Why Russia Is Worried About Ukraine’s Decoy Drones

Russia and Ukraine are engaged in a campaign of strategic drone warfare, each targeting the others enemy infrastructure with nightly waves of drones. In Ukraine, strikes by Russian Shaheds are causing power outages, while Ukrainian Lyutyi and FP-1 drones are burning down Russian refineries causing a spiraling fuel crisis.

Both sides aim to down as many of the incoming attackers as possible , but both sides are now using decoys to deplete enemy air defenses. As the Russian military blog Two Majors noted earlier this month: “The enemy is not slowing down in developing its own unmanned technologies and is learning from our Gerbera decoys… These devices are appearing more and more frequently.”

Quail: The B-52’s Little Friend

If air defence had unlimited ammunition they could simply blast everything. But in an age when most air defence was carried out by scarce and expensive surface to air missiles, decoys started to make sense. The B-52 strategic bomber first flew in 1955, and was designed specifically for the daunting mission of flying deep into the Soviet Union at high altitude to drop atomic bombs.

The massive B-52s would be impossible to hide from Soviet radar, and would be met with surface-to-air missiles and MiG interceptors. So the USAF gave the bombers a secret weapon: a jet-powered decoy drone called the ADM-20 Quail. The B-52 could carry up to eight Quails in its bomb bay and launch these as it approached the danger zone.

Fitted with radar reflectors, the Quail looked the same as a B-52 to radar operators, even though it only had a five-foot wingspan. Flying at 650 mph for almost an hour, the Quail could be pre-programmed to make two turns and one speed change to simulate a real bomber, which gives an idea of the limitations of 1950s computer power. In service from 1960, the Quail would have given the B-52s a much better chance of getting through, though it was never used in action and retired in 1978.

At some point planners realized that the decoy could also carry a warhead. This led to the Subsonic Cruise Armed Decoy (SCAD) program, which later evolved into the Tomahawk cruise missile

The Air Force now has more sophisticated decoy drones including the ADM-160 MALD with capabilities including electronic jamming and deception tools, costing around $400k. Several have been supplied to Ukraine to protect aircraft.

Russian Decoys

Russia started making the Iranian-designed Shahed drone at scale in 2024. Produced cheaply in large numbers, Russian drones threatened to overwhelm Ukrainian air defenses, with over 6,000 drones launched in July and up to 700 fired in a single night.

However, not all the attacking drones are Shaheds with 110-pound warheads. A significant number, perhaps around half according to the thinktank ISIS are even lower cost decoys.

A Shahed costs around $50,000. The Russian-made Gerbera decoy may be more like $10,000, and is now used in large numbers. The Gerbera is the same size as the Shahed and looks similar on radar, but at around 40 pounds it is only a tenth the weight and has a much shorter range. Some Gerberas carry electronic warfare gear to sniff out the locations of air defence radar, and 19 unarmed Gerberas were flown over Poland to test defenses last month.

Some Gerberas, are fitted with small warheads though, either in a tactical strike role and to endanger Ukrainian crews clearing up after drone attacks. The ‘armed decoy’ is still very much a thing and no drone can be assumed to be harmless.

The Parodiya decoy is an even simpler, smaller Russian drone, Like the Quail, it carries a radar reflector called a Luneburg lens (a metal coated sphere which looks like a glitter ball ) to make it appear larger on radar. The drone is made from plywood and utilizes mainly Chinese and Western electronics. Range is not known but believed to be hundreds of miles.

These decoys matter because while much of Ukraine’s protection comes from electronic warfare and mobile defence groups with machine guns and automatic cannot, they also rely on missiles. Recent videos show Russian drones being shot down by F-16s firing Sidewinder air-to-air missiles and Mig-29s. These are highly effective but such missiles are in short supply. With each Sidewinder AIM-9X costing $447,000 – and only a few hundred produced each year — they cannot be wasted on cheap decoys.

Ukraine’s Phantom Drones

Ukraine took longer to ramp up its drone strike campaign, but it is now gathering steam, with plans for some 30,000 long-range drones this year. These will be supplemented with an unknown number of decoys.

Again, it is a matter of cost. The Fire Point FP-1 costs a claimed $55. Lower cost decoys can deplete or distract the defeneses and give them a better chance of getting through.

The Russian military blog Two Majors released images of what appears to be a Ukrainian decoy drones used in an attack on an oil facility in the occupied Crimea. There is no indication of scale, but again this is likely to be smaller than the attack drones with an internal radar reflector.

In 2024 HI Sutton reported that Ukrainian company Slobidka Aerocompany had developed a low-cost decoy with a body made from plastic pipework and wooden airframe, wrapped with metal foil to increase its radar cross section. The model shown by Two Majors appears identical in design, right down to the identical caps at either end of the pipe body.

Ukrainian drone strikes are carefully planned with complex flight paths plotted to find a way through defenses. Decoys act as pathfinders to check a route is safe, ghost squadrons distracting air defense while the real attack is elsewhere.

“We use the decoys to make a corridor for ourselves,” a drone commander with callsign Casper told The Times newspaper.

As with attack drones, Ukrainian decoy production may have taken some time to ramp up. But now the drones are flying, they are likely to evolve fast. Electronic reconnaissance to help find paths through Russian radar, communication relays, and armed versions are all possible.

But while Ukraine has effective anti-aircraft gunnery units and increasing numbers of interceptor drones to take on the Shaheds, Russia has neither. Recent videos show Ukrainian drones flying into refineries with, at most, a few machine guns firing into the air. That means Russia is relying on its diminishing stockpiles for surface-to-air missiles, and those will be depleted ever faster as more decoys fill the skies. Some Russian sources suggest they is already running low, with only two missiles for six launchers.

The Fire Point FP-1 and Lyutyi drones will do the damage. But low-cost decoys ensure they get through. Two Majors are right to be worried.