As Putin amasses the deadliest aerial threat since the Second World War, Nato countries are scrambling to find a solution

Roland Oliphant Senior Foreign Correspondent

04 July 2025

Are you looking for a career change? A stimulating challenge? Maybe a job where you can truly be who you always wanted to be?

Ukraine’s western air command may have just the thing for you: flying interceptor drones. A role, it announced in a recent Facebook post, that is “very interesting”, “promising” and will allow successful applicants to “express” themselves.

It’s not the usual language of a recruiting sergeant in a war of national survival, but nor is it entirely misleading. For the interceptor drone is rapidly emerging as the most important weapon in the age of automated warfare.

Indeed, from Nato’s headquarters in Brussels, to the halls of military power in Beijing, military officials may soon be racing to acquire their own.

The blitz

The first Russian drone attack to hit Kyiv in October 2022 involved nearly 30 Shaheds, the 8ft-wide, Iranian-designed kamikaze drone that has become the mainstay of Russia’s bombing campaign.

Since then, the petrol-motor buzz of approaching Shaheds, thought to cost between $20,000-$50,000 (£14,000-£36,000) a unit, has become all too familiar to Ukrainian soldiers and civilians. All the while, the drone swarms have grown ever larger.

Overnight on Thursday, just after Donald Trump called Vladimir Putin to propose a ceasefire, Russia launched 539 drones and 11 missiles in the biggest single air attack of the war.

The Ukrainian air force said almost all – 478 – of them were shot down or crashed en route, probably as a result of electronic counter measures.

But it was only the latest in a series of record-breaking mass drone attacks.

“Since mid-May they’ve set the record for the largest Shahed attack about six times,” says Marcel Plichta, a former US Army intelligence analyst and drone warfare expert. He adds that these cheap, mass attacks pose a financial (as well as logistical) problem for Ukraine’s air defence.

“A conventional air-defence missile, even one that is an order of magnitude cheaper than a Patriot missile, is still going to be triple or quadruple the cost of one of these drones.

“Now, air defence is never going to be economical. But those are very bad numbers if you’re using some of the more expensive systems.”

A few nights picked at random from the last month illustrate the scale of the problem.

On the evening of June 14 to 15, Ukraine’s air force reported that Russia had launched 183 Shaheds and decoys. Two nights later, they launched 440. Then, on June 22 to 23, another 352. The night of June 25 to 26, the Russians launched just 41, but the following evening the so-called “strike package” was back up to 363.

And then, on the last Saturday evening in June, Russia launched 477 drones and decoys and more than 60 missiles, setting the record for the biggest air attack of its kind until yesterday’s raid.

Serhiy Beskrestnov, a Ukrainian electronic warfare expert, told Ukrainian media last month that he expects Russian strike packages to grow to as many as 800-a-day as they continue to expand production.

A senior Ukrainian official said it could reach 1000-a-day. He added that conventional air-defence systems were too expensive to be a long-term solution, and said electronic counter-measures were simply not effective enough to provide blanket protection. 

Ukraine also uses “mobile air-defence teams” – soldiers with Browning machine guns or PKM’s, the heavy version of the Kalashnikov – to shoot down drones flying close to the ground (which they do to avoid Ukrainian radar). 

But Russia has become wise to this tactic and started flying its drones higher again, as well as employing “decoy” drones – drones with no bombs on them – to tempt Ukraine to waste even more missiles.  

“So,” says the senior Ukrainian official, “the answer has to be interceptors.”

Five models of interceptors – a drone designed to take out another drone – have so far been approved for use by the Ukrainian military (it is not known how much they each cost, per unit). 

One unveiled by Ukraine’s western air command this month is a flying-wing shaped, rail-launched craft that looks a bit like a Stealth bomber, and which a grown man can just about carry under one arm. Others look “a bit like an American football with wings”, says Bob Tollast, of the Royal United Services Institute. The Ukrainian Wild Hornets group has one called Sting, with four large fins attached, for hunting Shaheds.

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Meanwhile, Western companies are busy developing their own offerings. The Bristol-based company MARSS advertises a similar cruciform model that it says can “defeat multiple small drones in a single mission”.

Anduril, the American tech and arms company, sells two interceptors, one called a Roadrunner, and one called an Anvil, which “navigates autonomously to intercept potential drone threats”.

There’s no standard design, but the one thing that holds true, from Kyiv to California via Bristol, is the size of the companies involved.

“It’s the ‘tech bro’ side of defence that’s moving faster on this, rather than the defence giants,” says Plichta, referring to companies which span digital innovation and defence like America’s Anduril and Palantir, as well as Epirus, which is behind Leonidas, an anti-drone swarm energy weapon.

What makes a good interceptor?

Regardless of the specific design, all interceptor drones have to overcome certain challenges. By definition they must all be faster, and thus probably more expensive, than the object they are trying to hit. That often means making them small, to maximise speed and range.

An explosive warhead increases damage, but also adds weight, so some, like the offering from MAARS, are simply flying battering rams designed to knock targets out of the sky. If they want a higher kill ratio than one-to-one, interceptors have to be able to survive multiple collisions and keep flying, so they need to be tough.

Finally, you need lots of drones, and lots of pilots to fly them, as the war in Ukraine has demonstrated. 

“If you think about it, you need at least one interceptor drone per Shahed. But you also need that volume spread around the areas they attack – that tends to be Kyiv and Odesa and cities in the middle of the country – or the paths to them. And then you have to account for flexibility, because it’s quite easy for the Russians to change flight paths,” says Plichta.

“When you take all of that into account, it’s not so much that the technology isn’t there, or that there aren’t prototypes, or that there aren’t working copies. It’s just a scale issue.”

Four-hundred Shaheds per night, one interceptor per Shahed, and one drone pilot per interceptor – even if AI-targeting eventually removes the last part of that equation, the logistical tail builds up rapidly. Without cost oversight, deploying the “cheap” interceptors can rapidly get expensive.

General Oleksandr Syrskyi, the commander of the Ukrainian armed forces, told journalists last month that to be effective, interceptor teams also need tactical mini radars – essential for reconnaissance work, and of which Ukraine currently has only a handful.

The best defence is a swarm of your own

And even if those logistical issues can be overcome, interceptor drones have their limitations. “We’re already using them, and we are expanding their use. But they can’t replace everything. We have to understand that anti-drone air defence is a complex system,” Yuriy Ignat, a spokesman for the Ukrainian air force, tells The Telegraph.

“First, they don’t have a very long range – only a few dozen kilometres. Secondly, you need to scale up the depth of territory they cover. They only work locally. And they can’t always fly, in bad weather, fog, and so on.”

Which is why Ukrainian MiG-29 and F-16 jets remain crucial to air-defence missions; why conventional systems, from state-of-the-art Patriot missiles, to the basic cannons of German Flakpanzer Gepards, continue to be deployed; and why the low-tech, machine-gun-on-a-truck teams still account for nearly half of all intercepts.

Nor is improvisation limited to drones. Britain recently announced that it was sending Ukraine 350 air-to-air ASRAAM missiles, adapted by RAF engineers to fire from the back of an improvised truck.

Electronic warfare – the jamming and counter-jamming of radio frequencies and GPS signals – remains a rapidly evolving battlefield. One innovation saw Russian operators work out how to piggyback on Ukraine’s domestic mobile network for drone navigation. The next Ukrainian move is working out how to cut them off.

Beyond Ukraine

This is not just a Ukrainian problem. Nato countries are scrambling to find a solution to a mass aerial threat unseen since the 1,000-bomber raids of the Second World War. Some have already spent billions, with mixed results.

In Britain, there has been work on an experimental laser cannon called DragonFire, which the government claims costs £10 to fire, and can hit “any visible target”. The Royal Navy plans to mount it on at least four warships by 2027.

In April, the Ministry of Defence announced that British soldiers had successfully destroyed a 100-drone swarm in tests of a directed energy weapon called RapidDestroyer, a huge metal box which uses high frequency radio waves to fry UAV electronics at a cost of 10p a shot.

Initial outlay on such systems is high, and they would make juicy targets for the enemy. But because their cost to fire is so low, over time they may prove cost effective, particularly against mass attack.

“The Pentagon bought just four directed energy weapons for about $66 million (£49.5m). Firing them, they don’t need a bunch of ammunition,” says Zachary Kallenborn, a drone warfare expert at King’s College London. “They just need power. So over time that high cost becomes affordable. The problem is, what happens if your adversary just blows the crap out of it?”

And arms manufacturers, like car makers, tend to issue somewhat optimistic performance statistics with their products. Taking down a 100-drone swarm is plausible, says Kallenborn, but what were the environmental conditions when the test took place? How large or armoured were the drones? At what angles were they approaching? All those factors can complicate real-world operations.

Last year Doug Bush, the head of US Army acquisition, told the Senate armed forces committee that field tests of a vehicle-mounted 50-kilowatt laser in the Middle East had revealed challenges with keeping it charged and hitting targets at range, without dust or other interference dissipating the beam. 

Hence the importance of the interceptor drone. 

In 1940, Winston Churchill praised the bravery of “the Few” meeting waves of Luftwaffe raiders. Today, in the age of automated warfare, defence of the skies may come down to the many, if not countless, flying robots and their operators.

“In a lot of ways, it does take us back to the Battle of Britain and the Blitz, with the difference that what is sacrificed instead of people is money,” says Plichta. “Like then, it is about scaling up in range and number, to have enough of these aircraft in the right place at the right time to stop an attack.”

Until a better solution is found, it seems, the best defence against a hostile drone swarm will be a drone swarm of your own.