The bombers' launch box is only one leg of Russia's deep strike. The second, growing leg is the massed one-way-attack drone campaign: hundreds of cheap Geran-2 drones (§8.1), combined with cruise and ballistic missiles, against strategic targets — the electricity grid, command nodes, the defence industry and airbases — far behind the front line.
The campaign turns on cost asymmetry. A Geran costs a fraction of the SAM needed to down it. By mixing waves — Gerbera decoy drones that mimic a Shahed on radar, real Gerans, then cruise/ballistic missiles — the attacker forces the defence to waste its expensive interceptors on cheap targets, after which the real missiles slip through the exhausted defence. It is an attrition battle against the air defence itself.
| Wave element | Role in the saturation |
|---|---|
| Decoy drones (Gerbera) | Mimic Shahed on radar; bait expensive SAMs |
| Geran-2 (OWA) | Mass and volume; force continuous response |
| Cruise missiles (Kh-101) | Precision against hard targets once the defence is saturated |
| Ballistic missiles (Iskander, Kinzhal) | Speed; exploit the last gaps |
The campaign shows massed OWA drones are not just a front-line weapon but a strategic coercion tool: they threaten critical infrastructure deep in the rear at low cost. For Western planners the lesson is uncomfortable — the same logic threatens unprotected energy and C2 infrastructure in Europe (cf. the European drone incursions of 2025–26). The defensive counterpart is in § 5.12.
Open-source analyses (incl. Northern Defence Affairs, Long-Range Strike Drones…, 2026; RUSI/CSIS). Didactic summary; figures indicative.