Russian state television has aired footage of a new strike drone called the BM-35, and the numbers attached to it are eye-catching: a jet engine, a top speed of more than 350 km/h, and a claim that Ukrainian interceptors simply cannot catch it. As always with weapons unveiled on a country’s own propaganda channels, the claims deserve a careful reading — but the trend behind them is real.

The report was flagged by Serhii Beskrestnov, a Ukrainian radio-communications adviser who goes by the call sign “Flash” and tracks Russian drone developments closely. Everything below about the BM-35’s performance comes from the Russian operators in that report, not from independent testing.

What Russia showed

According to the operators in the report, the BM-35 can be assembled and launched within minutes from a mobile platform, and controlled by an operator throughout its flight much like a first-person-view (FPV) drone — while allegedly shrugging off Ukrainian electronic-warfare jamming. They say up to three can be sent at once, each scattering around a thousand fragments on impact, and that the drone is used to sever Ukrainian supply lines near the front in the Kharkiv and Sumy regions.

Those are operational boasts, and the resistance-to-jamming claim in particular is the kind of assertion that is easy to make on television and hard to prove. What is verifiable is the direction of travel: Russia is putting jet engines on more and more of its attack drones.

Why jet power matters

A propeller-driven drone like the original Shahed-136 plods along at well under 200 km/h, slow enough for gun trucks, helicopters and cheap interceptor drones to catch. A turbojet changes that maths. Russia’s jet-powered Shahed variants — the Geran-3 and the newer Geran-4 — are credited with speeds from roughly 350 up to 500 km/h, and they are far harder to shoot down. By one tally reported by the outlet Militarnyi, Russia launched around 1,400 jet-powered drones in the first part of 2026, against only about 180 in all of 2025.

The BM-35 sits at the small, tactical end of that same shift: not a long-range city-strike weapon, but a fast, front-line munition meant to replace slower FPV drones for hitting logistics behind Ukrainian lines.

Ukraine’s answer

Kyiv is racing to keep pace. Ukrainian developers are moving their own interceptor drones to jet propulsion, and the company SkyFall has shown a high-speed interceptor, the P1-SUN Jetkiller, said to reach around 370 km/h — slightly faster than the BM-35’s claimed speed. It is the latest round in a fast-moving cat-and-mouse game: Russia fields a faster drone, Ukraine builds a faster catcher, and each side adds electronic-warfare tricks to blind the other.

So the honest way to read the BM-35 reveal is as one data point in that race, not a war-winning wonder weapon. The jet engine is genuine and significant. The specific claims of invincibility are, for now, exactly that — claims.

Sources: RBC-Ukraine; Serhii Beskrestnov (“Flash”) via NTV report; Militarnyi; Ukrainska Pravda; Business Insider; statements by Ukrainian Air Force spokesman Yurii Ihnat.