SNEAK ATTACK

Ukraine's audacious drone strikes deep inside Russia may announce a new era in warfare

- SIMON SHUSTER

THE DRONE FACTORY IN KYIV HAD AN ENVIABLE problem. It could make more combat drones than the Ukrainian military needs. The heavy ones, known as Vampires, can be assembled at a rate of 4,000 per month, the factory’s founder told me on a tour of the facility in March. The smaller ones, similar to the drones Ukraine used on June 1 to attack several Russian air bases, could be made many times as fast, he said: roughly 4,000 per day.

All around us, the noise of the production line made it difficult to hear, as did the speaker system playing ’80s music. (“I just died in your arms tonight ...”) So I asked the founder to repeat himself: 4,000 drones ... per day? “Yeah, that’s at full capacity,” he said. “Right now we’re only making around half that.”

The surprise attack on June 1 targeting Russian military aircraft parked as far away as Irkutsk, more than 3,000 miles from Ukraine, employed a total of 117 kamikaze drones, according to President Volodymyr Zelensky. Each of them costs around $400 to produce, and they destroyed Russian bombers worth billions, by Ukraine’s count. That would make this operation, dubbed Spider’s Web by Kyiv, one of the most efficient, dollar for dollar, in the history of warfare. Some Kremlin propagandists even called it Russia’s Pearl Harbor.