Ukrainian Air Force Changes Language In Daily Disclosures As It Concerns Russia's Employment Of Gerbera And Other Decoy Drones
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Note: The following text was originally posted on my X/Twitter account.
The Ukrainian Air Force's daily disclosures about the number of strike munitions that Russia is said to have launched on a given day and the number of said strike munitions that Ukraine claims to have shot down may be belatedly starting to account for Russia's large-scale employment of (seemingly) primarily unarmed decoy drones alongside armed Shahed-136/Geran-2/Garpiya strike drones, which is a dynamic that can be dated to at least the start of autumn 2024. It is important to note that Russia's primary decoy drone appears to be the Gerbera (image 3 and the third drone from both the top adn bottom in image 4) and that the Gerbera can, at most, only be equipped with a very small and rather token 1-3 kilogram-class warhead—Russia's Shahed-136/Geran-2/Garpiya strike drones are regularly equipped with either 50-kilogram or 90-kilogram class warheads. There is no public information on the percentage of Gerbera decoy drones that are employed in an armed, as opposed to an unarmed, configuration.
Since the start of autumn 2024, the Ukrainian Air Force's daily disclosures—which problematically do not disaggregate/differentiate between armed strike drones and primarily unarmed decoy drones—offer figures for the number of "Shahed type strike drones and various types of imitator/simulator drones" that Russia is said to have launched/Ukraine claims to have intercepted. The Ukrainian Air Force's daily disclosure from the morning of 8 September 2025, which reflects Russia's employment of strike munitions from the previous night through the morning of 8 September, explicitly mentions Russia's use of its Gerbera (Гербера) decoy drone. This is, to my knowledge, the first instance of the Ukrainian Air Force mentioning the Gerbera by name in its daily disclosures despite Russia's employment of many thousands of such (seemingly) primarily unarmed decoy drones ever since the autumn of 2024. It remains to be seen whether the Ukrainian military will begin to offer accurate data that disaggregates the number of decoy drones—whether unarmed or (very modestly) armed—from the daily totals. In a forthcoming post, I will use the Ukrainian Air Force's own disclosures to demonstrate that some 32% of claimed "Shahed type strike drones and various types of imitator/simulator drone" interceptions in August 2025—and an unknown percentage of claimed launches thereof—appear to have been interceptions of Russian decoy drones such as the Gerbera, not Shahed-136/Geran-2/Garpiya strike drones that typically carry significantly larger and far more consequential/non-token warheads.