The country’s war effort was at a nadir. But mass drone production has come to the rescue.

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Kyiv has taken the war to its enemy while slowing Russia’s advances on the battlefield — despite reduced support from Donald Trump’s US.

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Months after the country’s morale hit a nadir and its allies despaired, Ukraine’s turnaround has challenged the long-held conventional wisdom that Russia’s bigger and better-equipped army can outlast Kyiv’s — boosting Ukrainians’ self-assurance to a level not seen in years.

“This month saw changes in the dynamics in our favour, in Ukraine’s favour,” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said last week. “We are holding more positions and inflicting more damage.” He added that the country’s long-range hits on Russia were “especially significant”.

Indeed, days after Shtilierman walked past assembly lines churning out FP-1 wings and engines, scores of the cheaply produced weapons would fly hundreds of kilometres to Moscow and beyond in Ukraine’s biggest bombardment of the Russian capital since the war began.

The drones zipped through Russian air defences before plunging into oil refineries, sparking massive fireballs and plumes of black smoke visible from space.

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Alyona Getmanchuk, head of Ukraine’s mission to Nato, says her country is “now in one of its strongest positions since the beginning of the war” as it depends less on its partners.

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Unease in Moscow

Ahead of Moscow’s Victory Day parade on May 9, an annual commemoration of the defeat of Nazi Germany and display of military might, Russian authorities appeared unusually uneasy. Amid speculation that Ukraine might target Red Square with drones, security was tightened and celebrations scaled back to include only foot soldiers.

The parade went ahead but not before Zelenskyy mockingly “authorised” the event to proceed, issuing an official decree on the presidential website promising not to strike Moscow.

In Russia, resentment is deepening over a war that has crept ever closer to home. Ukrainian drone strikes are a regular occurrence as far from the frontline as the Ural Mountains.

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State pollster Vtsiom’s index of “personal protest potential”, an indicator of respondents’ willingness to take part in demonstrations, rose to 25 per cent in April — its highest level since the war began.

“Everyone is furious. People [in the Russian elite] are in full agreement this is a catastrophe,” a senior Russian businessman says. “It has to be resolved somehow.” He adds that Vladimir Putin, who has run Russia since the turn of the century, is “overwhelmingly unpopular” but also “old and stubborn”.

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Backed by some €90bn in EU loans, Kyiv is pouring resources into domestic arms production in a bid to reduce dependence on western weapons and the political constraints that often accompany them.

It has moved at breakneck speed to scale up the manufacture of land, sea and air drones, artillery systems, electronic warfare equipment, and even ballistic and cruise missiles.

In the first four months of this year, the Ukrainian defence ministry has reported exponential growth in the production of reconnaissance drones (up 441 per cent on the total for all of 2025), mid-strike drones (up 312 per cent) and deep-strike systems (up 53 per cent).

According to the figures provided by the ministry, which cannot be independently verified, the output of fibre-optic first-person view drones has increased by 179 per cent.

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Franz-Stefan Gady, a Vienna-based military analyst who frequently travels to the front, says that by deploying swarms of FPVs to establish the 20km-deep kill zone, Kyiv has regained “parity or superiority along select sectors of the frontline in drone warfare”.

He adds: “Ukraine is arguably in a better military position in May 2026 than it was in May 2025, and Russian problems are more systemic in 2026 than they were in 2025.”

In the meantime, Ukraine is expanding from long-range strikes that wreak havoc on the oil and gas sector bankrolling the Kremlin’s war machine to medium-range drone operations to disrupt Russian logistics and supply lines.

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This month Ukrainian forces have published videos of drone strikes on targets 30km to 65km beyond the front line, as well as a hit by Fire Point’s FP-2 drones on a headquarters of the Russian FSB intelligence agency and another on an air defence system near the entrance of the occupied Crimean peninsula more than 200km away.

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Andriy Zagorodnyuk, a former Ukrainian defence minister now at the Centre for Defence Strategies, a Kyiv-based security think-tank, was among the first to emphasise the importance of medium-range strikes two years ago — a drive he says Ukraine is now benefiting from.

“Russia currently is in a precarious position — they don’t have many options,” he says. “They don’t have a path to prevail.”

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Three organisations that track battlefield developments in Ukraine — Deep State, Black Bird Group and the Institute for the Study of War — all report Russia’s territorial gains have slowed, although the groups’ assessments differ slightly in the amount of territory gained or lost.

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In Moscow some pro-war commentators have even begun to argue that ending the invasion on the current front lines — far short of Putin’s goals — would mark an acceptable end point.

Vasily Kashin, a professor at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, wrote in an essay for the foreign policy journal Russia in Global Affairs last week that “securing [currently occupied] territory for Russia . . . would be a good result and a complete military victory” if combined with limits on Kyiv’s armed forces and a ban on Ukraine participating in military alliances or hosting foreign troops.

He added that it was not in the country’s interest to “endlessly set on fire [its] resources at Mala Tokmachka,” a frontline village Russia’s forces have failed to capture for more than a year, “while pursuing imaginary goals”.

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Getmanchuk, the head of the mission to Nato, says there is “a broad perception that the most difficult phase of the war is behind us”.

She adds: “Ukrainians increasingly believe they will be able to withstand whatever comes next.”

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