🔧 Thanks to substantial financial resources, production lines far from the front, and especially support from China, russia has gained a significant advantage in the drone war.
Source: Gazeta.UA
🇨🇳 Beijing officially denies supplying drones or their components to russia. However, according to Oleg Alexandrov, a representative of Ukraine’s Foreign Intelligence Service speaking to Politico, russia heavily depends on Chinese parts for both tactical and long-range drones. This reduces russia’s technological and manufacturing gap in drone production.
📡 “Chinese manufacturers supply equipment, electronics, navigation, optical and telemetry systems, engines, microchips, processors, antennas, and control boards. To bypass sanctions, they use shell companies and rename them to avoid scrutiny. Officially, China complies with the rules — but only officially,” Alexandrov explained.
📈 The russian federation increased long-range drone production from 15,000 in 2024 to over 30,000 in 2025 and also plans to produce 2 million small tactical drones.
🎯 “russia intends to produce about 30,000 long-range drones, 30,000 decoy drones to exhaust Ukrainian air defenses, and 2 million FPV drones in 2025,” the intelligence official added.
🔒 In addition, russia is actively deploying fiber-optic drones, which are immune to electronic warfare. Ukrainian forces previously detected regular UAVs easily, but fiber-optic drones are much harder to detect.
🎧 “We are forced to use acoustic and other methods to track such drones. The russians are also increasing production of electronic warfare tools. Radio frequencies at the front change every two weeks, so only about 20% of the drones we receive can be used without reconfiguration. We have to spend time and money adjusting them,” Alexandrov concluded.
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