The Shahed used to buzz. Now it screams. Russia has thrown its production weight behind a jet-powered version of the Iranian-designed attack drone, and the shift is turning a slow, propeller-driven nuisance into a genuinely hard target — one that flies roughly twice as fast and shrugs off the cheap defences Ukraine built to stop the old model.

According to Ukrainian military intelligence, Russian factories are now turning out around 3,000 jet-powered Geran drones a month, and jet output has passed production of the piston-engined Geran-2. Business Insider, citing Ukrainian data, reported the use of the high-speed jet Shaheds jumping several-fold within a single month.

Twice as fast, twice as hard to kill

The standard Geran-2 — Russia’s licence-built Shahed-136 — putters along at roughly 185 km/h on a small piston engine. The jet-powered Geran-4 is a different animal: a new airframe wrapped around a Chinese Telefly turbojet, cruising somewhere between 300 and 400 km/h.

That speed is the whole point. Ukraine had largely tamed the piston Shahed with mobile machine-gun teams, electronic warfare, and a growing fleet of cheap propeller-driven interceptor drones. A target moving at 350 km/h breaks most of that. Ukraine’s Defence Intelligence says the Geran-4 was designed specifically to beat those interceptors.

The result is a nasty economics problem. Each jet Geran is still far cheaper than the missiles and interceptors needed to stop it — and now there are thousands more of them, moving too fast for the low-cost defences that worked last year.

An arms race measured in factory floor space

The Gerans pour out of Yelabuga, inside the Alabuga Special Economic Zone in Tatarstan, and satellite imagery has shown fresh construction there as Russia pushes to expand capacity further. Kyiv’s intelligence assessment is blunt: the plan is to keep raising the jet share until it makes up roughly half of all Shahed-type drones.

Ukraine is racing to answer with faster interceptors of its own — new high-speed designs unveiled at Farnborough are aimed squarely at the jet Shahed. But the pattern of this war holds: a cheap weapon gets a little better, the defence scrambles to catch up, and the side that can build fastest sets the tempo. Right now, over Ukraine, that tempo just got a turbojet.

Sources: Business Insider; Ukrainska Pravda; Euromaidan Press; Militarnyi; RFE/RL (citing Ukraine’s Defence Intelligence).