Why Ukrainian Drones Should Bomb Moscow

The Supreme Commander-in-Chief promised 30 thousand "medium and long" range attack drones this year. It is not exactly known what "medium" and "long" range are in the president's interpretation, but it is likely that this is still more than the thousand "long" range attack drones and 10 thousand "medium range" drones promised last year. If we take into account purely arithmetic indicators, this is a great achievement! This is our victory! But is it really as it is presented to us?..

Among the military and drone manufacturers, medium-range drones are usually those that fly approximately 300 km, and long-range drones are those that fly more than 300 km. The fact is that aviation, especially small and unmanned, is a disproportionate thing. Roughly speaking, if you reduce the An-225 Mriya super-heavy-duty transport jet by ten times, it will not lift a load ten times smaller, and will not transfer it over a distance ten times shorter. This approach to solving problems does not work in aviation. In addition, it is worth noting that an attack drone with a range of 300 km will differ from an attack drone with a range of 400 km in twice the size, weight and price.

Thus, counting the number of "medium and long-range" attack drones in pieces is possible only for the average person, this is not enough for specialists. These are very different drones, different sizes, weights, prices, purposes. In addition, we must proceed from the fact that we need to carry out air strikes with bombs. And we also need to carry out air strikes with bombs on Moscow, in addition to the already known and understandable military targets within the reach of our drones.

Why should we carry out air strikes with bombs on Moscow? Because Koshchei's egg is in this sacred place, and until we establish parity between air attacks on Kyiv and drone attacks on Moscow, we should not even think about negotiations on favorable terms for us. Remember the excitement that occurred when Ukrainian drones attacked the Kremlin? It is worth noting that hundreds of square kilometers of the Kursk region controlled by our troops are not worth even one massive raid on Moscow.

By the way, the last massive drone strike on Moscow known to the general public occurred on November 18, 2024, when 59 drones were shot down on approach to the capital of the Russian Federation. It is worth noting that they were shot down not over Moscow: 45 drones were shot down by anti-aircraft defense forces over the Bryansk region; six over the Kursk region; three over the Belgorod region; three were destroyed over the Tula region, and only two were shot down over the Moscow region.

I know a little more than the average person about the successes of our drone strikes. I am aware that there were even more unsuccessful attacks by unmanned drones, when more than 400 unmanned drones launched towards Moscow, and only 12 reached the outskirts of the Moscow region (and they were shot down). I also know about more successful raids of our drones, when three (half) of the six drone strikes reached Moscow. The situations and circumstances during these attacks were different. It should be noted that for the sake of objectivity, it is always important to count the number of drones launched and the number that reached the target, but in war, only enemy losses are always counted.

However, in any case, no matter how we counted, the result is disappointing, namely, every night, and now every day, enemy aircraft-projectiles of Iranian production Shahed 136 bomb Kyiv and the region, and in Moscow and the Moscow region, everything is quiet and calm, there are no explosions or bombings. In addition, this fact, nevertheless, inevitably, no matter how you interpret it, is an accurate and vivid evidence of the inefficiency, worthlessness of our defense policy and military policy in general.

Regarding our dubious defensive structures, it is still possible to find some excuse, to blame someone for the shortcomings, the quality of the concrete, the poor location ... In addition, it is also possible to blame the suppliers and the military personnel themselves for the poor quality of the first-person view drones, every second of which does not fly at the front. It is also possible to blame someone or something for the terrible quality of 120 mm mines. But it is worth noting the fact that it is impossible not to see the obvious, it is impossible to deny the facts, namely that every night and now every day, the Iranian-made Shahed 136 flying projectile bombs Kyiv, and Ukrainian drones do not reach Moscow.

Why is the situation this way? To answer this question, we need to go back to 2022, when the Russians first used the Geranium kamikaze strike drones and the Iranian-made Shahed 136 flying projectile, which we began to contemptuously call obscene language. The then commander-in-chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi set the task for the then head of the joint-stock company "Ukroboronprom" Husev to develop a Ukrainian analogue of a long-range strike drone by the new year 2023, which was developed by the new year, though only in 2024, and not entirely by the joint-stock company "Ukroboronprom", but this is no longer important...

In the end, we also got medium – and long-range strike drones, namely the Ukrainian unmanned aerial complex with loitering munitions UJ-26 "Bober", the Ukrainian long-range kamikaze drone AN-196 "Lyutyi" and other drones, the names of which are not advertised. It is worth noting that some types of these long-range drones, purchased with budget money from the country, have been filling warehouses since the middle of last year, but no one uses them, because they cannot fly to the desired targets.

Why is this so? Because the situation has changed dramatically since the middle of last year. Namely, the enemy has begun to widely and massively use electronic warfare against drones in its rear. From the state border to Moscow itself, our enemy has significantly strengthened the air defense grouping, moved the Arctic versions of the self-propelled anti-aircraft missile and gun system "Pantsir" to Moscow, built high masts for the air defense systems, and installed "Pantsir" systems on the roofs of high-rise Moscow buildings.

And suddenly it turned out that the expensive, but simple in design, Ukrainian "Shahed" drones are not even capable of flying to the Moscow region. Even worse, a significant part of these attack drones crashes immediately after launch, because GPS signals are suppressed not only by the enemy, but also by our security forces, and without satellite navigation they do not fly. Therefore, they began to try to use most of these domestic "Shahed" drones in other areas of the front, where there are not so many electronic warfare and air defense systems. And then Ukrainian drones flew to Kaspiysk, Grozny, Kazan and other places where they can fly to the delight of the average person, who evaluates the effectiveness of drones by the range of use and the power of the warhead.

Meanwhile, no weapon has been able to fly to the center of Moscow for a year and a half. There are several reasons:

1. The strongest counteraction of electronic warfare, when satellite navigation signals are either completely absent or they are spoofed (substituted), usually by altitude, so that the drone simply crashes into the ground. In order to cope with this situation, the drone must have a reliable and fairly expensive inertial navigation system, an accurate magnetic compass, an artificial intelligence system for analyzing navigation data and making informed decisions. Most of our Ukrainian drones do not have these characteristics.
2. Strong counteraction of air defense is also important, when the density of radar stations and air defense systems per square kilometer of protected territory is simply off the charts and in order to reach Moscow, it is necessary to fly at extremely low altitudes, and this mode is also unavailable to most Ukrainian drones, built according to the concept of "we take more and carry further." That is, these drones are obviously large in size, have a significant radar cross-section (RCS), and at the same time do not have the necessary equipment and software on board to fly at altitudes less than 100 meters.
3. The fatal imperfection of Ukrainian long-range drones and poor crew training also play a significant role. It is worth noting that our enemy has one type of long-range drones, namely the Iranian-made flying bomb "Shahed-136", which is constantly being improved. We have dozens of different drones, which are simply purchased by different security agencies according to the formula "the cheaper, the better." As a result, enemy Shahed-136 drones terrorize Kyiv every night and every day, Ukrainian drones occasionally reach places where air defense and electronic warfare are not as strong as in the Moscow region. It is time to finally admit that in order to bomb Moscow, it is important to choose one or two promising models and invest all your efforts in improving them, rather than breeding dozens (soon there will be hundreds) of various unpromising "unique" drones and "drone-rockets" that are a purely Ukrainian marketing invention that are of no value or use.

It is also worth noting that our military who control drones have a particularly difficult time also because the enemy uses its advantage in medium-range ballistic missiles against them. The enemy can constantly launch their Shahed136 drones from four or five locations without expecting a retaliatory strike, and our long-range drone crews are forced to look for a new place to launch their devices every time, every night, because the enemy quickly identifies such places and launches a preemptive strike on them. In order to solve this problem, we need to have a concept, a solution, a catapult for launching large drones with a short interval between launches. But unfortunately, there are no such ready-made solutions anywhere in the world, and we are not ready for them either.

So, it turns out that long-range drones either take off from wheels, for which they need at least some more or less suitable takeoff sites (and in muddy conditions there are few of them), or use a rocket launch on powder boosters, which in itself is extremely unsafe since enemy reconnaissance drones confidently detect such launches at a distance of up to 50 km, and Iskander operational-tactical missile systems immediately strike the launch sites.

In addition, another big seasonal problem is icing of drones. When the humidity along the route or in the target area is up to 100% and the temperature is from +2 to -12 °C, the drones become covered in ice and simply fall. Iranian-made Shahed 136 missile aircraft do not fall because they are treated with special anti-icing fluorine-containing compounds, and some Shahed 136 have a wing heating system and airspeed sensors. Why is this not done in our country? This is a rhetorical question: because unmanned aviation in general is managed by non-professionals in various law enforcement agencies, who are very far from both unmanned aviation and the problems of aviation in general.

At the end of this text, I will try to give hints, "simple solutions" to correct the situation. How should we start regularly bombing Moscow?

1. First, for such a military maneuver, we need to decide which 30,000 drones we need and for what? And why 30 thousand? If we are still going to bomb targets poorly covered by air defense and electronic warfare from time to time and make beautiful reports about a large number of devices launched simultaneously, without analyzing and dissecting their effectiveness in terms of the number of those that reached and hit the target, that is one story. If we are going to seriously engage in launching drones to Moscow, where Koshchei's death is located, that is a completely different story.
2. It is necessary, and it has been important for the third year in a row, to create a single state management of unmanned drones. We even have the Ministry of Youth and Sports of Ukraine, but there is no Ministry of Defense Industry of Ukraine, or even a Committee on Drones of Ukraine, when everyone already seems to understand what role drones play in modern warfare. The question is not even in some new structure, but in overcoming chaos and anarchy, which cost us an exorbitant price, and as a result of which our Ukrainian drones are so imperfect that they cannot fly to Moscow.
3. It is necessary, and has long been necessary, to create a single and efficient Command for long-range unmanned bombing, and not to have each such command in each defense structure. It is worth noting that our Air Force is a separate branch of the armed forces, and the Navy is a separate branch of the armed forces, so why are long-range drones in almost all types and branches of the armed forces? What is the point of this competition between commanders who are fighting for orders and stars on their shoulder straps? It is worth noting that the System must be unified and work effectively. It is necessary that there be unified intelligence, task setting, drone procurement policy, crew training system, work on planning and conducting combat operations.

Moscow must be destroyed. This is as important a task today as the battles on the Donetsk front. This task must become an obsession, a large-scale national project like the Manhattan Project (the project to create an atomic bomb in the United States of America in the 1940s). This project must be headed by ambitious professionals, not loyal and weak-willed people. The destruction of the Carthage of Moscow must become the primary state defense task.