KYIV, July 7 — Against the backdrop of a grinding war of attrition, Ukraine has quietly built a long-range strike capability that is rewriting the tactical map of the conflict. From workshops that, two years ago, produced little more than reconnaissance quadcopters, a domestic drone industry has emerged that can now reach targets deep inside Russian territory. The core of this arsenal includes the UJ-22 Airborne and the PD-2, both Ukrainian-designed platforms with published ranges exceeding 1,000 kilometres.
According to Ukrainian defence officials, these are not imported systems but fully domestically produced machines. Since 2023, these drones have been used in strikes on Russian oil refineries, airfields, and ammunition depots — a campaign of asymmetric pressure aimed at the economic and military infrastructure that sustains the Kremlin’s war effort.
What is at stake became dramatically clear on August 26, 2024, when a Ukrainian drone struck the Omsk refinery, a facility approximately 2,000 kilometres from Ukraine’s borders. That distance, previously unconfirmed in operational use, demonstrated that Ukrainian engineering had solved the problem of range in a way few outside observers had anticipated. The Omsk strike was not an outlier but a signal: the geography of sanctuary inside Russia had shifted.
The drones are typically equipped with GPS guidance systems, allowing for precision navigation over vast distances, and can carry explosive payloads of up to 50 kilograms. That is enough to cause significant damage to fuel storage tanks, electrical substations, and railway infrastructure — the sinews of a modern military logistics network.
The wider picture is one of a defender turning the attacker’s own geography into a vulnerability. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy stated in July 2024 that Ukraine’s drone production had increased 100-fold compared to 2022. That figure, stark in its magnitude, speaks to a national mobilisation of engineering and manufacturing capacity that few predicted at the start of the full-scale invasion.
The programme is explicitly framed as part of Ukraine’s asymmetric warfare strategy. Targeting oil refineries disrupts fuel supplies for tanks and aircraft; striking ammunition depots forces Russian logistics to operate over longer, more vulnerable lines of communication; hitting airfields degrades the ability to launch strikes against Ukrainian cities. For European observers, the implications extend beyond the current war.
Ukraine is demonstrating that a determined middle-power can develop a credible long-range strike capability without access to Western cruise missile technology. The combination of commercial GPS modules, automotive engines, and airframe designs that can be produced in small machine shops represents a model of defence industrialisation that other nations are now studying closely.
