Ukraine has begun combat-testing jet-powered interceptor drones fast enough to run down Russia's new deadly class of Geran-4 drones that can evade even the best of Ukraine’s new class of interceptor drone, as the drones arms race between the two adversaries continues to unfold.

Ukraine’s new drones fly at more than 600 km/h, and the first confirmed kills are still awaited, former defence minister Mykhailo Fedorov said after visiting one of the manufacturers involved.

Fedorov set out the programme on Telegram on August 14, Interfax-Ukraine reported. Several Ukrainian producers already have working designs, developed over the past year with grants routed through the defence-tech cluster Brave1, which also ran the analysis and testing.

The push matters because Russia is quietly changing the weapon Ukraine has spent a year learning to shoot down.

"The first Ukrainian jet-powered interceptor drones for combating Shahed jets are undergoing combat testing. Today, we are observing a trend: the Russians are gradually replacing conventional Shaheds with jet-powered ones," Fedorov wrote. "This is a change in aerial warfare strategy. Our response must be swift to continue defeating Russia in every technological cycle."

Interceptor drones are the one part of Ukraine's air defence that has actually worked at scale. Cheap, locally built and produced in the tens of thousands, they took down the bulk of incoming Shaheds through 2025 and gave Kyiv what Fedorov calls one of the world's most advanced "small" air-defence systems, now being studied by other armies.

The jet-powered Geran variants broke that model. They fly higher and faster than the propeller-driven originals, and outpaced Ukraine's existing interceptors when they appeared in numbers, forcing Kyiv back onto scarce guided missiles for targets it had been handling with drones.

That is the expensive end of the problem. Ukraine's stock of US-made guided interceptors has run down close to zero, with only around seven of roughly 150 Iskander-M ballistic missiles fired at the Kyiv area since July 1 shot down. Russia, meanwhile, has expanded its missile and drone output faster than Ukraine and its allies can drain it.

"Now the task is to increase our efforts tenfold to combat the threat of jet drones as quickly as possible," Fedorov said, calling for more money for research, testing and production capacity, ahead of the widely anticipated winter Russian missile barrage aimed at destroying what is left of Ukraine’s power sector.

The government is saying much the same thing. Acting Defence Minister Yevhen Khmara told his Swedish and Norwegian counterparts on August 10 that countering ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and Shaheds was an urgent priority, and that Ukraine needed "interceptor missiles and asymmetric capabilities" to do it, alongside the Freyja anti-ballistic project.

The arithmetic is what makes the drone route attractive. A jet interceptor built in Ukraine costs a small fraction of a Patriot round that Kyiv can no longer reliably obtain, and can be built at home rather than waited on from a partner capital.