Ukraine has built its own jet-powered drone interceptor — and it'll easily fit in the back of a pickup truck

Ukraine has deployed a turbojet interceptor specifically designed to hunt Russian attack drones The compact aircraft can return home when an interception attempt fails Multiple warhead options allow the interceptor to tackle different aerial targets Ukraine's defense ministry has confirmed a new turbojet-powered aircraft built to shoot down Russian attack drones has now entered military service.

Dubbed Alexa Spatium, the compact v-tail craft was engineered domestically to intercept small aerial and surface threats across the battlefield.

It was built chiefly to engage Russia's Geran-3, Geran-4 and Geran-5 kamikaze drones, together with the frequently deployed Shahed-131 loitering munition.

Built for speed and reuse The aircraft measures 1.5 by 1.7 meters and is fired from a portable catapult stationed close to the front line.

If it fails to strike anything on a given mission, the interceptor is designed to fly back toward its own launch point.

It can be fitted with thermobaric, shaped-charge, fragmentation or high-explosive warheads, depending on the kind of threat it aims to destroy in the air.

Guidance comes either from coordinates loaded before launch or through direct operator control once the aircraft is already flying toward its objective.

Detection relies on an electro-optical camera paired with an infrared sensor, allowing it to spot enemy aircraft even in low visibility conditions.

As of the time of writing, Kyiv has not officially revealed the interceptor's top speed, and a statement from the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence left several performance figures undisclosed.

A wider race against faster threats Ukraine is not the only country fielding this kind of weapon, since Britain introduced a comparable system earlier in the year.

Known as Skyhammer and built by Cambridge Aerospace, it also runs on a turbojet engine and hunts down Shahed-style drones.

It relies on a nose-mounted radar seeker and a fragmentation warhead built to disable rather than fully destroy its objective.

Neither weapon, however, offers real protection from ballistic missiles, which travel far faster than any propeller or jet drone can manage.

This gap matters a great deal for Ukraine, whose stock of American-supplied Patriot missiles has thinned after years of steady combat use.