Latest Ukrainian Press Release Draws Attention To Lackluster Performance, Limited Salvo Size Of Russia's Land-Attack Cruise Missiles
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According to the Ukrainian military, Russia launched a total of 524 long-range strike munitions against Ukraine from the night of 18 November 2025 through the morning of 19 November 2025. This total of 524 long-range strike munitions reportedly included:
A non-disaggregated total of 476 propeller-driven fixed-wing strike drones—namely the Shahed-136/Geran-2/Garpiya—and unarmed/minimally armed decoy drones, namely the Gerbera. While the Ukrainian military’s daily press releases have disaggregated the likes of Shahed-136/Geran-2/Garpiya strike drones from Gerbera decoy drones with increasing regularity in recent months, the latest press release notably only offers non-disaggregated figures. Based on prior press releases and publicly disclosed estimates of Russian strike drone and decoy drone production from Ukrainian military intelligence, some 30%-40% of the non-disaggregated total of 476 fixed-wing propeller-driven drones is likely to have been composed of unarmed, or at most minimally armed—with a 1-2 kilogram warhead—decoy drones such as the Gerbera.
40 Kh-101 air-launched subsonic land-attack cruise missiles. These are carried and launched by Tu-95 and Tu-160 bombers of the Russian air force. Kh-101 launches tend to be sporadic as a result of Russia’s limited production capacity and consequent limited inventory of Kh-101 cruise missiles available for immediate use.
7 3M-14 Kalibr sea-launched subsonic land-attack cruise missiles, which are reported to have been launched from the Black Sea. The remaining surface ships and submarines of the Russian Black Sea Fleet undertake very brief and exceptionally sporadic sorties into the Black Sea or the Sea of Azov to launch a single-digit quantity of 3M-14 land-attack cruise missiles before returning to port to rearm—if 3M-14 reloads are available. As with the air-launched Kh-101, 3M-14 land-attack cruise missile launches tend to be sporadic as a result of Russia’s limited production capacity and consequent limited inventory of 3M-14 cruise missiles that are available for immediate use.
1 9M723 Iskander-M ballistic missile.
Making Sense Of The Latest Ukrainian Interception Claims
According to the Ukrainian military, 483 of the aforementioned 524 Russian strike munitions—some 92.1%—were either successfully intercepted through one form of air defence capability or another or neutralized through Ukrainian electronic warfare capabilities. While these figures are quite impressive when taken at face value, such aggregated figures are increasingly misleading and should not be readily extrapolated across time and space in the Russia-Ukraine War, let alone to other current and future conflicts.
On Variance In The Susceptibility Of Russian Strike Munitions To Ukrainian Electronic Warfare Capabilities
Neutralizations through electronic warfare primarily reflect the jamming and/or spoofing of global navigation satellite system (GNSS) antennas/receivers installed on the likes of the Shahed-136/Geran-2/Garpiya strikes drones and unarmed/minimally armed Gerbera decoy drones. It bears emphasis that Ukraine’s electronic warfare capabilities are decidedly heterogeneous and that there is considerable variance in terms of the electronic warfare capabilities deployed across Ukraine. There is, moreover, considerable variance in the resilience of Russian GNSS antenna arrays to Ukrainian electronic warfare capabilities.
Several different types of GNSS antenna arrays are installed on Shahed-136/Geran-2/Garpiya strike drones. Unarmed/minimally armed Gerbera decoy drones, which typically constitute some 30%-40% of the total number of propeller-driven fixed-wing drones launched by Russia on a given day since the late summer of 2024, are built at a very low price point and feature much less resilient four-element GNSS antenna arrays than the twelve-element and sixteen-element GNSS antenna arrays that increasingly constitute the standard for use on Shahed-136/Geran-2/Garpiya strike drones, which previously employed four-element and eight-element GNSS antenna arrays prior to Ukraine’s increasingly widespread deployment of more effective electronic warfare capabilities. GNSS antenna arrays with a greater number of antenna elements are more expensive—and considerably larger/heavier—and would significantly increase the unit cost of Gerbera decoy drones, even if there was no barrier to installation in terms of payload weight and volume on the small Gerbera airframe. All else being equal, the greater the number of elements on a Controlled Reception Pattern Antenna (CRPA) GNSS antenna array, the greater the resilience of the antenna array to the effects of electronic warfare, which is intended to deny the aircraft or munition on which the GNSS antenna array is installed access to reliable and accurate positioning data derived from GNSS satellites.
Given the above, it is possible, even likely, that a greater percentage of the unarmed/minimally armed Gerbera decoy drones are either successfully intercepted or neutralized by electronic warfare than Shahed-136/Geran-2/Garpiya strike drones. While not ideal for Russia, such a dynamic will nevertheless be indicative of how the much less expensive unarmed/minimally armed Gerbera decoy drones, which have a take-off weight that is around 10% of the Shahed-136/Geran-2/Garpiya, are performing well in their primary role of a low-cost decoy intended to occupy/tax and exhaust/deplete Ukrainian air defences. The greater susceptibility of the GNSS antenna arrays installed on Gerbera decoy drones is, in other words, a feature, not a bug, of this very inexpensive decoy drone design that Ukrainian military intelligence claims Russia is producing at an annualized rate of around 40,000 units—which will allow Russia to sustain an average daily launch rate of 109 Gerbera decoy drones provided that it does not stockpile such decoy drones. It is important to note that while the Ukrainian military has, in recent months, often offered data through which observers can disaggregate the number of strike drones launched from the number of decoy drones launched by Russia on a given day, this practice does not extend to the figures offered for the total non-disaggregated number of Russian propeller-driven drones that Ukraine claims to have successfully intercepted or otherwise neutralized through electronic warfare on a given day.
Focusing On Ukrainian Claims About Cruise Missile And Ballistic Missile Interceptions
According to the Ukrainian military’s latest press release, Ukrainian air defences successfully intercepted 34 of the 40 Kh-101 air-launched subsonic land-attack cruise missiles that Russia is said to have launched, as well as seven of the seven 3M-14 sea-launched subsonic land-attack cruise missiles that Russia is said to have launched. As a general matter, the aforementioned Russian land-attack cruise missiles are far less susceptible to the effects of GNSS jamming and spoofing than the likes of the Shahed-136/Geran-2/Garpiya as well as the Gerbera, and must, as such, be intercepted by Ukrainian air defences unless the missiles malfunction in flight. The single 9M723 Iskander-M ballistic missile that Russia is said to have launched does not appear to have been intercepted and may not have even been subject to an interception attempt, given the limited defensive footprint offered by the steadily expanding number of terminal phase endo-atmospheric ballistic missile defence-capable air defence systems operated by the Ukrainian military across Ukrainian territory.
Supposing that the above figures are accurate, Ukraine would have intercepted 85% of the 40 Kh-101 air-launched subsonic land-attack cruise missiles that Russia is said to have launched and 100% of the 3M-14 sea-launched subsonic land-attack cruise missiles that Russia is said to have launched. That is, Ukraine claims to have intercepted 87.23% of the subsonic cruise missiles (of all types) that Russia is said to have launched. Even if these figures are accurate, these are nevertheless misleading in several very important respects: the Ukrainian military’s regular press releases only offer figures for how many Russian strike munitions are intercepted, not where/when these are intercepted or how these are intercepted. The interrelated questions of where/when and how matter because Ukraine may be heavily exerting itself—perhaps unsustainably overexerting itself—to attain these interception figures, and current—now past—performance may not necessarily be indicative of future performance.
The Ukrainian military’s regular press releases, which are frequently and widely cited without careful analytical consideration of what these limited spot datapoints do and do not actually indicate about air defence dynamics in the Russia-Ukraine War, let alone other contemporary and future conflicts, have never offered observers any indication of how much effort and expense Ukraine puts in to achieve the claimed performance of its air defence capabilities. Observers operating with access to publicly available information have little in the way of recourse, given how the requisite data is non-public and likely to be highly classified, but there is another—albeit limited and imperfect—approach to analytical inference. Official and non-official reports of impacts, specifically cruise and/or ballistic missile impacts, which are not only not accompanied by the unmistakable sound of a propeller-driven drone powered by a small two-stroke piston engine but also result in much larger explosions given the use of much larger and heavier warheads on the Kh-101, 9M723, and 3M-14—offer observers a window into the extent to which Russian strike munitions manage to penetrate Ukrainian airspace and, as such, offer observers a window into the porosity of Ukrainian air defence coverage.
The above unofficial map is the product of one of Ukraine’s largest open-source strike munition tracking/early warning efforts, which draws upon both official alerts offered by the Ukrainian military and open-source datapoints, such as recorded footage from mobile phones and similar. Being unofficial and being undoubtedly based on incomplete and limited data, the trajectories depicted for various Russian strike munitions in the above map should be considered illustrative, not authoritative—these maps are not derived from radar tracking data. The above map, which notably appears to be inaccurate, seeing as how it depicts a greater number of 9M723 Iskander-M ballistic missile launches than is the case of the Ukrainian military’s latest press release, which was released after the publication of the above map, depicts illustrative propeller-driven strike drone and decoy drone trajectories in yellow, illustrative sea-launched 3M-14 cruise missile trajectories in green, illustrative air-launched Kh-101 cruise missiles trajectories in red, and illustrative 9M723 Iskander-M ballistic missiles trajectories in orange.
The main takeaway from the above map is that Ukraine’s air defences appear to remain very porous. Leakers that penetrate the forward-most “lines” of Ukrainian air defences appear to make it through hundreds of kilometers in Ukrainian airspace, and the land-attack cruise missiles and strike drones that appear to have impacted the ground around Lviv and Ternopil in western Ukraine evidently bypassed most “lines” of Ukrainian air defences. Observers operating with access to publicly available information can only speculate as to why the leakers got as far as they did and, more importantly, have no way of knowing where/when Russian strike munitions were successfully intercepted and how these were intercepted. There is a world of difference in a scenario in which, for example, Ukraine launched a total of 40 surface-to-air and/or air-to-air missiles to successfully intercept 34 of the 40—85%—Kh-101 cruise missiles that Russia is said to have launched and one in which, for example, it launched 60, or 80, surface-to-air and/or air-to-air missiles to successfully intercept 34 of the 40—85%—cruise missiles that Russia is said to have launched.
While the air-launched Kh-101 can be equipped with infrared countermeasures, cruise missiles and strike drones generally do not “evade” surface-to-air and air-to-air missiles in the manner of crewed combat aircraft and tend not to feature countermeasures of any sort. Surface-to-air and air-to-air missiles may, however, miss their intended target and more generally malfunction in flight, and the air defence systems and/or fighter aircraft that are positioned to undertake an engagement attempt against one or more cruise missiles may be overwhelmed/saturated by the number of targets in their vicinity and/or exhaust the number of ready-to-fire surface-to-air/air-to-air missiles that can be launched in the brief window in which even a subonic—but low-flying—cruise missile remains within the engagement range of a given air defence system or fighter aircraft (fighter aircraft have limited range-endurance as with any aircraft in addition to a limited munitions load, whereas ground-based air defence systems only have a limited number of ready-to-fire munitions). It bears emphasis that air defence systems and fighter aircraft can only engage a finite number of targets at a time, in addition to having a limited temporal window to engage moving targets.
The level of effort and amount of expense that Ukraine puts into attaining its claimed air defence performance can be expressed in terms of a munitions exchange and/or cost exchange ratio. There is a difference, for example, between using an AIM-120 air-to-air missile or a MIM-104D (PAC-2) surface-to-air missile to undertake a (probabilistically successful) interception attempt of a Kh-101 or 3M-14 subsonic land-attack cruise missile. If the ratio of surface-to-air and/or air-to-air missiles launched to Russian cruise missiles is 1:1, then the Ukrainian interception figures can be more or less taken at face value. If, however, Ukraine is launching an average of more than one surface-to-air and/or air-to-air missile per Russian cruise missile, then the exchange ratio will be far less favourable to Ukraine. Given the unit production costs of the likes of the AIM-120 and MIM-104D, the cost exchange ratio will also be far less favourable for Ukraine. It nevertheless bears emphasis that cost exchange ratios, which focus on the marginal cost of interception, are better understood as abstractions. Ukraine is, after all, primarily using surface-to-air and air-to-air missiles that have been paid for and donated by countries, while Russia, like other countries, cannot produce an infinite number of cruise missiles due to production capacity constraints, even if the cost exchange ratio was exceedingly favourable.
While the specifics of the surface-to-air missiles and/or air-to-air missiles that Ukraine uses in its air defence efforts are not public knowledge, it goes without saying that not everything is as expensive or as limited in terms of availability as the AIM-120 or the MIM-104D—or the likes of the Aster 30, IRIS-T, and the many other air defence systems that Ukraine currently operates. The cost exchange ratio is far more favourable to Ukraine when Soviet-built surface-to-air and/or air-to-air missiles are used in interception efforts, even if these older missiles tend to be less reliable and less effective—which can manifest itself in a higher penetration rate for Russian missiles. The cost exchange ratio is also far more favourable to Ukraine when older donated Western missiles, such as the AIM-9M, Aspide, Crotale, MIM-23 HAWK, as well as shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles (i.e., MANPADS) of any origin are used in interception efforts. Whatever the composition of the likely very heterogeneous array of surface-to-air and/or air-to-air missiles that Ukraine launches—expends—on a given day, it is possible, even likely, that Ukraine is launching on average more than one surface-to-air and/or air-to-air missile for every cruise missile that Russia launches. As a result, Russia’s penetration rate—reportedly 85% for the most recent salvo of 40 Kh-101 air-launched subsonic cruise missiles and 0% for the most recent salvo of 7 3M-14 Kalibr sea-launched subsonic cruise missiles—may be very unimpressive at face value, but Ukraine may be heavily exerting itself—perhaps unsustainably overexerting itself—to attain these interception figures, and current—now past—performance may not necessarily be indicative of future performance.
Wars are not, of course, mechanistically determined by exchange ratios and cost exchange ratios, and Russian target selection as it concerns the use of land-attack cruise missiles and ballistic missiles—as opposed to far less expensive and far more readily available propeller-driven fixed-wing strike drones and decoy drones—likely reflects its actual targeting priorities, not merely what it perceives to be the most effective approach to exhausting Ukraine’s air defences. Stated differently, the Russian military almost certainly wants all of its cruise missiles to hit their intended targets, even though that is not a realistic expectation against Ukraine’s fully alerted and fully mobilized air defences—which are being quite lavishly resupplied and supported by Ukraine’s foreign backers—in a war that is fast heading toward the start of its fifth year.
On The Issue Of Salvo Size
In an ideal world, Russia would modify the Kh-101 and 3M-14 Kalibr and/or develop new clean-sheet land-attack cruise missiles with much lower radar and infrared signatures that could, all else being equal, attain a much better penetration rate against Ukraine’s current and future air defence capabilities. In the real world, Russia’s primary approaches to improving the penetration rate of its cruise missiles are:
Increasing the number of cruise missiles launched, which is to say increasing salvo sizes. This can be done by increasing the production of long-deployed cruise missile designs like the Kh-101 and 3M-14 and/or increasing the production of more recently introduced lower payload-range—and less expensive—cruise missiles, such as the ground-launched Banderol, as well as cruise missile analogues, such as the Geran-3, which is a turbojet-powered version/derivative of the ordinarily propeller-driven Shahed-136/Geran-2 strike drone.
Improving intelligence on the dispositions of Ukrainian air defences so as to improve route planning with the aim of having cruise missiles fly preprogrammed flight paths that avoid as many Ukrainian air defences as possible.
Targeting Ukraine’s ground-based air defence systems—its surface-to-air missile systems and accompanying radars, its stored/non-ready-for-launch surface-to-air missiles, its fighter aircraft and fighter aircraft bases/infrastructure, and so forth, to degrade Ukraine’s ability to sustain its claimed air defence performance. This is a critically important series of capability areas in which Russia has been consistently and woefully underperforming since February 2022.
Exhausting and overwhelming Ukraine’s air defences through other means, namely the very large-scale use of less expensive propeller-driven fixed-wing strike drones in the vein of the Shahed-136/Geran-2/Garpiya, as well as decoy drones in the vein of the Gerbera.
Whatever approach or combinations thereof Russia pursues, subsonic land-attack cruise missiles and similar are unlikely to have a very high penetration rate against Ukraine’s fully alerted and mobilized air defences unless these are launched in truly large salvos. Simply stated, Russia needs to launch very large salvos, something in the region of 100 cruise missiles, if not more, if it intends to more effectively employ its cruise missile arsenal. It is important to emphasize that this is not simply about improving the penetration rate for Russian cruise missiles; it is also about improving the terminal effects on the intended targets of Russian cruise missiles. Subsonic land-attack cruise missiles are typically equipped with, at most, a 400-500 kilogram high-explosive warhead. The destructive radius and destructive effects of such warheads are non-trivial but nevertheless limited, and targets such as power plants, factories, airbases, and similar are typically composed of multiple, perhaps dozens, of discrete aimpoints, each of which must be serviced by at least one such warhead. Absent a 100% penetration rate—as well as a 100% reliability rate and 100% accuracy rate—large salvos are required in any event to heavily damage or destroy many potential targets in Ukraine.
While Kh-101 and 3M-14 launches tend to be sporadic and very limited in scale—the most recent Russian cruise missile salvo is atypically large—as a result of Russia’s limited production capacity and consequent limited inventory of such cruise missiles that are available for immediate use, it is important to bear in mind that Russia faces a major constraint in terms of the maximum number of cruise missiles that it can launch on a given day.
Only a subset of the Russian bomber fleet, namely certain Tu-95 versions and Tu-160 bombers, is capable of launching the Kh-101. Russia’s bomber fleet was not only significantly attrited on 1 June 2025 in Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb, but the growing threat posed by Ukraine’s long-range strike munitions to Russian bomber bases has forced Russia to redeploy the bulk of its serviceable bomber aircraft to bases east of the Ural Mountains. To launch Kh-101 cruise missile against Ukraine, these bombers must redeploy to airbases in Western Russia before being loaded with Kh-101 missiles. As a result of this peculiar and inefficient imposed operational approach, Russia is rapidly running up the flight hours on a fleet that is primarily composed of decades-old Soviet-built bomber aircraft that Russia is poorly positioned to replace for the foreseeable future. Given this, the maximum salvo of Kh-101 cruise missiles that Russia can launch is inherently quite limited, and the in-production Kh-101 has a design that is not well-suited for adaptation into a ground-launched configuration.
The issue of salvo size also affects the 3M-14 Kalibr sea-launched subsonic land-attack cruise missile, which can presently only be launched by the remaining warships and submarines of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, as well as the Russian Caspian Flotilla (which can access the Black Sea via Russian internal waters, including the Volga-Don Canal). Russia’s approach to employing the 3M-14 in the specific military-geographical context of the Russia-Ukraine War is extremely inefficient, with Russian warships and submarines in the Black Sea undertaking very brief sorties to reach launch points situated several dozen kilometers from the Russian coastline to launch 3M-14 Kalibr cruise missiles that could have just as easily reached their targets had these been launched from the nearest point of land, if not much further inland. There is presently no indication that Russia has adapted the ordinarily sea-launched 3M-14 for launch from either a semi-mobile or fully mobile terrestrial launcher. Unless Russia does so, the maximum salvo size for the 3M-14 will be affected by the very limited number of Russian warships and submarines capable of launching this land-attack cruise missile that are within range of Ukraine—the 3M-14-equipped vessels of the Russian Baltic Fleet, Northern Fleet, and Pacific Fleet cannot reinforce the Black Sea Fleet or, more generally, bring their 3M-14 cruise missiles within range of Ukraine.
While Russia does deploy ground-launched land-attack cruise missiles, namely the 9M727/9M728, which is also known as the Iskander-K, as well as the longer-range 9M729, the deployment of which is understood to be the immediate cause of the demise of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, these subsonic land-attack cruise missiles are also sporadically launched as a result of Russia’s limited production capacity and consequent limited inventories of 9M727/9M728 and 9M729 cruise missiles that are available for immediate use. While ground-launched land-attack cruise missiles have limitations and are not, as such, unalloyed goods, stationary, semi-mobile, and mobile terrestrial launchers are nevertheless far simpler and less expensive than bomber aircraft, warships, and submarines.
If Russia is to launch very large salvos of, say, one hundred or more land-attack cruise missiles against Ukraine, it will almost certainly have to prioritize the production of ground-launched land-attack cruise missiles, or at least cruise missiles that can also be launched from the ground. While this should be doable with the sea-launched 3M-14, the air-launched Kh-101 has design features that make this more difficult—but not impossible—to adapt for ground-launch, and the 9M727/9M728 and the 9M729 are already exclusively launched from the ground. The recent unveiling of a ground-launched version of the ordinarily air-launched Banderol and the ongoing use of the turbojet-powered Geran-3, which is a version/derivative of the propeller-driven Shahed-136/Geran-2/Garpiya, suggests that Russia is gradually and belatedly heading in this direction, but it bears emphasis that the Banderol, Geran-3, and the Shahed-136/Geran-2/Garpiya are all operated by the Russian army/ground forest, not the Russian air force. The Russian army is also the sole operator of the ground-launched 9M727/9M728 and 9M729 subsonic land-attack cruise missiles, which appear to be built and used in very limited numbers—especially in the case of the longer-range 9M729—on a much more sporadic basis than the air-launched Kh-101 (the Russian army is also the sole operator of the 9M723 Iskander-M ballistic missile). Given the above, the Russian service branch that operates ground-launched long-range strike munitions does not appear to be heavily pushing for a reallocation of resources toward prioritizing 9M727/9M728 and 9M729 production, or adapting the 3M-14 and Kh-101 for use with terrestrial launchers. The effectiveness of Russian cruise missiles will, as such, be constrained by limited salvo size, independent of Russia’s limited production capacity and consequent limited inventory of land-attack cruise missiles that are available for immediate use.