June 2025 Report 2
June 2025 HIGHLIGHTS
- At the launch of Operation Rising Lion, Israel employed tactical drones to suppress Iranian air defense networks, gather real-time intelligence, and coordinate long-range strike packages.
- Israeli combat doctrine continues to integrate unmanned systems in increasingly complex ways.
- Israeli continues to make strides in developing new technological leaps that increase its drones effectiveness in a wide range of combat roles.
- An upcoming joint military exercise between Russia and Belarus has Ukrainian military planners concerned about another assault on Kyiv.
- Since 2022, Russia has continuously adapted and upgraded its armored vehicles to deal with drone threats.
- A recent tabletop war game highlighted some of Taiwan’s vulnerabilities to a Chinese invasion.
- Taiwan has developed a wind-resilient drone that Ukraine has selected for front-line operations.
- Taiwan is aligning its defense doctrine with asymmetric warfare strategies, drawing lessons from Ukraine’s effective use of low-cost drones.
EDITOR'S NOTE
Recent weeks have shown how unmanned warfare is evolving across a range of combat roles, spanning the gamut from unconventional raids deep within enemy territory to long-range, strategic strike campaigns.
On the heels of Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb — a daring drone raid earlier this month that destroyed scores of Russian strategic bombers parked at Russian airbases — Israel followed suit with its own, unconventional drone operation inside of Iran during the opening hours of Operation Rising Lion.
Months prior to the operation, Israel smuggled drone components into Iran within suitcases, trucks, and shipping containers, according to news reports. From those components, Israeli operatives assembled hundreds of armed, quadcopter drones, thus laying the groundwork for short-range, drone strike missions, carried out by covert Israeli teams on the ground in Iran, against air defenses and missile sites. This unconventional operation enabled manned fighter jets to accomplish their missions and reduced retaliation threats against the Israeli homeland.
As both Operation Rising Lion and Operation Spiderweb have clearly shown, small drones have much more far-reaching applications than simply subbing in for pre-existing weapons like anti-tank guided missiles or mortars. Drones are tactical tools that can achieve strategic effects, when used creatively. The dominant role that drones now play over Ukraine’s battlefields — where at least 70% of Russian casualties now come from Ukrainian drones — is not the result of technology alone. It is the pairing of technology and tactics that makes drone warfare so transformative and lethal.
A New Kind of Air Raid
Lately, we’ve seen another drone warfare trend from the Russians, which sits on the opposite end of the warfighting spectrum from covert, expertly executed raids like Operation Spiderweb and Operation Rising Lion.
On the night of June 8 to 9, Russia launched its largest countrywide drone attack of the full-scale war, comprising 479 Iranian-designed, Shahed-type strike drones and 20 missiles. A day later, during the early morning hours of June 10, Russia launched 315 Shahed-type attack drones and decoys, as well as seven missiles, against Ukrainian cities and civilian areas. Ukraine’s capital city of Kyiv was the main target. A week later, on the night of June 16 to 17, Russia attacked across the country again with 440 strike drones and 32 missiles. As of this article’s penning, that attack killed 28 people in Kyiv, and wounded at least 134 others, city officials reported.
From ground level here in Kyiv, these latest attacks were unlike other long-range attacks during the full-scale war. They felt closer to what one imagines a World War II, area bombing raid might have been like. Non-stop explosions for hours. Tracers cutting across the night sky that briefly lit up like a rising sun each time an air defense strike found its mark. In the morning, the sky was black with smoke and fires burned across the city. Visually, it looked apocalyptic. Yet, the momentum of everyday life is hard to arrest. Within minutes of the air raid alert’s end, civilians emerged from their underground shelters and corridors and splashed some water on their faces and went about their days.
According to the Ukrainian Air Force, its air defenses shot down 239 Russian strike drones on the night of June 16; 163 more went down due to electronic warfare defenses or other reasons. By that measure, only 38 of 440 Russian drones penetrated Ukraine’s air defenses — a success rate of 8.6%.
From a material perspective, the strikes were a failure. But how do you measure the success rate of terror bombing?
Unmanned Area Bombing
Chillingly, some Russian Shahed-type drones used during the June 16 to 17 attack were armed with cluster munitions — clearly intended to kill and maim civilians not take out infrastructure as the Russians insist. Another mass Russian drone attack against Kyiv during the pre-dawn hours of June 23 included the use of drones armed with “a viscous flammable liquid” that burned in a manner similar to napalm, according to unverified OSINT accounts posted to Telegram channels. If true, this adds one more data point to the contention that Russia’s mass Shahed strikes are evolving into an area bombing campaign targeting Ukraine’s civilian population.
To date, Russia did not possess the domestic production means to re-generate its strike drones fast enough to achieve area bombing effects. But that’s changing.
Armed with a military-industrial base that can rapidly regenerate its strike drones, Russia is steadily scaling up the scale of its nightly strike drone raids. So far this year, Russia has already launched more than 20,000 long-range strike drones against Ukraine — 4,198 alone in March, according to Ukrainian media. That’s a significant jump from last year, when Russia averaged about 1,000 strike drones against Ukraine per month.
According to an estimate by Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate, the HUR, Russia can now produce up to 170 drones per day, comprising both strike drones (Russia’s variant of the Shahed is called the Geran-2) and decoys. With some 6,000 Geran-2 and Harpia-A1 drones already in its possession, as well as about 6,000 decoy drones, Russia can presently sustain attacks comprising about 300 drones at a time. That number could soon rise to about 500, according to HUR estimates.
By drawing out, exposing, and exhausting Ukraine’s air defenses, these mass drone waves act as pathfinders for Russia’s follow-on missile strikes. And as Russia’s nightly Shahed attack waves penetrate the civilian hearts of Ukraine’s major cities, they aim to inflict a psychological strain on civil society and stress-test the nation’s will to resist.
To date, Russia’s drone and missile campaign against Ukraine remains a strategic failure. Russian drones and missiles have never been able to inflict damage faster than Ukrainian workers can repair it, and Ukrainian civilian morale continues to endure in the face of these nightly terror attacks.
One major lesson from history is that area bombing of civilian population centers does not generally break civilian morale. Instead, such indiscriminate raids are liable to backfire and generate a greater degree of societal cohesion, empowered by sentiments of common cause and shared suffering. That’s certainly the case here in Kyiv and across Ukraine, as each new Russian atrocity reinforces the Ukrainian nation’s will to resist.
For the time being, Russia cannot sustain its drone and missile strike campaign at a rate and intensity sufficient to defeat civilian morale or inflict irrecoverable damage on Ukraine’s economy. Yet, if the recent trend toward arming waves of hundreds of strike drones with cluster munitions and incendiary warheads continues, the civilian carnage of these nightly terror attacks is sure to rise.
The question, then, is how far Russia will go in its campaign to deliberately target Ukrainian civilians as a means to achieve its military objectives.
— Nolan Peterson, Editor
