SZR: Russia plans to produce two million FPV drones in 2025 with support from China
The Kremlin plans to produce up to twomillion FPV drones by 2025. In addition, Russia wants to produce 30,000 long-range drones and another 30,000 decoy drones that are intended to exhaust the Ukrainian air defense system. This was reported to Politico by the representative of the Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine, Oleh Aleksandrov.
As Alexandrov noted, Russia is catching up with Ukraine in drone production thanks to greater financial resources, production lines located far from the front lines, and especially assistance from China.
"Chinese manufacturers supply them with equipment, electronics, navigation, optical and telemetry systems, engines, microcircuits, processor modules, antenna field systems, control boards, navigation. They use so-called shell companies, change names, do everything to avoid export controls and avoid sanctions for their activities. However, officially China complies with all the rules," the spokesman said.
According to Alexandrov, Russia is critically dependent on Chinese supplies of spare parts for both tactical and long-range drones.
This allows Russia to undermine Ukraine's leadership in drone technology and production.
According to him, Russia has managed to increase the production of long-range drones from 15,000 in 2024 to over 30,000 this year, as well as up to two million small tactical drones:
Russia is also increasing its use of fiber-optic drones, which are immune to electronic warfare. Ukrainian forces were previously able to detect conventional Russian drones as soon as they took to the skies, but this is much more difficult with fiber-optic drones.
- On April 16, it became known that North Korea earned over $20 billion from Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine.
- On April 26, Russia for the first time acknowledged the participation of the DPRK military in the war against Ukraine, stating that they allegedly showed "high professionalism."
- On May 29, it was reported that North Korea had facilitated Russian attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure. Pyongyang could transfer about 9 million munitions to Moscow from 2023.
