
Russia's Geran-4 Runs On A $25,000 Hobby Jet, Texas Instruments Chips
RFE/RL took apart a Geran-4 Seeker: a $25,000 Chinese hobby turbojet, two SIM cards, a mesh modem, Texas Instruments chips. Russia builds 3,000 a month.
The war that rewrote drone doctrine. FPV strikes, interceptors, jamming, and the industrial race behind them — reported from the open record.
The Ukraine drone war is where modern drone warfare is being invented — in public, at industrial scale, on both sides — and this desk has reported it since the beginning. How a century of unmanned flight led to this point is told in our history of drones guide.
The defining fact is volume. Attrition once ran at a reported 10,000 drones a month, which turned production speed into a weapon: Ukrainian makers now cut strike-drone wing build times from days to hours, and every FPV airframe is a candidate munition. Autonomy is advancing at the same pace — Ukraine’s Kolibri FPV flies 25 miles and finishes strikes alone.
The war does not stay inside the lines on the map. The Leipzig cargo-drone bomb reached Europe’s logistics system; drones circled Europe’s only Patriot repair base days later. The Russia desk tracks that campaign, and the counter-drone desk tracks the defenses being built against it.
And the brutality is part of the record: a Russian drone hunting a vegetable seller in Kherson is the video Zelensky says the world must see. We report what the technology does, including this. Every Ukraine drone story lands in the feed below.
Last updated September 28, 2026 — the feed below updates with every new story.

RFE/RL took apart a Geran-4 Seeker: a $25,000 Chinese hobby turbojet, two SIM cards, a mesh modem, Texas Instruments chips. Russia builds 3,000 a month.

Ukraine's 3rd Army Corps flies explosive ground robots over the front under heavy bomber drones, and credits the tactic with 48 square miles retaken.

Fired as defense minister in July, the man behind Ukraine's Army of Drones launched an Army of Robots and set a six-month target for a humanoid kill.
Tekever raised $580 million at a $6.4 billion valuation, led by UC Investments, a week after signing to replace the British Army's Watchkeeper drones.

Orqa drones running KEF Robotics navigation and Blue Arrow's RII software flew recon and payload missions under GPS and radio jamming in Alabama.

Zelensky released the first video of a jet-powered Shahed downed by a Ukrainian interceptor drone. Kyiv is withholding the maker, cost and kill count.

Neros is the only company on both Gauntlet II leaderboards, Perennial Autonomy wins deep strike, and March champion Skycutter drops to fourth.

Ukrainian drone operators beat US troops at Hohenfels. Now the Army is ending its only drone assault battalion, and an ex-Pentagon official asks why.
At every scale at once: FPV drones as precision munitions, fixed-wing types for deep strikes, commercial quadcopters for reconnaissance and artillery spotting. The defining fact is volume — attrition once ran at a reported 10,000 aircraft a month, which makes production speed a weapon in itself.
Yes, and no longer only as terminal guidance demos. A Russian AI drone guided by an off-the-shelf Nvidia Jetson chip killed three civilians in Zaporizhzhia — commodity hardware, weaponized autonomy. That event moved the debate from hypothetical to documented.
It is the case study every Western military and drone maker works from: cheap and many beats exquisite and few. The US Army's creation — and rapid disbanding — of its first drone assault battalion shows how hard the lessons are to absorb inside a legacy structure.
One email with the drone news that matters — DJI, FAA, public safety, and everything in between, straight from the newsroom. No spam, no fluff.