Russia’s rumored jet-powered variations of the Iranian Shahed are showing in Ukraine’s air protection reports

• Ukrainian reports are beginning to doc the use of Russia’s new jet-propelled Shahed drones.

• One model, unofficially dubbed the Geran-3, is said to fly up to 500 miles per hour.

• Such speeds would pose key issues for Ukraine’s air defenses if jet drones are launched en masse.

More indicators are rising that Russia is launching a new exploding drone said to fly much quicker than its present Shaheds.

Ukraine’s Air Force Command reported on Wednesday that it had encountered jet-powered attack drones while defending its airspace the evening before.

“A notable feature of the night attack was the use of up to eight jet-powered UAVs in the northern direction,” it wrote in a common replace.

The announcement marks one of the first official reports of Ukraine’s forces encountering the new loitering munition in fight.

In complete, the Air Force Command counted 78 Shahed attack drones launched on Tuesday evening.

The assertion added that 51 drones were shot down or disabled by digital warfare, interceptor drones, anti-air missiles, and cell fire teams, which usually use truck-mounted machine weapons.

The Ukrainian air drive did not specify if any jet-propelled drones were shot down.

“There were 27 drone impacts recorded at 7 locations, and falling debris from downed drones at 2 locations,” Air Force Command wrote.

On Thursday, a Ukrainian Telegram channel that displays the flight paths of Russian drones also wrote that it recorded launches of jet-propelled drones.

“On the map we’ve drawn for you, you can see the movement of cruise missiles, jet-powered Shaheds, and regular strike/decoy UAVs,” it wrote. While not an official authorities channel, it’s extensively adopted in Ukraine for city-specific alerts on incoming drones.

A serious downside for Ukraine’s air defenses

Russian jet-propelled drones are believed to be carefully modeled after Iran’s Shahed-238, an upgraded long-range loitering munition Tehran unveiled in November.

Moscow has not formally detailed its own model of the new weapon, but Ukraine’s intelligence and Western analysts have reported that it’s probably building a model with the Tolou‑10/13 jet engine to vastly increase the drone’s pace.

Open-source intelligence sources said as early as January that Ukraine may have shot down at least one Shahed-238-type drone, indicating restricted Russian use. In June, photos printed by Ukrainian Telegram channels appeared to show destroyed fragments of such drones in the nation.

In both earlier reports and the Air Force Command’s replace on Wednesday, it’s unclear if these were prototypes or finalized drones.

But if deployed en masse against Ukraine, the new upgraded drone could pose a main downside for Kyiv’s air defenses.

The Shahed-238 is said to be much quicker than the Shahed-136, which is domestically produced in Russia as the Geran-2 — the Kremlin’s principal attack drone against Ukraine.

While the Shahed-136 is recognized to fly at prime speeds of 115 mph, a Russian common advised state media in December that the Shahed-238 could fly as fast as 500 mph. Extended impartial analyses on the drone’s still aren’t publicly obtainable, and it’s doable that the munition can only fly that fast while diving.

At such pace, however, the jet-powered drone would be almost as fast as a cruise missile.

That would be a almost inconceivable goal for Ukraine’s cell fire teams, or the vehicle-mounted machine gun crews it’s relied on to combat off Shahed-136s.

This 12 months, cell fire teams are already being overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of Russian Shahed-136s launched every evening. To shore up the hole, Ukraine has began prioritizing interceptor drones, which also risk being rendered out of date if jet-powered Shaheds become mainstream.

Interceptor drones, constructed secretly by Ukrainian corporations, already need to fly much quicker than the Shahed-136 since they must catch up to the loitering munition after it’s detected.

A Shahed-238 or Geran-3 shifting at 500 mph would require an intercepting drone to fly almost thrice as fast as before.

“In such a case, promising antiaircraft interceptor UAVs, unfortunately, will be powerless,” wrote a Ukrainian army blogger in late June.

Ukraine does have superior anti-air missile defenses for quicker targets, such as the US-made Patriot system, which has even been reported to take down the hypersonic Kinzhal missile.

Still, Ukraine usually reserves these costly anti-air munitions for ballistic missiles; expending them to neutralize waves of Shahed drones would be unsustainable.

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