The framing of a “drone war” implies a single metric of victory: which side uses unmanned systems to impose its will more effectively. That framing is seductive because it reduces a complex, political contest to a technological duel. In truth the contest over unmanned systems in Ukraine is multidimensional: industrial scale, tactical effectiveness, electronic warfare and countermeasures, cost-exchange ratios, and the political and moral effects of strikes on civilians and infrastructure. Any honest assessment must hold each of these axes in view rather than declare a simple victor.

On the dimension of production and launch capacity, Russia has clearly made deliberate choices to favour scale. Since late 2024 Moscow has dramatically increased Shahed-type and decoy drone production and employed them in massed salvos intended to force saturation of Ukrainian air defences. Western analysts and open-source monitoring documented spikes in nightly launches and a rapid rise in monthly output during 2025, a pattern Russia sustained to impose an attritional logic on Kyiv. This industrial scaling is not merely tactical improvisation; it is a strategy that substitutes quantity for precision to degrade Ukrainian defensive stocks and civilian resilience.

Yet production is a necessary condition for coercion, not a sufficient one for strategic success. Interception figures and battlefield effects show important constraints. Ukrainian air defences, electronic warfare deployments, and increasingly the use of low-cost interceptor drones and mobile fire groups have denied many Russian drones their intended effects. Analysts from multiple institutes recorded high interception or disruption rates in major salvos even as some drones penetrated to hit infrastructure and towns. Interception is costly in munitions, and that cost asymmetry favours the mass attacker short term. But successful interception rates demonstrate that saturation is not absolute; it is probabilistic, and probability matters when cities and critical systems are at stake.

At the tactical level on the ground, Ukraine’s small tactical drones, particularly FPV and other loitering munitions, remain a decisive factor in localized attrition. Several studies and field reports from 2024 and 2025 show that tactical UAVs accounted for a large share of damaged and destroyed Russian vehicles and inflicted disproportionate personnel casualties. Those same studies, however, caution that tactical drones have high failure rates, are weather- and EW-sensitive, and rarely substitute for massed combined-arms effects. The asymmetry here is instructive: Russia has pursued strategic saturation with long-range strike drones, while Ukraine has leaned on agility and precision at the tactical level to blunt Russian manoeuvre and impose costs on the invader.

A further, philosophical point deserves attention. “Winning” a drone war is not only about who can destroy more hardware or who can produce more airframes. It is about whether those strikes achieve political and military objectives. Russia’s campaign of massed strikes has increased damage to Ukrainian energy and infrastructure, raised civilian suffering, and aimed to degrade Western willingness to resupply. Those are real effects, and in that narrow coercive sense Russia has achieved partial success. But coercion that deepens wartime polarisation, prompts international legal scrutiny, and stiffens Ukraine’s resolve is not an uncontested strategic triumph. Victory in war remains a function of control over territory, sustainment of forces, and political outcomes — domains where massed drone salvos are influential but not determinative.

We must also consider adaptation. Warfare is evolutionary. Kyiv’s investment in low-cost interceptors, improved EW, distributed mobile air-defence tactics, and other countermeasures will change attrition dynamics over months. Conversely, Russia’s own adaptations — attempts to harden production, diversify component sources, and mix decoys with higher-value missiles — demonstrate a mutual learning cycle. Neither side has reached a stable technological monopoly. The future trajectory depends on industrial supply chains, external military assistance, and innovations in inexpensive counter-UAS systems that alter the cost calculus of interception.

Finally, there is the moral calculus. The deliberate use of large numbers of cheap strike drones against urban and energy infrastructure imposes civilian suffering that feeds legal and ethical judgments. A conflict in which attrition is conducted by autonomous or semi-autonomous, low-cost airframes forces analysts and policymakers to confront responsibility, proportionality, and the thresholds for escalation. These questions matter because political legitimacy and post-war reconstruction are part of strategic outcomes. Technology that helps win a battle but delegitimizes the victor’s political position can be Pyrrhic in the long run.

So is Russia “winning” the drone war? The most sober answer is layered. In 2025 Russia achieved measurable advantages in industrial-scale drone production and employed these systems to impose an attritional burden on Ukrainian air defences and civilian infrastructure. That earns Moscow a tactical and operational score on one axis. But strategic victory requires more than localized coercion. Ukraine’s tactical drone force, its EW and interception measures, international political support, and the moral-political fallout of massed strikes mean that Russia’s gains are costly and contested. The drone contest has become another theatre in a broader war of will, supply, and political ends. Judged solely by tonnage of airframes launched or by temporary degradation of services, Russia may claim short-term advantage. Judged by the longer metrics that determine wars, the question remains open and contingent on adaptation, supply, and politics.

If there is a practical prescription buried in this diagnosis it is modest and urgent. Donors and defense planners should invest rapidly in inexpensive, scalable counter-UAS systems and distributed air-defence tactics, prioritize resilient infrastructure, and accelerate measures that reduce the asymmetric cost of interception. Philosophically, analysts should resist technological determinism. Machines matter, but they do not decide politics. The drone is a force multiplier and a moral test. How states respond to that test will define whether cheap attrition becomes decisive strategy or a self-defeating campaign of coercion.