German defense AI firm Helsing has unveiled Contra, an AI-run air defense system and two interceptor missiles designed to chase Russia’s jet-powered Geran drones, the company announced on 26 October. Officials pitch it as cheap, but it won’t reach the market this winter.

That leaves Ukraine on its own defenses as Russia shifts to jet drones. By early October, jet models made up about 40% of Russian drone launches, and Ukraine’s own interceptors for them won’t arrive in needed numbers before late November, Air Force Deputy Commander Yurii Cherevashenko said.

Two missiles, one AI brain

Contra is the command layer of air defense: it links radars and other sensors, tracks incoming drones and missiles, and assigns a weapon to each target, while people keep control over decisions, Helsing said. Besides the company’s own missiles, it can also use other firms’ interceptors, lasers, guns, or nets. AD-1 Inferno is jet-powered and designed to loiter, swarm, and re-engage targets, while AD-2 Ambush, a solid-fuel rocket, is designed to reach Mach 2.5, over twice the speed of sound, and a range of more than 20 km, the company said.

Inferno, with a 700 km/h speed and a 20-km range, would be the everyday shooter. Ambush would handle “leakers,” drones about to hit the ground, said Maxwell Adams, Helsing’s senior product director. Each shot should cost under $100,000, company officials said.

Built for the faster Gerans

Ukraine once downed 90% of Russia’s slower, propeller-driven Gerans, copies of Iran’s Shahed, Defense News reported. Russia has since fielded thousands of jet Geran-4s and Geran-5s flying at 400–700 km/h, and almost half now get through, Helsing co-founder and co-CEO Gundbert Scherf said.

Ukraine’s own nightly rates swing widely. On 28 September, President Zelenskyy put the shoot-down rate for jet drones at 57%. Overnight on 7 October, it exceeded 82%, National Security and Defense Council Secretary Ihor Klymenko said. Russian output of the two models has reached 4,000 a month, Helsing said, citing unspecified intelligence reports.

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Helsing has signed one Contra contract, Scherf said, but the system is still in testing, and he expects it on the market in the second half of 2027. Ukraine already uses Helsing’s HX-2 strike drones. Scherf said they should be integrated into a system like Contra.

Ukraine has finished its share of FREYJA, a joint European project to build a system against ballistic missiles, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told journalists on 17 October, Ukrinform reported. He added that Kyiv wants to test the first system as soon as possible.

Ukraine still relies on US-made Patriot interceptors to stop Russian ballistic missiles. Zelenskyy told ABC News on 23 October that Ukraine had received only 24 of them from the US in three months, while it needs 350 a month on average. FREYJA can not close that gap soon, because the system is still in development.

Ukraine’s missile and launcher, partners’ radars and sensors

Zelenskyy said the partners’ share of the work, with 10 countries taking part, is still underway. He also said he had discussed the project with French President Emmanuel Macron, and he named Norway as a key partner.

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Zelenskyy did not say what the partners still have to deliver. In August, he said Ukraine is capable of making the missile and launcher, while partners would supply critical components such as radars and sensors.

One part not made in Ukraine

In May, Fire Point co-founder and chief designer Denys Shtilerman said all components of the FP-7.x interceptor are made in Ukraine except one. “As for that one part we don’t manufacture in Ukraine, we’ve contracted a certain quantity of it. We already have it,” he said, but did not name the part.

In June, however, Shtilerman told the Financial Times that mass production depended on an infrared seeker Fire Point hoped to get from Germany’s Diehl Defence. Neither statement says whether the seeker is that one part.

Fire Point co-founder Iryna Terekh said in September that FREYJA was going through testing and technical integration in combat conditions in Ukraine. The company plans its first intercept of a ballistic target by mid-2027.

The official timeline has since moved closer. On 21 October, Zelenskyy wrote that officials had identified where to speed up so FREYJA reaches testing by the end of this year. A test is still a step short of an intercept.

Machine tools and other equipment from seven countries, led by China, work at Russian plants that make ballistic missiles and their components, Ukraine’s military intelligence (HUR) said on 26 October. The 30 items are a small slice of HUR’s War&Sanctions portal, which lists 1,698 machine tools at 223 Russian plants.

Seventeen of the 30 were made outside China, in Germany, Taiwan, the US, Türkiye, Switzerland, and Italy. One of HUR’s proposals reaches past Russia and China, to the firms that supply parts for Chinese machine tools. The list comes two weeks after the EU blacklisted 1,569 Russian arms suppliers and executives. More than half of those listings hit the ballistic missile supply chain, EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said. Sanctioning a company, though, does not stop the machines in its workshops.

A Chinese machine at the Iskander plant

HUR’s statement leads with a GX-650 five-axis machining center made by China’s Hyper Machine Tool. Such computer-controlled machines cut complex metal parts from several angles. HUR said it works at the Votkinsk Plant, which the agency described as the maker of 9M723 missiles for the Iskander-M system and the missile section of the Kh-47M2 Kinzhal, an air-launched ballistic missile.

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HUR has flagged Votkinsk before. In November 2025, it published hackathon findings showing that Russian companies supplied Chinese and Taiwanese machine tools to the plant after the full-scale invasion began.

Chinese Shtral turning and milling centers work at PEMZ Molot, which builds electronics units for Iskander-M missiles, according to HUR’s statement. At UPKB Detal, which makes altimeters for hypersonic Zircon cruise missiles, HUR found measuring equipment from Germany’s Rohde & Schwarz.

The portal entries paint a broader picture. Only four of the 30 entries list a ballistic missile among the plant’s weapons. Most of the rest list cruise missiles, glide-bomb kits, guided artillery shells, or Geran-2 attack drones. HUR did not publish its evidence, though the portal says partner agencies can request it.

Foreign parts inside Chinese machines

Russian plants use the equipment to make missiles and parts such as altimeters, control surfaces, and gyroscopes, HUR said. The agency noted a growing number of Chinese machine tools, including five-axis models. According to HUR, those Chinese machines contain European, Japanese, and Taiwanese components, from numerical control systems to precision spindles and bearings. In HUR’s assessment, Russia still cannot replace equipment from leading foreign makers with its own.

A new video transmitter for Wild Hornets’ drones, including its STING interceptors, has passed state tests, the Ukrainian drone maker told Militarnyi. The module sends a drone’s camera feed to its pilot. The company expects it to widen its interceptors’ operating radius.

Russia launched 140 Shahed-type drones at Ukraine overnight on 26 October and 280 the next night, when its main target was Kyiv, Air Force figures as of the morning show. Interceptor drones, which cost dozens of times less than the Shaheds they hunt, are one of Ukraine’s answers. The STING alone downed more than 3,000 drones in its first seven months of use, Wild Hornets says. If the company’s estimate holds, a 30 km radius would let each ground station cover more than twice the area it covers at 20 km.

What the testers checked

Specialists from the State Research Institute for Testing and Certification of Arms and Military Equipment and the Defense Ministry’s State Quality Assurance Directorate confirmed the module’s declared characteristics on three drone types, the company said. The three were the STING interceptor, the Queen of Hornets cargo platform, and the 10-inch Wild Hornets Digital anti-aircraft drone.

Some of the drones’ figures exceeded the values the company had set for them, Wild Hornets told Ukrainian defense outlet Oboronka, without saying which ones. Those figures will enter the official specifications after further field tests, it said.

More than double the power

The module, called HV VTX Pro, is part of an upgrade to Wild Hornets’ Hornet Vision digital video system. It more than doubles the transmitter’s maximum power, to 4 W. That sends a clear picture farther and makes the feed steadier in crowded airwaves and under electronic jamming, the company said.

Wild Hornets first described the module in August, when it was already in serial production. Its interceptors’ operating radius would grow from around 20 km to 30 km, the company said at the time. That estimate assumed good line of sight and the 360-degree antenna on its ground stations, according to a company statement Interfax-Ukraine quoted. Interception could also become at least 20% more effective against targets flying extremely low, the statement said.

Wild Hornets is a Ukrainian company that designs and builds drones, from strike FPV drones and cargo platforms to the STING, which the company says flies at up to 280 km/h to hunt Shaheds. Its drones serve with more than 100 units of Ukraine’s Defense Forces, from the army and the National Guard to military intelligence, the Air Force, and the border guard, according to Interfax-Ukraine.

Russia is expanding drone storage at the Hvardiiske military airfield in occupied Crimea, Ukrainian OSINT channel Dnipro Osint reported on 26 October, citing new satellite images. The channel did not say who took the images or when. Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) said it struck drone hangars at the same airfield in July, and the military said strikes on 13 October damaged four drone storage sites nearby.

Hvardiiske has stayed in use since then. Ukraine’s General Staff has listed it among the sites Russia launched attack drones from in every daily report since 7 October. The airfield was on the list again on 24, 25, and 27 October, the night Russia aimed its main strike at Kyiv. The new construction, as the channel describes it, adds protected storage at a base Ukraine has already shown it can reach.

Shelters and “garages”

The images show more than 20 small shelters under construction, each protected by earth berms, the channel said. It also counted about 40 smaller structures it calls “garages.” It said they are meant for storing, servicing, and preparing Geran drones for launch.

Geran is the name Russia gives the Iranian-designed Shahed drones: the Shahed-136 became the Geran-2, which Russia now builds itself. The images show at least one hangar damaged by a Ukrainian drone hit, Dnipro Osint noted.

Launched from vehicles

Hvardiiske, north of Simferopol, uses mobile launch platforms instead of fixed installations, according to Dnipro Osint. Crews load drones onto specially equipped vehicles, which then launch them from the runway.

Struck repeatedly since June

On 24 June, the SBU said it hit infrastructure at Hvardiiske and at the Saky airbase. On 3 July, the SBU reported that its drones struck two hangars at Hvardiiske that stored Shaheds and aviation equipment. Ukraine’s General Staff said its forces struck the airfield again overnight on 5 July, and the SBU said a day later that it hit three hangars with aviation equipment there. A strike on 3 August destroyed nine aviation-fuel tanks and damaged two aircraft hangars, the General Staff said. Strikes on 13 October damaged four drone storage sites near Hvardiiske, with signs of secondary detonation, it reported two days later.

Not the only base Russia is building up

Hvardiiske is not the only Russian drone base Ukrainian OSINT channels have flagged this month. On 13 October, the anonymous channel Absolutely Reliable Source said Russia had nearly finished the first section of a launch site for jet-powered Geran-5 drones near Millerovo in Rostov Oblast, with eight launcher positions and 32 drone-preparation spots. Hvardiiske and Millerovo were both among the launch areas the General Staff listed for the night of 27 October, when Russia launched 280 Shahed-type drones, 69 of them jet-powered, with Kyiv as the main target.