In Foreign Policy, Yasir Atalan explains Russia’s strategy to win its war with Ukraine via the deployment of cheap suicide drones. Atalan writes:
On Sept. 7, Russia launched its largest aerial strike of its war against Ukraine—860 Shahed drones and missiles in a single night. The targets weren’t limited to Ukraine. Two days later, 19 of these exploding drones crossed into Poland, forcing NATO fighter jets into the sky. A similar incursion against Romanian airspace followed just days later. These were not isolated incidents. They marked a broader pattern in which Moscow has made cheap, mass-produced exploding drones the centerpiece of its aerial campaign.
Over the past three years, Russia has scaled up its one-way attack drone launches significantly. At the start of the war, Moscow launched on average 150 to 200 of these drones per month, according to Ukrainian Air Force data analyzed by Center for Strategic and International Studies. Today, it produces and deploys nearly 5,000 monthly, averaging more than 1,000 per week. In 2025 alone, Russia has launched more than 33,000 Shahed drones and their variants against Ukraine. This number was only 4,800 for the same period last year. Meanwhile, cruise and ballistic missile launches have stayed relatively steady, as shown in the chart below.
The shift clearly shows Russia’s evolving strategy which includes saturating the air defenses, pressuring city centers, and forcing Ukraine to give up. Moscow thinks that it will win the war not through decisive tank offensives and precision strikes, but through endless attrition with low-cost, high-volume weapons.
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