For three years the story of the drone war was told from the Ukrainian side. By autumn of 2025, Western analysts were converging on a different sentence: Russia has learned, and is now winning.
The Atlantic Council's October 2025 headline put the matter plainly: Russia has learned from Ukraine and is now winning the drone war. Three things drive the assessment.
The Rubicon Centre for Advanced Unmanned Technologies, established by Defence Minister Belousov in autumn of 2024, has, per the analyst Rob Lee, about five thousand people and vast financial resources. It is, in Michael Kofman's words, "the leading problem for Ukrainian drone operators — not only the drone companies themselves, but because they train other Russian drone units to replicate their approaches." Rubicon was decisive in cutting Ukrainian supply lines around Kursk in the winter of 2024 — 25, forcing the withdrawal that ended Ukraine's incursion.
The Alabuga special economic zone in Tatarstan, which once held a contracted target of two thousand and sixty Shahed-class drones, now produces roughly eighteen and a half thousand a year, with mid-2025 output around twenty-seven hundred per month plus a similar number of Gerbera decoys. The plant is rapidly expanding — satellite imagery in mid-2025 showed housing for up to forty-one thousand workers, and Ukrainian intelligence assesses Russia plans to import twelve thousand North Korean labourers at two dollars and fifty cents an hour. The drone war has become, on the Russian side, an industrial-defence partnership with Pyongyang.
Russia launched five and a half thousand Shaheds in June of 2025 alone — sixteen times the figure for June of 2024. Seven hundred and twenty-eight drones in a single night on the ninth of July, 2025. In January of 2026, more than four thousand four hundred Shaheds, averaging one hundred and forty per day. By spring of 2026, Russia is producing fibre-optic FPVs in larger numbers than Ukraine, pushing them to fifty to sixty-five kilometres of range. CSIS estimates Russia's total drone output at about four million a year — comparable to Ukraine's.
It is one of the few unambiguous reversals in the war. The country that began the conflict as the slower mover, building drones from Iranian designs in a single plant, now matches Ukraine on output and beats it on volume of long-range one-way attack. Whatever the West concluded in 2023 about whose industrial base would adapt fastest, the answer in 2026 is more complicated than first reported.