Swarms of Russian drones attack Ukraine nightly as Moscow puts new emphasis on the deadly weapon

The long-range Russian drones come in swarms each night, buzzing for hours over Ukraine by the hundreds, terrorizing the population and attacking targets from the industrial east to areas near its western border with Poland.

Russia now often batters Ukraine with more drones in a single night than it did during some entire months in 2024, and analysts say the barrages are likely to escalate. On July 8, Russia unleashed more than 700 drones — a record.

Some experts say that number could soon top 1,000 a day.

The spike comes as U.S. President Donald Trump has given Russia until early September to reach a ceasefire or face new sanctions -– a timeframe Moscow is likely to use to inflict as much damage as possible on Ukraine.

Russia has sharply increased its drone output and appears to keep ramping it up. Initially importing Shahed drones from Iran early in the 3 1/2-year-old war, Russia has boosted its domestic production and upgraded the original design.

The Russian Defense Ministry says it's turning its drone force into a separate military branch. It also has established a dedicated center for improving drone tactics and better training for those flying them.

Russian engineers have changed the original Iranian Shahed to increase its altitude and make it harder to intercept, according to Russian military bloggers and Western analysts. Other modifications include making it more jamming-resistant and able to carry powerful thermobaric warheads. Some use artificial intelligence to operate autonomously.

The original Shahed and its Russian replica — called “Geran,” or “geranium” — have an engine to propel it at 180 kph (just over 110 mph). A faster jet version is reportedly in the works.

The Washington-based Institute for the Study of War noted that cooperation with China has allowed Russia to bypass Western sanctions on imports of electronics for drone production. Ukraine’s military intelligence estimates that Russia receives up to 65% of components for its Geran drones from China. Beijing rejects the claims.

Russia initially launched its production of the Iranian drones at factory in Alabuga, located in Tatarstan. An Associated Press investigation found employees at the Alabuga plant included young African women who said they were duped into taking jobs there. Geran production later began at a plant in Udmurtia, west of the Ural Mountains. Ukraine has launched drone attacks on both factories but failed to derail production.

A report Sunday by state-run Zvezda TV described the Alabuga factory as the world's biggest attack drone plant.

“It’s a war of drones. We are ready for it,” said plant director Timur Shagivaleyev, adding it produces all components, including engines and electronics, and has its own training school.

The report showed hundreds of black Geran drones stacked in an assembly shop decorated with Soviet-style posters. One featured images of the father of the Soviet nuclear bomb, Igor Kurchatov, legendary Soviet space program chief, Sergei Korolyov, and dictator Josef Stalin, with the words: “Kurchatov, Korolyov and Stalin live in your DNA.”

The Russian military has improved its tactics, increasingly using decoy drones named “Gerbera” for a type of daisy. They closely resemble the attack drones and are intended to confuse Ukrainian defenses and distract attention from their more deadly twins.

By using large numbers of drones in one attack, Russia seeks to overwhelm Ukrainian air defenses and keep them from targeting more expensive cruise and ballistic missiles that Moscow often uses alongside the drones to hit targets like key infrastructure facilities, air defense batteries and air bases.

Former Russian Defense Ministry press officer Mikhail Zvinchuk, who runs a popular war blog, noted the Russian military has learned to focus on a few targets to maximize the impact. The drones can roam Ukraine's skies for hours, zigzagging past defenses, he wrote.

“Our defense industries’ output allows massive strikes on practically a daily basis without the need for breaks to accumulate the necessary resources,” said another military blogger, Alexander Kots. “We no longer spread our fingers but hit with a punching fist in one spot to make sure we hit the targets.”

Ukraine relies on mobile teams armed with machine guns as a low-cost response to the drones to spare the use of expensive Western-supplied air defense missiles. It also has developed interceptor drones and is working to scale up production, but the steady rise in Russian attacks is straining its defenses.

Despite international sanctions and a growing load on its economy, Russia’s military spending this year has risen 3.4% over 2024, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which estimated it at the equivalent of about $200 billion. While budgetary pressures could increase, it said, the current spending level is manageable for the Kremlin.

Over 1.5 million drones of various types were delivered to the military last year, said President Vladimir Putin.

Frontelligence Insight, a Ukraine-based open-source intelligence organization, reported this month that Russia launched more than 28,000 Shahed and Geran drones since the full-scale invasion began in 2022, with 10% of the total fired last month alone.

While ballistic and cruise missiles are faster and pack a bigger punch, they cost millions and are available only in limited quantities. A Geran drone costs only tens of thousands of dollars — a fraction of a ballistic missile.

The drones' range of about 2,000 kilometers (1,240 miles) allows them to bypass some defenses, and a relatively big load of 40 kilograms (88 pounds) of explosives makes them a highly effective instrument of what the Center for Strategic and International Studies calls “a cruel attritional logic.”

CSIS called them ”the most cost-effective munition in Russia’s firepower strike arsenal."

“Russia’s plan is to intimidate our society,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, adding that Moscow seeks to launch 700 to 1,000 drones a day. Over the weekend, German Maj. Gen. Christian Freuding said in an interview that Russia aims for a capability of launching 2,000 drones in one attack.

Along the more than 1,000-kilometer (600-mile) front line, short-range attack drones have become prolific and transformed the fighting, quickly spotting and targeting troops and weapons within a 10-kilometer (6-mile) kill zone.

Russian drone units initially were set on the initiative of midlevel commanders and often relied on equipment purchased with private donations. Once drones became available in big numbers, the military moved last fall to put those units under a single command.

Putin has endorsed the Defense Ministry’s proposal to make drones a separate branch of the armed forces, dubbed the Unmanned Systems Troops.

Russia has increasingly focused on battlefield drones that use thin fiber optic cables, making them immune to jamming and have an extended range of 25 kilometers (over 15 miles). It also has set up Rubicon, a center to train drone operators and develop the best tactics.

Such fiber optic drones used by both sides can venture deeper into rear areas, targeting supply, support and command structures that until recently were deemed safe.

Michael Kofman, a military expert with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the Russian advancements have raised new defensive challenges for Ukraine.

“The Ukrainian military has to evolve ways of protecting the rear, entrenching at a much greater depth,” Kofman said in a recent podcast.

FILE - In this photo taken from video distributed by Russian Defense Ministry Press Service on July 17, 2025, a Russian serviceman operates a "Supercam" drone in an undisclosed location in Ukraine. (Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP, File)

FILE - A Ukrainian officer shows a thermobaric charge from a downed Russian drone in a research laboratory in an undisclosed location in Ukraine on, Nov. 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky, File)

FILE - In this photo provided by Ukraine's 65th Mechanized Brigade press service, a resident rides a bike along the street under an anti-drone net in Orikhiv in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region, July 15, 2025. (Andriy Andriyenko/Ukraine's 65th Mechanized Brigade via AP, File)

FILE - In this photo taken from video distributed by Russian Defense Ministry Press Service on July 18, 2025, Russian soldiers prepare a strike drone aircraft to fly toward Ukrainian positions in an undisclosed location. (Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP, File)

FILE - A Russian drone attacks a building during a Russian missile and drone air attack in Kyiv, Ukraine, June 17, 2025. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky, File)

ROME (AP) — Pope Leo XIV is kicking off a three-nation tour of Latin America with a visit to Uruguay, the region’s least Catholic and most secular country, three weeks after undergoing lung cancer surgery that had put the entire trip into question.

Leo is due to arrive in Montevideo after a 13-and-a-half hour flight from Rome. He has a packed three-day itinerary in Uruguay including a visit to a neighborhood plagued by gang violence, a Mass in Paysandú, some 375 kilometers (230 miles) from the capital, and another Mass in the city of Florida, about 100 kilometers (60 miles) away.

The Uruguay leg is the first stop on what will be the longest and farthest trip of his pontificate, all being undertaken as the 71-year-old pope continues his recovery. The trip will also bring him to neighboring Argentina and finally back home to Peru, where Leo served as a missionary priest and bishop for two decades.

"His stamina is fantastic. The way that he's singing is incredible. And you can only sing if your lungs are really strong," said Maria Montserrat Alvar, the Vatican's new communications chief. She noted that Leo has passed the 14-day convalescence period required by doctors after his Oct. 13 surgery and is eager to get on the road.

“His doctors are very confident and he'll have plenty of medical care on board should something happen, but we don't see that in his prognosis or even in the way that he's acting,” she said.

In Uruguay, which hasn’t had a papal visit since 1988, Leo is expected to try to remind the 3.5 million people of their strong Catholic heritage stemming from the times of Spanish colonial rule. He is likely to propose the faith anew as an answer to today’s challenges and problems.

Upon arrival, Leo will meet with President Yamandú Orsi, leader of the center-left alliance that assumed power in Uruguay in March 2025, and then deliver his welcome address to government officials and diplomats. He finishes the long day with a vespers service at the city's cathedral.

Leo will find in Uruguay a country unlike any other in Latin America, which is home to around 40% of the world's 1.4 billion Catholics. Uruguay is considered the most secular country in the region, where only a fraction of people who identify as Catholic actually go to Mass regularly.

Uruguay was the first country in the world to legalize marijuana for recreational use, the second country in Latin America to decriminalize abortion, and the third country in the Americas to legalize same-sex marriage.

More recently, it became the first country in the region to approve assisted dying legislation over the strong opposition of the Catholic Church, evidence of Uruguay’s entrenched, church-state separation that prohibits any mention of God in oaths of office.

Leo is expected to recall the church's opposition to abortion and euthanasia as part of his broader argument about upholding human dignity in all phases of life.

Uruguayan church officials have marveled at the apparent enthusiasm the visit has provoked, with reports that tickets to Leo’s prayer vigil at Montevideo’s Centenario Stadium were snapped up after two days.

“It seems that the pope’s presence is shifting something here and is gradually breaking down this veil that has always sought to obscure and diminish the presence of the Catholic tradition that lies at the country’s foundation,” said Guzmán Carriquiry, the Uruguayan former head of the Vatican’s pontifical commission for Latin America.

“I believe this pope will stir up questions in the hearts of Uruguayans -- disturbing questions -- questions about meaning and, we hope, questions about faith,” he said.

Carriquiry said he expects Leo will seek to revive the Catholic roots of Uruguay, especially when he travels to Florida on Sunday to mark an important Catholic feast day.

The Nov. 8 feast commemorates the Virgin of the Thirty-three, a small wooden icon of the Virgin Mary that is intricately connected to Uruguay’s independence movement. According to tradition, 33 independence patriots acquired the Guaraní statue and had it with them when independence was declared from the Brazilian empire in Florida on Aug. 25, 1825.

“So the number 33 is an ecclesiastical symbol, a national symbol,” said Carriquiry, who was also Uruguay’s ambassador to the Holy See. “And so the pope will speak there about the Catholic tradition that lies at the origin of Uruguay—that stems from Uruguay and gave rise to Uruguay—in order to revive and renew the Catholic tradition in the hearts of Uruguayans.”

Andrew Chesnut, chair of Catholic studies and an expert in the Latin American church at Virginia Commonwealth University, said he wasn’t surprised that Leo’s visit had generated enthusiasm and that he will be welcomed warmly.

“But that’s not necessarily going to translate into folks in the pews,” he said. “If the overarching goal is trying to revitalize Catholicism in the most Catholic region on Earth, Uruguay is kind of a lost cause, and it has been for decades.”

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

Pope Leo XIV appears at the window of the Apostolic Palace overlooking St. Peter's Square at the Vatican for the Angelus noon prayer on All Saints' Day, a feast celebrated across much of the Christian world, Sunday, Nov. 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

Pope Leo XIV blesses a new born after his weekly general audience in St. Peter's Square at The Vatican, Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2026. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)

Pope Leo XIV celebrates a mass in memory of cardinals and bishops who died during the past year, in St. Peter's Basilica, at the Vatican, Thursday, Nov. 5, 2026. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)

A mototaxi pass drives past a banner of Pope Leo XIV at Pimentel beach in Chiclayo, Peru, Thursday, Nov. 5, 2026, ahead of his planned trip to Uruguay, Argentina, and Peru from November 6 to 17. (AP Photo/Martin Mejia)