MOSCOW – Even as the Kremlin’s war machine starts to lose steam after years of relentless expansion, Russia’s aircraft sector is on a tear, fuelled by insatiable demand for thousands of drones.
Output in the industry, which includes both manned military aircraft and unmanned aerial vehicles, increased 117 per cent in April from a year earlier, Federal Statistics Service data show.
That compares with an average 68 per cent growth year-on-year in 2025, according to Bloomberg calculations.
The surge underscores how Moscow is pivoting to a new economic and military reality in President Vladimir Putin’s war with Ukraine that’s now in its fifth year.
With the production and effectiveness of tanks and other conventional armour hitting limits, cheap and scalable unmanned systems including first-person view drones have become one of the few areas of Russian industry still capable of rapid expansion.
“First-person view UAVs are now a dominant feature of fighting on the ground, making any kind of force build up hazardous for kilometres either side of the line of contact,” said Douglas Barrie, a senior fellow for military aerospace at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
“Longer-range UAVs have provided Moscow with the capacity to supplement its far smaller inventory of land-attack cruise missiles and to sustain a campaign against Ukrainian critical national infrastructure.”
Moscow is scaling up drone output alongside the creation of new dedicated unmanned systems troops, a move ordered by Putin in mid-2025.
Summing up 2025’s results, Defence Minister Andrey Belousov acknowledged that Ukrainian forces previously held an advantage in the combat use of drones, but claimed Russia has since turned the tide.
Detailed data on military production volumes are not disclosed.
Putin previously cited a figure of 1.4 million drones produced in 2024.
In 2026, Russia plans to manufacture 7.3 million first-person view drones and 7.8 million warheads for unmanned aerial vehicles of various types, according to Ukrainian military intelligence figures cited in May by Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi.
By comparison, since the start of the war, Russian forces have received 64 Su-34 and Su-35 tactical fixed-wing aircraft and 12 Su-27 warplanes, according to Sam Cranny-Evans, a military analyst at the Royal United Services Institute.
The broader defence sector is losing momentum, constrained by acute labour shortages, widening economic strains and tighter state financing.
While 2026 marks the first time the Kremlin opted to cut military spending since the invasion began, official forecasts show growth across industries producing heavy equipment, ammunition and missile components sharply slowing to just 4 per cent to 5 per cent from roughly 30 per cent in recent years.
Drones now play a central role in Russia’s military operations, Barrie said, including by helping ensure that more expensive cruise and ballistic missiles reach their targets.
Keeping up the current pace of cruise and ballistic missile launches over time “may well be beyond current Russian production capacity,” he said.
With the battlefield largely at a stalemate despite Russia’s advantage in manpower and conventional weapons, Moscow has intensified ballistic missile and drone attacks on Ukraine in an effort to regain the strategic initiative.
In May, Ukraine faced one of the largest Russian barrages of the war, which involved some 600 drones and 90 missiles, including a hypersonic Oreshnik missile used for the first time since January.
Russia’s aircraft industry expanded output by 78 per cent in the first four months of 2026, according to official data.
That contrasts with a 16 per cent increase in total production across defence-related industries and a near 3 per cent decline in civilian output, according to estimates from Renaissance Capital, reflecting slowing demand, high interest rates and widening sanctions pressure.
Drone manufacturing sidesteps many of the economy’s structural constraints.
It is significantly cheaper, can utilise female labour more easily amid workforce shortages, and scales quickly – from assembling hundreds of units in basements and garages to mass production of tens of thousands under state contracts.
The figures cited by Syrskyi imply a daily output of around 20,000 FPV drones.
Spread across what he described as an active front line of roughly 1,200km, that would amount to about 17 Russian drones per kilometer each day.
While Ukraine typically leads in initial technological innovation, Russia has proven effective at copying these advancements and scaling them, said Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
The Russian military has narrowed the gap in unmanned systems employment in part by scaling elite UAV units and developing new concepts of use, though those advances have yet to produce a decisive breakthrough, he wrote in a report.
Both sides describe drones as the primary strike force at this stage of the war.
Belousov has said that as much as half of Ukraine’s current losses are attributable to drone strikes, while Syrskyi said Ukraine’s unmanned systems units have been inflicting more losses on Russian forces than Moscow has been able to replace for a fifth month in a row.
Heavy armour forces have spent years searching for ways to defend against drones, and eventually they will find them, but the drone industry is developing too, according to Vladimir Tkachuk, head of Russia’s UAV producer, Uraldronzavod.
“Let a mid-sized tank learn to shoot down 10 drones on approach, and someone will design a swarm algorithm that launches 20,” he said in a radio interview.
“This will be an endless contest. There’s no escaping drones anymore, this is the new reality – both in the economy and on the battlefield.” BLOOMBERG
