Since Russian Shahed drone swarms rain destruction across Ukraine, especially in cities that had begun to regain a fragile sense of wartime routine, a new kind of battle is taking shape, one fought by drones designed to shoot other drones out of the sky. With traditional air defense systems stretched thin and U.S. weapons aid slowing, Ukraine is turning to a fast-growing fleet of interceptor drones as its best hope for reestablishing control over its airspace.
“Ukraine is already using interceptors to shoot down Shaheds and is expanding their production,” President Volodymyr Zelensky’s office confirmed on June 21.
For months, Ukraine has grappled with an intensifying Shahed drone campaign by Russia, specifically the Shahed-136, rebranded by Moscow as the Geran-2. These Iranian-designed drones travel fast, low, and in large numbers, making them particularly hard to intercept with conventional weapons. As Bohdan Danyliv of the Serhiy Prytula Fund put it, “If at the start we had some kind of SAMs, missiles, Javelins, air-defense systems including enough rockets for them, now they’ve started to run out, and we’re running a deficit.”
To plug this growing defense gap, the Ukrainian government has made anti-Shahed drone technology a top priority in 2025, though the urgency only kicked into high gear as Shahed strikes escalated to near-nightly assaults.
One Air Force Telegram post dated June 14 stated: “Assignment number one: The cultivation and scaling of means that already work effectively. Most of all: increasing the number of unmanned aerial vehicle interceptors.”
Several interceptor drone models, many of them First-Person View (FPV) types, are already proving effective. Among them is the Sting, a community-funded UAV that scored the first filmed kill of a Shahed drone in a high-speed midair collision, an event proudly shared by the Sternenko Community Fund and its partner Wild Hornets.
“We cannot name producers, out of security considerations. However, recently the situation has been changing, and we are already seeing positive movement in this area,” a Sternenko representative said.
But taking down a Shahed isn’t as simple as shooting a slower drone. As Danyliv explains, “A Shahed is much faster, by a factor of two… and you don’t just need to catch up to it, you need to overtake it.”
The defense challenge is further complicated by Shahed drones’ direct flight paths and the limited window radar systems have to detect and react, only 25 to 30 kilometers, which a Shahed can traverse in minutes.
Another model, the Shulika, co-produced with Belgium, has also made headlines, reportedly downing over 20 Russian drones as of April.
The allure of these interceptor drones is not just in their maneuverability but also in their cost-efficiency. Where surface-to-air missiles like those fired by S-300 systems can cost between $40,000 and $100,000, a drone interceptor comes in at around $2,000 to $5,000.
“You can make a drone, for example, at a firm like ours, fast, cheap, and en masse,” said a Wild Hornets spokesperson. “While missiles for an S-300 are unique technologies… more than half of those [producers] are in Russia.”
Even so, interceptor drones can’t yet fully replace missiles when it comes to countering ballistic or cruise missile threats. Their current use is mostly limited to low-altitude threats like Shaheds, Zalas, Merlins, and Orlans.
While Ukraine races to scale production, Russia is producing up to 70 Gerans daily, and some attacks include hundreds of drones in a single night, overwhelming even the most sophisticated defenses.
As Taras Chmut, director of the Come Back Alive charity, put it, “Their number is growing faster than the opposition from Ukraine’s side, plus these weapons are growing more technologically sophisticated.” His organization has funded interceptor programs responsible for taking down 25 Shaheds and up to 40 Gerbers in just three months.
Though the Ukrainian Defense Ministry says 10 interceptor models are undergoing anti-Shahed testing, Danyliv believes only four are currently effective in real-world conditions.
Still, there’s hope. The success of these low-cost interceptors is already reshaping drone co-production talks with international allies like the UK, and it’s rapidly becoming a focal point of Ukraine’s tech-driven defense strategy.
“It needed to happen yesterday,” Danyliv lamented. “We need to make it so the Russians cry bitter tears, so they’re afraid to take flight.”
