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.