Ukraine learned how to shoot down a drone flying at 200 kilometres an hour. It downs nine out of ten. The problem is that Russia stopped sending that kind of drone.

The new generation of Russian jet-powered unmanned craft travels at 240 to 500 kilometres an hour, and this summer's numbers are not small: from around 450 such drones in June, the figure jumped to around 2,850 in August. A sixfold increase in three months. Ukrainian military intelligence estimates Russia is already producing around 3,000 jet drones a month.

An admission you rarely hear from a command in wartime

Deputy commander Maksym Zhorin made no attempt to dress it up. "With the jet drones we have once again completely lost the initiative - that is a fact," he wrote. The Russians, he added, have launched mass production of jet-powered Shaheds, and the Ukrainian side genuinely does not know what to do about them.

That is a sentence worth reading twice. It comes not from an opposition politician or a foreign analyst, but from a man in the chain of command, published openly, in the middle of a war. How many armies in the world would let a sentence like that leave their headquarters?

The test that ended up in the fields

In early July Ukraine tested a new generation of interceptor drones, built for exactly this purpose. According to two sources familiar with the exercise, the test did not go as planned - a large share of the interceptors could not hold control at speeds above 400 kilometres an hour, and some ended up in neighbouring fields.

The existing interceptors cost less than 2,000 dollars and proved an excellent answer to the older Shaheds. Against the jet-powered ones, they are simply too slow. A commander of an interceptor drone unit says it is sometimes possible to hit a particular model, but only when it slows down to manoeuvre. And Russia, he warns, is already introducing systems that detect an object nearby and automatically accelerate the drone.

Kyiv and Odesa are carrying the weight

The capital and the surrounding region take almost a fifth of all launched drones. Together with Odesa, the port through which Ukrainian exports flow, they are the main targets. In some attacks jet drones already make up more than 70 percent of the strike package, and according to statements from the Ukrainian side that share will only grow.

The crucial difference is not only speed. These craft are guided - the operator can change route and altitude in flight. The drone that last week hit a building of the Ukrainian security service with remarkable precision, straight into the chief's office, was according to official assessments manually flown.

Sword and shield, without end

An analyst from an American security centre describes the war as an endless contest between sword and shield, in which every new capability quickly finds its antidote. His assessment is that the current Russian advantage will melt away as soon as Ukraine builds a fast and cheap interceptor.

Zelensky says over 60 Ukrainian companies are working on intercepting jet drones, but only a handful have shown results. An industry source is more specific: some of the prototypes are too large and too slow for real combat, where the window to hit a fast target lasts seconds.

This is a war in which five years of technology have been compressed into a few months. Each side buys time until the other catches up. The question for anyone watching from the Balkans is simpler and more uncomfortable: who in Europe today has a shield against something that flies at 500 kilometres an hour with an operator changing its trajectory?