonial to the effectiveness of Russia's Geran-5 drones than the candid admission made by Maksym Zhorin, Deputy Commander of Ukraine's 3rd Army Corps: "We don't know what to do about them."

Over the past five years, Russia has devised new weapons and strategies. Ukraine, supported financially and with weapons by its Western allies, has played catch-up, innovating on the fly and finding elegant solutions to Moscow's inventiveness.

So, when Russia started swarm attacks using Iranian-designed Shahed-class drones in 2022, Kyiv swiftly responded with mobile anti-drone groups armed with machine guns and short-range interceptor rockets. They proved highly effective, achieving over a 90 per cent kill rate and frustrating the Russians. Moscow was forced to change its tactics -- and it did so with such effectiveness that Ukrainian leaders now shy away from flaunting interception rates.

Several factors make the Geran-5 deadly effective. They are jet-powered, making them fast, and most of the time too fast for the Ukrainian military to react to. They are impervious to machine gun fire because they fly too high. They terrorise residents because the drones often strike before people can scamper to safety. Ukraine's only defence currently is shooting them down with missiles, which are too expensive and too few, partly because the United States itself is tied up in a protracted war in the Middle East.

"The Geran family is Russia's domestic production line of the Iranian Shahed-136, manufactured at scale at the Alabuga special economic zone. The jet-powered variants - Geran-3, and now Geran-4 and Geran-5 - replace the original piston engine and propeller with compact turbojets, largely Chinese-sourced commercial engines. The result is a step change in performance: cruise speeds of 300–400 km/h with dashes to 500 km/h for the Geran-4, and up to roughly 600 km/h for the Geran-5, at altitudes up to 5,000–6,000 metres, with ranges from 450 km to over 950 km depending on the variant," says Kateryna Bondar, Senior Fellow, Center for Strategic & International Studies.

The wreckage of Geran-5 in Ukraine. Photo Credit: Ukraine's Defense Intelligence (GUR)

She said Ukraine's counter-drone infrastructure was optimised against propeller-driven drones, not the jet-powered machines.

"Mobile fire groups with heavy machine guns, gun trucks, and FPV interceptor drones costing $1,400-3,000 closed the cost-exchange gap against that target, at one point accounting for the majority of Shahed kills. The jet-powered Gerans defeat this layer through speed and altitude," she added.

The analyst said Ukrainian interceptors' top speed is about 250–300 km/hour, and they cannot shoot down a target moving at 500 km/hour.

"Newer variants add onboard electronic warfare that disrupts interceptor video links in the terminal phase.