The Iranian drones in Ukraine’s already crowded skies

The Iranian Shahed-136 drone was designed to explode on impact, and on Monday, Russian forces launched dozens of them at targets across Ukraine. One hit an apartment building in Kyiv, the capital, killing four people, including a woman who was six months pregnant.
As the war enters its ninth month, the Shahed is among dozens of types of drones, including remote-controlled surveillance types and programmable flying bombs, being used on battlefields in Ukraine. They also include military drones produced the United States, Turkey and Russia and commercial-grade drones made in China.
The full range of models, and which countries supplied them, is unclear. But the rapid increase in the number and types of unmanned drones deployed in the war signals that smaller, less-expensive weapons like the Shahed will probably become a staple of modern armed conflicts.
Some are surveillance drones — unmanned aerial systems in military parlance — essentially small propeller-driven winged aircraft controlled radio signals. Larger models of this type can spy on enemy forces or carry missiles and bombs to attack targets on the ground. They land and can be refueled and flown again.
These larger surveillance drones can be expensive, so both Ukrainian and Russian forces have employed quadcopters — battery-powered commercial drones that are far cheaper. Quadcopters fly shorter dances and hover over a position before dropping small weapons like grenades on enemy troops and vehicles. They are designed to be recovered, rearmed and used again after their batteries are recharged.
Many of the weapons terrorizing Kyiv and other civilian areas of Ukraine, however, are what the defense industry calls “loitering munitions.” These drones explode on impact, which is why they are sometimes referred to as kamikaze drones.
The United States has shipped Ukraine weapons of this type since early in the war.
In March, the Pentagon announced it would send 100 “tactical unmanned aerial systems” called Switchblades. The next month, the adminration said it would provide another 300. Eight days later, the Defense Department said it would send 120 Phoenix Ghost drones to Ukraine. In July, the United States provided funds for Ukraine to buy 580 more of them.
In August, the Pentagon said it would send Puma drones — small aircraft that soldiers toss into the air to launch and then control remote control from up to nine miles away. Pumas can stay at altitudes of about 500 feet.
The White House is not providing Kyiv with larger drones like the Predator and Reaper that U.S. forces used in the wars that began after the Sept. 11 attacks. Both aircraft can fly for hours while sending live video feeds of the ground and carry laser-guided missiles and guided bombs.
Soon after Russia’s invasion, Ukrainian troops began using Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones to hunt Russian soldiers far beyond the front lines. These drones, which have a 39-foot wingspan and carry small guided munitions, were Ukraine’s main long-range weapon until the United States began supplying mobile rocket launchers known as HIMARS and the guided munitions for them.
The Iranian Mohajer-6, another weapon that Russia is flying over Ukraine, is similar to the Bayraktar. It has a wingspan of 33 feet, a range of more than 1,240 miles and can drop or launch small munitions. Iran also provided the Shahed-136 to Houthi fighters in Yemen in 2021, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency told the Senate Armed Services Committee.
In addition to the Shahed-136 and Mohajer-6, Russian troops have used at least 10 other types of drones, according to Conflict Armament Research, an independent group based in Britain that identifies and tracks weapons and ammunition used in wars around the world. They include the Orlan-10 and Kartograf surveillance models, which Russia produces.
The proliferation of these weapons is rapidly increasing around the world.
A 2017 survey the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College found that nine countries were developing or producing 26 models of loitering munitions.
“Today, there are more than 100 models of loitering munitions in development or production in at least 24 countries,” said Dan Gettinger, who studies armed drones and founded the center.
“In recent years, the armed conflicts in Nagorno-Karabakh and Ukraine have contributed to a growing interest and investment in loitering munitions in Europe — France, Italy and the UK have launched efforts to acquire loitering munitions in the past 18 months,” Mr. Gettinger said.
The Shahed-136 is the most powerful Iranian weapon that Russia is using in Ukraine. It weighs about 450 pounds, he said, and is believed to contain between 80 and 90 pounds of explosives.
After repeated setbacks, Russia’s use of the Iranian drones could be a sign that it is running low on precision-guided weapons.
“This is more about a losing power trying to make up for its battlefield losses sparking fear from a new kind of weapon targeting civilians,” said Peter W. Singer, an author on defense topics and fellow at the think tank New America. “It also gives a taste of what is to come as the technology gets more advanced and more widespread — just as missiles went from novel and not all that effective to the norm of war, the same will happen with swarms of armed drones.
“As recently as a few months ago, there was still a debate among both about whether drones would be effective in a major conventional war, as opposed to just counterterrorism and insurgency,” he said. “That debate is now utterly over.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.