In the past two months, just one Ukrainian charity has supplied the military with enough interceptor UAVs to down 1,500 enemy drones.
According to the report, these interceptor drones could become a low-cost, accessible alternative to Western or Soviet-era anti-aircraft missiles whose stocks are dwindling because allies are either unable or unwilling to replenish them.
Ukraine’s 1,129th air defense regiment told the journalists that this approach was first tested in 2024, initially focusing on knocking out enemy reconnaissance UAVs over the battlefield.
“As a result, the depth to which these enemy reconnaissance drones can fly behind Ukrainian lines has decreased sharply,” the report said.
Earlier, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said other defense units are using such interceptors to take down Shahed UAVs targeting Kyiv and other cities. In some cases, Ukrainian forces have managed to bring down several dozen kamikaze drones in a single night.
At the same time, hunting enemy drones is becoming more difficult, as Moscow constantly improves their design.
“When we started to work [with these drones], the enemy would fly at 800 or a thousand meters,” the report quotes a Ukrainian officer familiar with the matter.
“Now it's three, four or five thousand—but their [interceptors’] camera zoom is not infinite.”
Taras Tymochko, of the Come Back Alive non-profit, told Reuters that interceptor drones have been supplied to 90 Ukrainian units. Since the project’s launch in 2024, the interceptors have enabled Ukraine to down more than 3,000 enemy drones, with nearly half of them in the past two months. The foundation estimates that the destroyed Russian aircraft are worth about $195 million—more than ten times the cost of the drones and equipment supplied under the project.
Sam Bendett, a senior research fellow at the Centre for New American Security, said Russian forces complain about the effectiveness of Ukraine’s interceptor drones even as they develop their own.
“We're starting to see more and more videos of various types of interceptions by both sides…,” he said.
“I think this is going to accelerate and it's going to become more and more ubiquitous in the coming weeks.”