Ukraine’s Mid-Range Drones Drive Battlefield Successes in War Against Russia

Dozens of miles behind Russian lines, a Ukrainian drone feed shows an unsuspecting Russian military truck idling. Then the feed cuts out as the drone slams into the vehicle. It’s a scene repeated over and over again on Ukrainian social media in recent weeks as the country leans into a new phase of its war against Russia.

The strikes, which have seen Ukrainian drones range almost 100 miles behind Russian lines, are part of a major campaign to starve Russian troops of supplies. And they’re an important factor in spurring optimism that Ukraine finally is gaining the upper hand.

Dozens of miles behind Russian lines, a Ukrainian drone feed shows an unsuspecting Russian military truck idling. Then the feed cuts out as the drone slams into the vehicle. It’s a scene repeated over and over again on Ukrainian social media in recent weeks as the country leans into a new phase of its war against Russia.

The strikes, which have seen Ukrainian drones range almost 100 miles behind Russian lines, are part of a major campaign to starve Russian troops of supplies. And they’re an important factor in spurring optimism that Ukraine finally is gaining the upper hand.

“The situation is better now than it was a year ago—this is one of the clear differences,” said Rob Lee, a Eurasia expert at the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) who regularly visits the front line.

Last year, Ukraine’s military was struggling to fend off Russian attacks, a task made all the harder by frequent Russian strikes on Ukrainian logistics and a deep manpower shortage in the Ukrainian army.

Now, thanks in part to the strike campaign—along with high Russian casualties, domestic discontent in Russia, and other factors—Ukraine appears more confident that it can end the war on favorable terms. On Monday, Kyrylo Budanov, a former top military commander and current chief of staff to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, said peace might be achievable by winter.

Ukraine’s mid-range attack drones force Russia to either take expensive or time-wasting security precautions in how it delivers troops, food, munitions, and fuel, or else risk further losses. “It’s going to make it more difficult for Russia to advance, because it’s going to increase the cost for them,” Lee said.

Ukraine is doubling down on the tactic. Strikes targeting Russians 12 miles or more from the front line have quadrupled since February, Zelensky said in May, calling it a “priority.”

Last week, Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said the ministry would boost strikes by offering cash to units that use them effectively in order for them to buy more drones, in an expansion of the military’s “e-points” system, which rewards the highest-performing units with more resources.

“We are launching a ‘logistics lockdown’ for the Russian army,” Fedorov wrote. Russian channels on the social media app Telegram have warned of attacks across highways in occupied portions of Ukraine.

Fedorov’s move to incentivize strikes holds promise, said Kateryna Bondar, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. Still, she cautioned that it could end up with units pursuing points to the detriment of military goals. “The strategic value of middle strike lies in [the] systemic degradation of a logistics network, not in individual platform kills — yet a points-per-confirmed-destruction logic rewards the easily-reachable, easily-filmed target over the higher-value but harder-to-verify node,” she wrote in an email.

Ukraine has had weapons with similar effects in the past—chiefly rocket systems such as the U.S. Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System, which has a range of around 40 miles and a payload of 200 pounds. Such systems were key in turning back a Russian advance in 2022, again by forcing Russian logistics to disperse.

However, the system had disadvantages: Each missile cost $168,000 and suffered from production constraints. The missiles are also jammable by Russia, and, because they’re U.S.-made products, they are more vulnerable to U.S. restrictions on military aid.

Among the most prominent mid-range strike drones is the Hornet, produced by Perennial Autonomy, a company founded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, an early investor in Ukrainian defense companies.

The drone’s payload, at 10 pounds, is small but sufficient to destroy valuable trucks carrying supplies and boasts a range of over 62 miles. To beat Russian jamming, it uses a combination of Starlink satellite systems and some artificial intelligence in targeting.

While it’s unclear how many Ukraine can produce, in 2025 Perennial Autonomy, under its previous corporate name of Swift Beat, signed a deal to produce “hundreds of thousands of drones,” a figure that also includes other drone types produced by the company. The drone costs as little as $6,000, making it a cost-efficient weapon for cash-strapped Ukraine.

For larger targets—like command posts or warehouses—Ukraine also has drones like the FP-2, which can crash a payload of 440 pounds of explosives into a target over 200 miles away. Ukraine can produce FP-2 and its original, longer-range variant, the FP-1, at a collective rate of 200 per day, with the FP-2 costing $50,000 per drone.

Still, Russia has some options for neutralizing the impact of Ukraine’s mid-range strike drones.

For one, Ukraine’s use of the drones relies in part on sophisticated intelligence collection to help identify targets, with U.S. contributions playing a major role, said Kateryna Stepanenko, an analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, a think tank.

However, that also poses a vulnerability that Russia could seek to exploit. “We will likely see some sort of cognitive warfare effort where the Kremlin will claim ‘we’re ready to negotiate if you cut [intelligence support],’” Stepanenko said. The United States briefly cut off intelligence support for Ukraine in March 2025, seemingly as a way to pressure Ukraine over negotiations with Russia, before quickly resuming it.

Russia can also work to boost its defense against such drones, which it currently lacks.

Ukraine’s system for shooting down similar Russian drones points toward the complexity of the task. Ukraine reliably shoots down most Russian Shahed drones, one of the most common types of Russian drones used for striking behind Ukrainian lines.

To do so, however, Ukraine has had to build up both a complex system for tracking the drones, as well as invent new, semi-autonomous interceptor drones, in addition to dedicated drone-hunter teams using machine guns in order to cover the over 700 miles of front line.

“It will likely take [Russia] at least a year to figure out how to protect against Ukrainian mid-range strike capabilities,” Stepanenko said.

“I’m not prepared to say that Russians will never find some sort of a countermeasure,” she said. “But I do think that it’s going to take them time.”