Russia's jet-powered drones flew against Ukraine every day in August

That figure is the whole story, because it sits above the top speed of the interceptors Ukraine has been using.

Russia turned to jet propulsion because the drones "are much faster than the previous generation", said Dr Marina Miron, an expert on military technology at King's College London, and that "makes it much more difficult for Ukraine to intercept them".

Earlier this year Ukraine was intercepting 94% of long-range drones, by President Volodymyr Zelensky's account. A defence built to stop a slow, low, propeller-driven target does not automatically stop the same airframe with a jet on it, and the interception rate is the number to watch in the coming months.

What it has cost

The consequences are already measurable. Zelensky said the drones formed part of a wave of attacks on 1 September that killed at least 12 people and injured 20 more. Six of the casualties were railway workers, after a depot in Kyiv was hit.

The president has condemned what he called an unfolding "horror" over the skies of the capital.

The reach extends past Ukraine's borders. The Moldovan government said on Wednesday that a plane carrying Zelensky had been delayed at Chisinau airport the previous day after a Russian drone — reported to be jet-powered — entered Moldovan airspace.

The arms race this has started

Kyiv's response has been to try to build something that can catch them.

On 10 August, Ukraine's deputy head of military intelligence, Maj Gen Vadym Skibitskyi, said his forces needed new interceptor missiles "capable of matching [jet-drones'] speed". Four Ukrainian companies have since started testing missiles designed to shoot down the new Geran models, officials in Kyiv have told reporters, and the country's new defence minister, Yevhenii Khmara, has tasked them with producing "thousands of units" as quickly as possible.

The word thousands is the point. Interceptors have to be cheap enough to fire in the numbers the attack requires, and an expensive missile used against a cheap drone is a losing exchange even when it works.

A weapon that is becoming something else

There is an economic logic behind Russia's investment, and it runs in the opposite direction from the usual assumption that drones are the cheap option.

The speed and manoeuvrability of the new models have blurred the line between a drone and a cruise missile, according to John Hardie of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a think tank focused on national security and foreign policy.

"Long-range one-way attack drones are basically a poor man's cruise missile," Hardie said. "The more you add capability to a drone, the less meaningful the distinction between the drone and a lower-end cruise missile."

That is a description of a category collapsing. A munition that flies at over 300mph, navigates independently and is built to be expended is doing the job of a cruise missile at a fraction of the cost — and, crucially, can be produced at a rate cruise missiles cannot.

What this means for the winter

The timing is what makes August's data more than a statistical curiosity. An air defence network that cannot reliably intercept the fastest incoming weapons goes into the colder months at a disadvantage it did not have last year.

Ukraine's counter depends on two things arriving at once: interceptors fast enough to catch a jet drone, and enough of them to matter. Four companies are testing; none has been reported as fielding at scale.

Meanwhile the daily pattern established in August is the baseline. Not a surge, not a demonstration — a rate of fire Russia sustained for a full month, against defences that were built for a slower war.