Inside Ukraine’s drone war against Putin

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experimental. But some of them did the job. There were explosions inside the base and several dead, with wounded soldiers seen streaming into the local hospital, according to local sources.

That capped a miserable week for the Kremlin, already struggling to explain more than a dozen drones striking the heart of Moscow, repeated shutdowns of major airports and unexplained explosions at arms factories, airfields, fuel depots and railways. A source close to the developers of Morok (“dark spirit"), one of the prototype drones used in the Crimean operation, says Ukraine’s new aerial strike capacity is the result of “seeds sown many months ago". Morok’s development had been a “miraculous" journey: after one risky test launch a few kilometres from the Russian border, its developers escaped incoming Russian rockets by minutes.

Now they aim to step up serial production. Fast and capable of carrying a heavy payload over several hundred kilometres, Morok is among the more promising fixed-wing kamikaze designs being considered by Ukraine. It has come this far largely without government funding, relying on hard work and a few friendly benefactors.

But like other developers, Morok’s team now faces a difficult task getting the resources to scale up. Ukraine’s drone programme is driven by necessity. Russia, a missile superpower, began the war with a clear superiority in long-range strike capacity.

It later began buying cheap, effective Shahed kamikaze drones from Iran. Ukraine, on the other hand, has not been allowed to use Western-donated weapons in Russia itself, and so has been looking for other ways to hit back. Part of the answer has been developing new missiles, or repurposing old ones: the vintage S-200 surface-to-air missile is