Products Shahed Aviation Industries
Shahed-136
Iran's long-range one-way attack drone, license-built in Russia as Geran-2 and launched against Ukraine in volume.
Missile / loitering munitionAdversary capabilityby Shahed Aviation IndustriesIntroduced 2021 · Updated 2026
The Shahed-136 is a long-range one-way attack drone developed by Shahed Aviation Industries in Iran (with HESA co-manufacturing) and built in volume by Russia under licence as the Geran-2. The platform first appeared publicly in December 2021 and has become Russia’s signature long-range strike drone against Ukraine.
The airframe is a delta-wing pusher with a 200 kg take-off weight, a quoted 2,500 km range, ~185 km/h cruise speed, and a 50 kg warhead in the original Iranian configuration. Russian variants from 2024 carry up to 90 kg. The MD-550 piston engine is reverse-engineered from a German Limbach L550E.
Above any single platform’s specs, the Shahed-136 is the war’s emblem of mass production economics — a relatively crude $30,000 airframe wielded in volume against a defender forced to spend orders of magnitude more per intercept. Recent Russian variants add an NVIDIA Jetson on-board for video processing and target identification, and Starlink for remote operator handoff.
Combat experience
Russia adopted the Shahed-136 from autumn 2022 as its primary long-range one-way attack drone against Ukraine. The platform is launched from rails or ramps in batches, navigates via inertial / GPS to fixed targets, and dives onto the aim-point. By May 2024, Ukrainian air-defence reporting recorded 2,628 Shahed-pattern launches across the prior six months alone; the Wall Street Journal corroborated more than 80% intercepts.
Russian production at Alabuga has scaled aggressively — roughly 26,000 Geran-2 airframes built through spring 2025, at about 170 airframes per day. Iran exports the original at a quoted price near $193,000 per unit; Russian domestic production is estimated at $30,000 to $80,000 per drone. Targets in Ukraine have been Ukrainian power transmission, generation, and substation infrastructure; defence-industrial sites; military airfields; and city-centre civilian buildings.
In late 2025 and early 2026 a reconnaissance-equipped Shahed variant containing an NVIDIA Jetson onboard computer for video processing and autonomous target-finding was recovered from Ukrainian territory. A separate variant adds Starlink connectivity for remote control.
Effectiveness
Effectiveness is asymmetric. Per drone, the Shahed-136 is unimpressive — slow, loud, and intercepted at over 80% by Ukrainian defences. As a weapon of saturation and economic exhaustion, it is among the most consequential systems of the war. Mass-produced cheap drones force Ukraine to expend short-range air-defence missiles at $1-3 million per shot to defeat a $30,000 airframe, and the unintercepted minority — perhaps 15-20% — has degraded Ukrainian electricity generation and transmission to crisis levels through successive winters.
Most-effective Ukrainian counter-measures cited in reporting are: DShK heavy machine guns fitted with thermal optics for low-altitude shoot-downs; specialised interceptor FPV drones; and the networked acoustic-detection system “Sky Fortress” that uses thousands of phone microphones across Ukrainian territory to triangulate Shahed flight paths.
Gallery
Sources
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HESA_Shahed_136 (2026-05-02) — Encyclopedic entry — confirms December 2021 public reveal, the 2,500 km / 185 km/h / 50–90 kg specs, the MD-550 piston engine origin, the Alabuga ~26,000-unit / 170-per-day production rate, the 2,628 Shahed launches against Ukraine logged by May 2024, the >80% intercept rate, the June 2025 NVIDIA Jetson reconnaissance variant, the early-2026 Starlink-equipped variant, and the DShK / interceptor / Sky Fortress counter-measure stack.