A full blown and fast moving drones arms race is playing out in the wheat fields of Ukraine with each side constantly trying to leapfrog its opponent. Both sides have taken the lead at one time or another only to lose it again as technicians dream are constantly dreaming up new features followed by countermeasures.

This year Ukraine has introduced new highly effective medium- and long-range drones it is using to create havoc to Russia’s supply lines and oil refineries far beyond Ukraine’s borders.

In Russia’s latest innovation it has rolled out new a Geran-2 drone, based on the Iranian-designed Shahed-136 loitering munition drones — Moscow's mass-produced version of the Iranian-designed Shahed-136 — that can now be redirected in flight onto moving targets, including vehicles and trains.

It uses a mesh radio network that lets ground operators retask a drone after launch rather than send it down a fixed pre-set route, Ukrainian electronic warfare adviser Serhii "Flash" Beskrestnov has reported on his Telegram channel, according to Euromaidan Press. Beskrestnov said Ukrainian EW manufacturers are already testing countermeasures against the mesh control channel, without giving a timeline for when they might be fielded at scale.

It matters less as a single new capability than as the latest data point in a four-year technological back-and-forth that has run since Iran began shipping Shahed-136 loitering munitions to Russia in the autumn of 2022. Since then the story has moved through Russia rebranding and mass-producing the drone at home as the Geran-2 drone, based on the Iranian-designed Shahed-136 loitering munition; both sides racing to out-produce each other on sheer drone numbers; an intensifying jamming war that pushed Ukraine's air defence and Europe's arms industry to build a whole anti-drone sector from scratch; a jam-proof fibre-optic workaround that Russia and Ukraine effectively invented for this war and that has since spread to conflicts as far away as Lebanon; a faster, jet-powered Geran-5 that outran existing defences; and now mesh-networked retasking, with an even more autonomous "Seeker" variant already being tested behind it.

None of this has produced a knockout blow for either side — it is an arms race, not a solved problem, and each countermeasure so far has provoked a workaround rather than an ending.

Iran's Shaheds become Russia's Geran-2

Iran began supplying Moscow with Shahed-136 loitering munitions in the autumn of 2022, as IntelliNews has reported in tracing the drone's supply chain, which has since run through a since-shuttered Iranian-linked factory in Tajikistan and Russia's own drone factory in the Alabuga Special Economic Zone in Tatarstan. Russia renamed its version the Geran-2 ("geranium") despite what IntelliNews has called "obvious similarities to Iranian Shaheds" in its coverage of the domestic production drive. By January 2024, Newsbase estimated around 6,000 Shahed-136s were already in Russian service; by April 2024 Iran had delivered roughly 4,500 of the drones in total, IntelliNews has reported.

Both sides race to mass-produce

What began as an imported weapon became a domestic manufacturing race on both sides. Ukraine's own drone production has surged to the point that President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in July 2026 Ukraine is now producing 10mn drones a year, with allies including Croatia offering to scale up FPV output to millions annually. Yet IntelliNews has also reported that Russia's missile and drone arsenal is expanding faster than Ukraine's, helped by China's alleged role in Russian production and North Korean shell and drone supply. Sheer numbers, in other words, has been one axis of the race in its own right — not just who has the cleverer technology, but who can build more of it as the cost-to-kill ratio now outstrips technological superiority in modern warfare.

We’re jamming

Mass drone use forced a matching defensive industry into existence. Russia's own anti-drone defence market was worth $0.5bn in 2024, second globally only to the US, while GPS spoofing and jamming attributed to Russia has repeatedly spilled into Nato airspace, prompting Estonia to press Ukraine to tighten drone controls after stray drones drifted into Baltic airspace. On the kinetic side of the defence, Ukraine has built a mobile-fire-group air-defence model reportedly intended to intercept up to 95% of incoming Shaheds, while Poland is leading a European effort to build a "drone wall" along Nato's eastern border — the clearest sign the arms race has stopped being a purely Ukrainian problem.

Fibre-optic: the workaround that can't be jammed

As jamming got better, both sides found the same answer: control the drone down a physical fibre-optic cable instead of over radio, which no jammer can touch. Fibre-optic FPV drones became routine on the front line — Ukrainian commander General Chereshnya doubling drone output partly by developing fibre-optic variants, and fibre-optic cable from Russian FPVs turning up strewn across the Donbas battlefield as a visible marker of how standard the tactic has become. The technique, effectively pioneered by the Russian side before being adopted by the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU), has since migrated to other conflicts: IntelliNews has reported that Hezbollah has adopted "Russia/Ukraine style" fibre-optic drones against Israel, forcing Israeli firms to race on counter-fibre-optic detection systems of their own.

Faster, harder, better Geran-5

Russia's next lever was speed. IntelliNews reported in April 2026 that Russia had deployed a jet-powered Geran-5, a faster successor to the propeller-driven Geran-2 that poses fresh problems for air-defence systems tuned to intercept the slower original. Beskrestnov has separately flagged Russia's growing use of jet-powered Shahed variants as a distinct trend rather than a one-off, alongside a parallel effort by Moscow to build its own Starlink-style satellite alternative — including a stratospheric Zeplin platform — to reduce its own drone force's reliance on vulnerable communications links, the same vulnerability that has repeatedly disrupted Ukraine's own drone units when Starlink itself has gone down.

Mesh networks and the rise of the autonomous "Seeker"

Which brings the story back to today's development. The mesh network Beskrestnov describes — multiple radio modems on each drone acting as transmitter and relay, automatically rerouting data if one link is knocked out — lets an operator retask a Geran-2 onto a moving target it was never launched at. Reporting on his Telegram channel, dev.ua and The New Voice of Ukraine both describe a further variant already emerging alongside it: the "Geran Seeker," which uses a Raspberry Pi-based machine-vision system to let an operator lock onto a target — a locomotive, in one example cited — from around a kilometre away, after which the drone guides itself in without further input, defeating the low-power jamming systems that might otherwise protect the target.

Read across the whole arc, the pattern is consistent: every Ukrainian or allied countermeasure — jamming, interceptors, drone walls — has been followed within months by a Russian workaround, and vice versa with fibre-optic control. Mesh-networked retasking and machine-vision auto-guidance are simply where that cycle has reached four years in, not where it ends.