Ukrainian Disclosures Offer Insight Into Scale of Russian Strike Drone and Decoy Decoy Launches, Projected Production – Part One

Note: This text is the second part of a SPAS Consulting analysis examining the scale of Russian strike drone and decoy drone launches and projected production. Part one focuses on the current composition of Russia's arsenal of strike drones and decoy drones. Part two focuses on the question of numbers.

Although Russia’s employment of single-use propeller-driven strike drones against Ukraine has dominated headlines for much of the past two and a half years, observers interested in the question of effects and effectiveness of this type of strike munition have to date been forced to operate with very limited data. Attesting to how public discourse on the effects and effectiveness of Russian strike drones has been prematurely ossified, Russia’s employment of increasing numbers of single-use propeller-driven decoy drones alongside its strike drones over the past six months has largely gone unnoticed. Recent disclosures by Ukrainian officials, however, offer insight into the scale of Russian strike drone and decoy drone launches and production. 

With the future course of the Russia-Ukraine War increasingly uncertain and the potential for a short-term moratorium on the employment of strike munitions against energy infrastructure unexpectedly reaching the top of the political agenda, observers require access to data and sound analytical frameworks to discern the realized and prospective effects and effectiveness of the employment of strike drones and other strike munitions in a conflict that has entered its fourth year. Recent Ukrainian disclosures offer observers a window into the question of the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of low-cost strike single-use propeller-driven strike drones such as the Shahed-136/Geran-2 and thereby develop a more holistic appreciation of the implications of this area of military technology beyond the Russia-Ukraine War.

The Current Composition of Russia’s Long-Range Strike Drone Arsenal

Before examining available data on Russia’s production and employment of single-use propeller-driven strike drones, it is important to first examine the current composition of Russia’s long-range single-use drone arsenal. Developing an accurate understanding of the composition of this arsenal has become increasingly important since July 2024 because Russia is launching ever-increasing numbers of armed and unarmed propeller-driven single-use decoy drones alongside its strike drones with the aim of occupying and overwhelming Ukrainian air defences while improving the effectiveness of Russian strike drones. Although regular Ukrainian disclosures of the number of strike munitions launched by Russia and the number intercepted by Ukraine are invaluable to observers of the Russia-Ukraine War (which are covered in part two of this analysis), these Ukrainian disclosures only offer observers a single aggregate total for both single-use propeller-driven strike drones and single-use propeller-driven decoy drones, whether armed or unarmed. Observers with access to publicly available data are poorly positioned to independently disaggregate the decoy drones from the strike drones and the result is increasing scope for inaccurate assessments of the effects and effectiveness of Russian single-use propeller-driven strike drones in the Russia-Ukraine War.

Russia’s best-known and most widely employed single-use propeller-driven strike drone is an Iranian design, the Shahed-136. Although Russia originally acquired an unknown quantity of the smaller Shahed-131 from which the larger Shahed-136 is derived, the Russian military has long concentrated its attention, efforts, and resources on the larger of these two related Iranian strike drone designs, which offers a significantly greater payload-range. Geran-2, which is the Russian designation for the Shahed-136, refers to Russian-produced Shahed-136 strike drones for the purposes of this analysis. 

While Russia originally acquired the Shahed-136 from the Iranian production line, Iran and JSC Alabuga entered into a commercial agreement for the licensed production of 6000 Shahed-136 strike drones at a factory in Alabuga, Tatarstan. According to media reports and leaked documents, the total figure of 6000 Shahed-136 strike drones includes an initial 600 airframes built in Iran but assembled in Russia, 1332 airframes assembled in Russia with major components sourced from Iran, and 4068 airframes built in Russia with major components sourced from a Russian supply chain. Media reports, disclosures from Ukrainian officials, and open-source analyses indicate that JSC Alabuga reached the production target of 6000 Shahed-136/Geran-2 strike drones a year ahead of the original target of September 2025. The design of the Russian-built Geran-2 has gradually evolved in tandem with the increasing localization of its production in Russia and its increasingly regular employment by the Russian military.

Russia has produced the Geran-2 in multiple distinguishable production versions such that the designation Geran-2 refers to an ideal type rather than a single unchanging Russian-built version of the underlying Iranian strike drone design. Many of these distinguishable changes appear to be motivated by a desire to lower the cost and complexity of the design to make it more suitable for wartime mass production and near-immediate destructive use. All things considered, the design of the Shahed-136 is more complex than it needs to be – it is something of a premium long-range strike drone design – largely because Iran developed the Shahed-136 as a strike munition intended for stockpiling in peacetime, not expedited production in wartime conditions and rapid wartime employment/consumption. Other distinguishable design changes made by Russia, however, are motivated by a desire to improve the effectiveness of the Geran-2 and more generally adapt a single-use strike drone designed to deliver a 50 kg warhead over a distance of 1500 km in Iran’s peculiar military-geographical context into a single-use strike drone better optimized for use in a military-geographical context in which (A) a 1000 km range Russian strike munition can be used to attack targets in essentially any part of Ukraine and (B) the Russian military regularly employs propeller-driven strike drones as a substitute for cruise missiles equipped with larger warheads that are not available in the required numbers despite three years of wartime industrial mobilization. 

While the Geran-2 was being manufactured in Alabuga under the terms of a commercial agreement with Iran, Russia is understood to have undertaken a parallel effort to develop the Garpiya strike drone. Disclosures by Ukraine and other governments indicate that the Garpiya amounts to a reverse-engineered Shahed-136 that is assembled with imported commercially sourced Chinese-built components. The production line for the Garpiya is reportedly located at a JSC IEMZ Kupol facility in Izhevsk, Udmurtia. Production independent of Iran will likely facilitate the ongoing evolution of the underlying Shahed-136 strike drone design in new directions and in accordance with Russia’s highly variant military requirements. It bears emphasis that the Shahed-136 has never been an optimal design for the Russian military in the context of the Russia-Ukraine War and this may have affected the scale of its adoption to date independent of resource constraints and limited production capacity in Iran and Russia. All else equal, the more that the underlying Iranian Shahed-136 strike drone design evolves in a direction that is better optimized for Russia’s wartime military requirements, the greater the resources that Moscow is likely to direct toward production and the more widely employed the Geran-2 and Garpiya are likely to be. At the same time, it bears emphasis that Russia would likely have built and launched a larger number of smaller, less complex, and less expensive strike drones had an off-the-shelf design been available for employment in 2022 and for localized production at a later date.

As noted earlier, Iran developed the Shahed-136 as a larger derivative of the earlier Shahed-131. The Shahed-131, which was used to attack Saudi oil facilities in 2019, has sufficient range to attack targets all along the southern coast of the Persian Gulf as well as much of the eastern half of the Arabian Peninsula. The larger Shahed-136 was developed to extend the reach of Iran’s lower-cost strike capabilities toward the Red Sea and Israel/the Mediterranean. For Iran, this requires a nominal maximum range of around 1500 km. Iran did not, however, merely develop the Shahed-136 with an increased range in mind. Rather, it developed the Shahed-136 with a heavier standard payload – greater payload-range – such that it can be more productively employed against a wider range of targets. Whereas the smaller Shahed-131 is best characterized as a long-range harassment weapon better suited to damaging and destroying soft targets, the larger Shahed-136 is akin to a slower and lower-cost analogue to a small cruise missile in Iranian service. 

For Russia, a low-cost means of delivering a 50 kg warhead is highly desirable but a nominal maximum range of 1500 km is excessive. Russia’s military-geographical context in the Russia-Ukraine War is shaped by the fact that a 1000 km range strike munition can be used to target essentially any part of Ukraine. There is, however, scope to trade range for payload and vice versa in most strike munitions and the Iranian Shahed-136 strike drone design is no exception.

In addition to different warhead options developed for use against different types of targets in Ukraine, Russia has installed a 90-kg class warhead for use with the Geran-2. The nominal maximum range of a Geran-2 equipped with this much heavier warhead is reportedly 650 km. Although the very significant reduction in the maximum range of the Geran-2 in this configuration is not ideal – not least in a context in which increasingly circuitous routes are required to avoid transits over areas in which Ukrainian air defences are known to be deployed in high concentrations – it results in a much larger destructive radius and greater damage to the target provided that the Geran-2 reaches its intended target and detonates on impact in the first place.  Prior to this purposeful trading of range for payload, a fully-fuelled Shahed-136/Geran-2 detonating on impact would likely have residual fuel onboard. Petroleum products are a poor destructive payload in a world in which munitions designers can incorporate additional incendiary materials like zirconium alongside high explosives. All things considered, Russia’s development of a heavier warhead for the Geran-2 amounts to an important step in adapting the underlying Iranian strike drone design into one better optimized toward Russian requirements in the context of the Russia-Ukraine War.

Russia’s Employment of Armed and Unarmed Decoy Drones

Although Russia’s single-use propeller-driven strike drones receive the most attention, Ukraine’s regular disclosures of the launch and interception of Russian strike drones do not disaggregate increasingly widely deployed single-use propeller-driven decoy drones from strike drones like the Shahed-136/Geran-2/Garpiya. Russia is reported to have first deployed decoy drones in July 2024. Following a period of depressed strike drone launch activity that likely reflected around five months of concerted stockpiling, in September 2024 Russia initiated a new strike campaign against Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. The extended autumn 2024-spring 2025 strike campaign has been characterized by a massive increase in the number of “strike drones” that Ukraine claims Russia to have launched and Ukrainian air defences to have intercepted. Although media reports often characterize the regular Ukrainian disclosures as referring to Shahed-136/Geran-2/Garpiya strike drones, many of the drones launched by Russia and intercepted by Ukraine since August 2024 are likely to have been single-use propeller-driven decoy drones launched alongside Geran-2/Garpiya strike drones.

Reports indicate that Russia primarily employs two decoy drone designs, the Gerbera and the Parodiya (often referred to as the Parody). Both are small low-cost designs of very simple construction. Designers can choose from a range of approaches when developing a decoy drone. The Gerbera and Parodiya are respectively optimized to mimic the visual and radar signature of the Shahed-136/Geran-2/Garpiya. These propeller-driven decoy drones are powered by a small piston engine that also mimics the acoustic signature of Russian strike drones especially in low visibility conditions at night, an important consideration in a context in which Ukraine’s air defences not only heavily rely on acoustic sensors to both detect and track Russian propeller-driven strike drones but also rely on widely deployed human-operated machine guns and autocannons to intercept propeller-driven strike drones at a low cost per interception in all atmospheric conditions. 

It bears emphasis that decoy drones, which are ideally much smaller, less complex, less expensive, and therefore more widely available than strike drones, do not necessarily need to accompany strike drones over the entire flight path toward the intended target. Small low-cost decoy drones with a maximum range of 200-400 km can be productively employed to facilitate the penetration of Ukrainian airspace by larger and more expensive strike drones for as long as Ukrainian air defences are heavily concentrated along the frontlines/international border with the aim as intercepting Russian strike drones at the earliest possible opportunity. The volume of airspace that Ukraine must surveil and defend dramatically increases once Russian strike drones bypass the forwardmost “line” of Ukrainian air defences and decoy drones can be used to facilitate the penetration of the airspace above Ukrainian-controlled territory.

The Gerbera Decoy Drone

Developed and built by JSC Alabuga, which builds the Shahed-136/Geran-2 strike drone, the Gerbera decoy drone is a small and light uncrewed aircraft design that reportedly weighs in the region of 10-20 kg and has a reported nominal maximum range of 300 km in its unarmed baseline configuration. The Shahed-136/Geran-2/Garpiya is, in contrast, a much larger and longer-range strike drone with a takeoff weight of around 200 kg and a payload of 50-90 kg. The Gerbera is, as such, incomparable with the Shahed-136/Geran-2/Garpiya in terms of performance. In terms of cost, however, the Gerbera is much more affordable with a reported unit price of US$10,000 (some components used in fixed-wing drones do not linearly scale in terms of cost with the maximum takeoff weight, maximum payload, and maximum range of an uncrewed aircraft design). Most importantly, the Gerbera is a very simple uncrewed aircraft design and can therefore be built in extremely large numbers. According to one report, JSC Alabuga was sustaining an output of up to 50 Gerbera decoy drones per day by December 2024. Although subject to uncertainty, this reported figure may amount to a capacity to produce up to 1500 Gerbera decoy drones per 30-day month and 18,250 per year. 

Although the Gerbera appears to be most widely employed as a decoy drone, reports from the summer of 2024 indicate that its manufacturer had developed at least three versions of this uncrewed aircraft: an unarmed decoy drone, an unarmed drone equipped with electronic equipment to detect the emissions of Ukrainian radars, and an armed sensor-equipped radio-controlled loitering strike drone in which a remote human operator controls the wholly non-automated Gerbera in the manner of a so-called FPV drone (i.e., with the remote human operator having full control authority over the Gerbera). More recent reports indicate that an unknown percentage of Gerbera decoy drones are equipped with a 2.5 kg explosive payload, which is a very small – and rather crude – warhead by the standards of the Shahed-136/Geran-2/Garpiya which are equipped with 50-90 kg class warheads. 

The introduction of armed Gerbera decoy drones – not to be confused with the armed loitering strike drone version of the Gerbera – is likely to be a tactic intended to incentivize Ukrainian air defences to intercept aerial targets accurately classified/discriminated as a Gerbera decoy drone. One of the problems brought about by the use of decoys alongside strike munitions in any context is that an adversary’s ability to accurately identify decoys – to discriminate between decoys and non-decoys – allows adversary air defences to forgo interception efforts. That is, decoys are only effective if an adversary experiences difficulty in discriminating between decoys and non-decoys. Even a modestly armed decoy drone, however, is likely to be subject to interception efforts as it can damage objects and kill persons on the ground and will more generally constitute an unexploded ordnance hazard when it runs out of fuel. As a result, measure-countermeasure dynamics can incentivize the arming of low-fidelity – low-cost – decoys in a world in which high-fidelity decoys – in terms of all parts of the electromagnetic spectrum as well as in terms of acoustic signature – can be so expensive that militaries may be better off simply launching additional strike munitions in a sacrificial manner so as to overwhelm air defences through brute force rather than employing expensive high-fidelity unarmed decoys that can consistently deceive adversary air defences.

The armed loitering strike drone version of the Gerbera does not appear to be widely deployed and is beyond the scope of this analysis. It bears emphasis that the loitering strike drone version of the Gerbera is likely to reflect a very significant exchange of range for payload – the remotely-operated loitering strike drone version is subject to line-of-sight restrictions and cannot be operated over a distance of 300 km without the use of one or more radio relays/repeaters or a satellite communication radio frequency datalink. The higher explosive payload reportedly carried by the armed loitering strike drone version of the Gerbera is therefore of little relevance to the unarmed or modestly armed decoy drone version of the Gerbera that Russia launches alongside its Shahed-136/Geran-2/Garpiya strike drones.

The Parodiya Decoy Drone

While the Gerbera was reportedly first employed in the summer of 2024, the first public report, which may well amount to a lagging indicator, discussing the Parodiya decoy drone emerged in October 2024. Like the Gerbera, the Parodiya is a small low-cost design of very simple construction. According to Ukrainian reports, the Parodiya, which is a single-use design destined to be destroyed over or crash in Ukrainian territory, has a nominal maximum range of 600 km. This allows Parodiya decoy drones to operate alongside groups of Shahed-136/Geran-2/Garpiya strike drones, which have a similar cruise speed, toward targets up to 600 km from the launch location. This results in a different concept of operations than that associated with the shorter-range Gerbera decoy drone, which is oriented toward facilitating the penetration of Ukrainian airspace rather than accompanying strike drones all the way to the intended target unless the targets are less than 300 km from the launch location. 

As of this writing in March 2025, the Parodiya appears to be exclusively employed as an unarmed decoy drone. It is possible that measure-countermeasure dynamics will incentivize Russia to trade range for a very small explosive payload in the form of a 1 kg warhead or similar. The only known payload of the Parodiya and the reason for its existence are two Luneberg lenses. These serve as radar reflectors and give the smaller and differently shaped Parodiya a radar signature that can be difficult to distinguish from that of a Shahed-136/Geran-2/Garpiya strike drone. The Gerbera decoy drone is not known to be equipped with a Luneberg lens and is not therefore intended to mimic the radar signature of the Shahed-136/Geran-2/Garpiya in this manner. 

Given its ability to mimic the radar signature of a strike drone, the unarmed Parodiya can also be effectively employed even in the absence of strike drone launch activity. Unless Ukraine’s air defences can consistently discriminate a Parodiya decoy drone from a Shahed-136/Geran-2/Garpiya strike drone, radar contacts will likely be classified as possible strike drones until positive identification is established or until the unidentified aerial target is successfully intercepted. Sporadic launches of salvos of unarmed Parodiya decoy drones at night, when visual identification is difficult without the use of imaging infrared sensors, can be undertaken with the objective of forcing Ukraine’s air defences to prepare for possible strike drone activity in a given sector. Repeated over time, this can exhaust Ukraine’s air defences even if all of the unarmed Parodiya decoy drones are not subjected to interception efforts due to eventual positive identification and therefore crash after running out of fuel.

Although this analysis focuses on the Russian Shahed-136/Geran-2/Garpiya strike drones and the Russian Gerbera and Parodiya decoy drones, it is important to note that Russia also operates other much smaller single-use propeller-driven strike drones. This includes the very crude Molniya-1 and Molniya-2, the Privet-82, the far more refined factory-built Kub-BLA, the larger and longer-range Italmas (Izdeliye-54) and another similar design of unknown designation, as well as the well-known Lancet-1 and Lancet-3. These have a much shorter nominal maximum range than the Shahed-136/Geran-2/Garpiya and are primarily employed to attack battlefield targets. With the exception of the Kub-BLA and Italmas, the aforementioned Russian uncrewed aircraft designs are equipped with sensors and function as loitering strike drones not limited to attacking previously identified targets using an INS and GNSS guidance system in the manner of the baseline versions of the Shahed-136/Geran-2/Garpiya. While Ukraine’s regular disclosures of Shahed-136/Geran-2/Garpiya launch activity has on occasions aggregated figures for the Lancet family alongside the Shahed-136/Geran-2/Garpiya, this practice appears to have been discontinued and appears to primarily affect the disclosed figures for 2022 and 2023. It is important to note that Ukraine does not regularly disclose figures for Russia’s employment of (loitering) strike drones other than the Shahed-136/Geran-2/Garpiya, the figures for which unhelpfully encompass the Gerbera and Parodiya decoy drones.

Note: The above text is the first part of a SPAS Consulting analysis examining the scale of Russian strike drone and decoy drone launches and projected production. Part one focuses on the current composition of Russia's arsenal of strike drones and decoy drones. Part two focuses on the question of numbers.