By late December 2025, Russia appeared to have the upper hand in the drone war. Its forces were increasingly striking Ukraine’s rear, aided by Starlink-enabled drones that could fly deep into Ukrainian-held territory while avoiding the main effects of electronic warfare.
That shifted decisively in February, when Russian forces were cut off from Starlink — at the instigation of Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, working with Elon Musk and SpaceX — stripping Moscow of the satellite communications its drones had relied on.
Dependent on American technology it no longer controlled, Russia lost much of the rear-strike edge it had spent a year building. Over the next few months a new story emerged — not of a Russian drone edge, but of a pronounced Ukrainian drone advantage and Russia’s frantic efforts to adapt.
Hunting the Operators
“Russian forces had been running thousands of gray-market Starlink terminals to support both ground communications and drone operations. When those terminals went dark, the impact extended far beyond communications,” Ryan O’Leary, an American former fighter who led the Chosen Company volunteer unit in Ukraine, tells Independence Avenue Media. “It directly affected Russia’s ability to project drone power at range.”
At the same time, Ukraine, ramping up the quality — and quantity — of drones it was producing, began leapfrogging its adversary in its ability to carry out persistent mid-range attacks.
Until recently, even when Kyiv was able to identify high-priority Russian drone teams or command posts in industrial zones, it was largely hamstrung, relying on only a handful of Western-supplied weapons such as HIMARS, whose effectiveness had been eroded by Russian electronic warfare. But more and more it is domestically produced drones that are doing much of the work without some of the core drawbacks.
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“We approximately know the locations of Russian pilots. Therefore, we can take them out,” Dmytro Zhlutenko, a drone operator from Ukraine’s 413th Battalion, tells Independence Avenue Media. “This is the exact capability we have been lacking, and we have invented it.”
In April, Fedorov said separate units had been created for the specific purpose of hunting Russian drone pilots.
The mid-range strikes also began targeting the support network behind Russia’s drone operations. These included fuel supplies, which Russian drone teams rely on for generators to power command posts, antennas, relay stations and launch sites.
Russia Builds a Drone Bureaucracy
The Russian Defense Ministry established a dedicated Unmanned Systems Forces branch in November 2025. It followed the August 2024 creation of the Rubicon drone formation, which played a key role in blunting Ukraine’s offensive into Russia’s Kursk region by targeting logistics routes and supply lines with long-range drone strikes.
But analysts including Rob Lee, of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, have observed that overaggressive expansion has threatened to dilute the effectiveness of these elite drone formations and reduce their quality.
The larger challenge is manpower, with drone units being targeted by Ukrainian forces and some analysts now saying Russia is losing more men per month than it can replace through recruitment.
In May, Bloomberg reported that Russia was trying to mitigate the problem by recruiting college students into unmanned systems units, offering large bonuses, academic leave, and tuition benefits. The campaign targets technically skilled students, including gamers, programmers, and drone pilots.
Russia’s defense minister, Andrei Belousov, has said that those who sign contracts as drone pilots or operators will not be transferred to other units or sent into assault roles, signaling an effort to protect drone specialists from some of the abuses associated with the wider military.
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In the meantime, Russia is also trying to adjust its tactics for the moment — but not without risk.
“Russia has likely significantly increased the tactical effectiveness of drone operations by moving operators closer to the front line,” Serhii Kuzan, chairman of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Center, tells Independence Avenue Media. “When the operator and relay infrastructure are closer to the front, control latency is reduced, the risk of long-range communication loss is minimized, and it is easier to adjust the flight path in complex situations.”
Lee and Dmytro Putiata, a Ukrainian veteran and military analyst, also recently observed that Russian commanders have experimented with a “drone line” concept that assigns drone units responsibility for different depths of the battlefield — from front-line strike missions to attacks on logistics routes and rear-area targets.
Rubicon’s doctrine increasingly focuses on “deep tactical interdiction,” hunting Ukrainian drone crews, antennas, electronic warfare systems, and logistics routes 10 to 40 kilometers behind the line, rather than only supporting assaults at the front.
But that centralization creates vulnerabilities. Ukraine now regularly targets Rubicon command posts, headquarters, and logistics nodes.
“Russia is trading personnel safety for operational effectiveness, and this is characteristic of its current model of warfare — mass, proximity to the battlefield, and acceptable losses,” Kuzan says.
Russia has also fitfully pivoted away from reliance on Starlink for communications to mesh networks. Unlike Starlink’s direct satellite connection, these networks extend the range of first-person-view drones (FPVs) by passing data through a chain of drones and relay nodes.
“With Ukrainian electronic warfare all over the front line and no satellite fallback, Russia’s only way to push FPV ranges beyond direct line-of-sight is to turn their drones into a relay network,” O’Leary says.
While this reduces dependence on satellite communications, it also requires a more complex network architecture and additional infrastructure to maintain connectivity.
Still a Threat — Within Limits
Some Russian military bloggers have written that the problem runs deeper than a lack of technology. The Telegram channel ¡No Pasarán! recently observed that Russia already has many of the tools needed to counter Ukrainian drones targeting logistics, but is held back by poor organization, slow bureaucracies, and an inability to deploy systems at scale.
Russia also lacks a consistent supply of cheap, survivable mid-range strike drones — a point that Russian military bloggers such as the popular Rybar have shown growing concern about. Russia regularly uses Shahed drones, costing around $50,000, while Ukraine is able to field AI-enabled drones, such as the Hornet, which reportedly cost around $5,000.
Still, for shorter distances on the front line Russia has embraced low-cost attritable drones such as the Molniya, a simple fixed-wing platform with a range of up to 30 kilometers. Produced for only a few hundred dollars each and launched in large numbers, they reflect Moscow’s growing focus on saturating the battlefield with cheaper drones.
Zhlutenko warns that Russia’s drone capabilities continue to improve. “The Rubicon-style drone warfighting model is more efficient than the classical Russian army model,” he says, arguing that Moscow is likely to spread its tactics across a wider range of units in the same way the Wagner militia’s battlefield methods were later adopted by the regular army.
Putiata and Lee have also argued that Rubicon represents a qualitative improvement over conventional Russian drone units, benefiting from greater resources, innovation capacity, and a dedicated focus on hunting Ukrainian drone teams and logistics deep behind the front line.
The authors say Rubicon has helped shorten the time between identifying and striking targets, improve the speed and effectiveness of Russia’s kill chain, and disseminate new tactics and procedures across the broader force.
Their growing effectiveness poses real risks for Ukraine. Still, even if Russia continues to expand these elite drone formations, those units will remain constrained by the wider military system around them and uneven implementation across the front may continue to hamper Moscow’s ability to fully exploit its technological progress.
