Aviation expert compares efficiency of Ukrainian and Russian long-range drones

The effectiveness of Ukrainian attacks with long-range drones is much higher, says Romanenko.

In the matter of long-range drones, the Russian side still has an advantage in quantity and range. At the same time, Ukrainian drones achieve greater effectiveness in attacks on targets, aviation expert Valeriy Romanenko said on air at the telethon.

“So far, the Russian side has the advantage; they launch hundreds of their long-range drones. In addition, unfortunately, Russian drones have a greater range and, in most cases, have a much larger warhead. But our drones choose the most vulnerable Russian targets and thus achieve greater effectiveness,” he explained.

The expert noted that it is necessary to pay attention to an important point: how many of the launched Russian drones hit their targets.

“Today it is about half a percent – one drone out of 177. It was about one and a half percent a few days ago. That is, out of 200 launched drones, about three hit their targets,” he emphasized.

Romanenko added that the overall effectiveness of the Ukrainian side’s strikes is much higher. And this is despite the fact that not hundreds of long-range drones are launched at targets on enemy territory – we are talking about dozens.

“Our overall efficiency is much higher. With each launch, for example, at an oil refinery, there are serious damages to objects that disable the most vulnerable elements of the oil refining process. Each strike generally disables airfields for some time, even if there are no critical hits,” the guest of the broadcast noted.

Also, according to the aviation expert, there is nothing fundamentally new in the strategy and tactics of Russian attacks with attack drones on civilian cities in Ukraine. The only changes are the mass character and the increase in the number of Russian imitators, which are intended to complicate the work of the Ukrainian air defense in destroying enemy attack drones.

“But now there are methods that allow us to cut off imitation drones. For example, selection by speed, because the “Parodias” and “Gerberas” have a significantly lower speed than the attack “Shaheds”. In this way, we can cut off drones that will be called location-lost from those that pose a real danger. I would like to emphasize once again that for almost the entire month of February, the percentage of destroyed Russian attack drones did not fall below 95%. Almost everything is destroyed,” Romanenko emphasized.

In his opinion, massive raids by enemy UAVs are a temporary phenomenon, since the total production capacity of the two Russian factories that “churn out” these “Shaheds” does not exceed 1,200-1,400 drones per month.

“The Russians simply do not have the capacity to launch an average of 200 drones daily or every other day,” he added.

(C)UNI1N 2025