Upgraded Shaheds Push Ukraine’s Air Defenses to the Limit

Today, the biggest news comes from the Russian Federation.

Here, Russia has upgraded its Shahed drones with a clear goal: to break through Ukraine’s improving defenses. The result is a faster, stealthier, and more lethal system built to test Ukrainian interception capacity at scale.

Russia’s Shahed drones now cruise at over 200 kilometers per hour and reach altitudes of up to 3,000 meters, representing a significant improvement over earlier versions. That may not sound extreme by aviation standards, but it puts the drones just above the reliable range of many mobile air defense systems. For mobile air defense crews relying on autocannons and machine guns without automated targeting, higher speeds and altitude sharply reduce their effectiveness. Additionally, the new cruising altitude of the Shaheds are now near and around the maximum engagement ceiling of most Manpads in service with Ukraine. Higher speed also shortens the time available for command centers to identify and respond, making it harder to coordinate layered defenses or reroute coverage fast enough to catch multiple inbound drones. That in itself increases the odds that at least some drones will get through, even if the majority are intercepted.

Another critical change is how these drones descend on their targets, as recent Shaheds have been recorded diving at speeds close to 400 kilometers per hour, with a steeper trajectory than before. These fast, high-angle descents allow the drone to evade point-defense systems that rely on last-second tracking and interception, such as autocannons or infrared-guided systems near high-value targets.

In effect, the drones now fly too low for mid-range systems, too fast for close-range systems, and too high for man-portable weapons. This stretches Ukraine’s air defense grid, forcing it to constantly reposition, expend more interceptors, and take more risks when choosing which incoming targets to prioritize.

GPS jamming has been one of Ukraine’s most reliable tools to disrupt Russian drones in the final stage of flight, but here as well, the Russians have adapted. The latest Shaheds appear to be equipped with better inertial navigation systems and shielding that makes them less reliant on GPS signals. These are not fully autonomous systems, and they do not yet rival cruise missiles in precision, but the gap is narrowing. A Shahed that can continue flying even when GPS signals are degraded or lost poses a much greater threat to military facilities, energy infrastructure, and urban centers alike, especially when launched in swarms.

Perhaps the most important upgrade is to the warhead, as Russia switched from the older 50-kilogram explosives to a new 90-kilogram combined effect payload. This includes a shaped-charge core for armor penetration, surrounded by layers of fragmentation, blast, and incendiary effects.

This combination of speeds, altitude, and a new 90-kilogram multi-effect warhead, makes the drones not just harder to intercept but also far more versatile against different targets. Unlike conventional warheads that focus on a single type of damage, this design ensures that even partial hits cause damage to almost any target the Shahed can hit.

Against its main target of fuel depots, transformer stations, troop concentrations, and civilian housing, all of these upgrades feed into one another, higher speed protects against interception, altitude makes visual tracking harder, and the heavier payload means even a partial hit can cause serious damage. It also raises the stakes for Ukraine’s rear-area operations, since even limited breaches in air defense can now lead to serious infrastructure damage or casualties.

In the long run, this shift also reflects Russia’s commitment to industrial-scale drone warfare, and instead of relying on a handful of precision missiles, Moscow is investing in waves of cheap, ever-improving drones to probe and exhaust Ukrainian defenses with. Whether this approach can outpace Ukraine’s own drone production and interception technology remains to be seen, but for now, both sides are escalating the drone war, with faster hardware, sharper tactics, and fewer rules.

Overall, Russia’s Shahed upgrades represent an effort to restore the balance in the drone war, as for much of the past year, Ukraine has gained the upper hand in intercepting these drones, combining better radar coverage with faster response times and new tactics such as drone-on-drone interception. But with faster speeds, higher altitude, better navigation, and stronger payloads, Shaheds are no longer the slow, predictable targets they once were. Even if their success rate does not increase dramatically, the cost for Ukrainians to stop them will.

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