In the evening hours of the recently passed New Year’s Day festivities in Russian-occupied Khorly, Kherson, a swarm of Ukrainian First-Person View (FPV) drones descended upon the Black Sea coastal town, allegedly killing at least 24 and injuring over 50. According to Moscow-aligned officials in the Eastern-Ukrainian region, the mass-casualty attack targeted service industries and civilian celebrations, igniting illegal incendiary munitions and setting swathes of the town ablaze. However, Ukrainian officials rejected these claims, insisting that the Armed Forces of Ukraine remain strictly governed by international security and humanitarian laws, localising their targets accordingly. This comes just days after a comparably disputed, but much larger Russian strike, as hundreds of Geran drones were launched towards Kyiv ahead of peace negotiations in Washington, DC, leaving over 750,000 Ukrainians disconnected from vital winter heating and amenities as Russian efforts targeted vital electrical grids and supply infrastructure (The Guardian, 2025; Max Hunder, 2025).
All the while this instability foments, both combatant leaderships claim adherence to and motivation by international law, and potential progress in peace negotiations. As of January 2026, such rhetoric remains prominent, with claims that territorial concessions and their subsequent security arrangements are the primary obstacles to a lasting peace. Such talks, of which the United States, among other European states, is a consistent intermediary, respond to calls for rapid defence alliances, demilitarised buffer zones, and industrial deconfliction measures. However, as international diplomats claim advancements in their mediated discourse, the unrelenting, cost-effective, and increasingly precise and innovative nature of drone warfare unveils the fragility of these rationalist security arrangements. This paradox undermines trust in proposed structural security guarantees, increasing the risk of ceasefire violations and rendering future peace talks unstable and potentially unenforceable under current legislation.
Yet, continued dualistic narrative battles underline not only a sustained rhetorical tension of condemnation between Russian and Ukrainian officials, but a deepening silence and growing global concern for human security violations which now plague a landscape of destructive, asymmetric wartime technologies. Nevertheless, weaponised drone production shows little sign of deceleration, with approximately 95% of Ukraine’s long-range UAV and drone systems being produced domestically in 2025 and Russia’s approximated production of 80,000 prototype drone units in the latter half of the year (Ukraine’s Arms Monitor, 2025).
This logistical and developmental explosion retroactively challenges structural realism’s long-held assumptions of contemporary security and combatant hierarchies, where material resources and financial superiority have determined state power within the theatre of warfare. According to such perspectives, as popularised by scholars like Professor John Mearsheimer, armed state-state conflict is transformed by the anarchic structure of our geopolitical environment, where stronger states conquer and dominate through their offensive militarised capabilities.
However, Ukraine’s drone strategies invert these norms, permitting a materially and financially inferior force to conduct effective sabotage operations upon a global superpower, prioritising high-volume, low-footprint production and adaptability over high-cost technologies. This discounted clandestine flexibility was fervently revealed to the world during the summer of 2025, when Ukraine’s counter-intelligence unit, the SBU, launched a strike of 100 smuggled FPVs to target airbases and strategic assets deep into Russian territory. The assault, known as ‘Operation Spiderweb’, led to the destruction of key assets, including several Tu-95 bombers and Su-34 fighter jets. Ukraine’s embedded assault demonstrates how asymmetric tactics can override conventional warfare, effectively striking Russian infrastructure with minimal cost to Ukrainian personnel. In doing so, drone technologies successfully exposed Russian security vulnerabilities and gave Ukrainian forces opportunities for a non-linear advantage on the battlefield, upturning the conflict’s militaristic hierarchy (Mazhulin, Swan, Holmes, Boulinier and Hecimovic, 2025).
Nonetheless, this paradigm shift continues to entail a significant human security cost, blurring the lines between international law and the distinction between military and civilian infrastructure targets. The precision and deniability of this technology foment indiscriminate impacts, exacerbating the challenges of daily life in wartime and compounding civilian casualties. According to the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, long-range drones have killed 548 and injured 3600 civilians in 2025 alone, revealing a 26% and 75% rise, respectively. This escalation raises vital questions for international humanitarian law, as principles of deterrence, target distinction, and proportionality of violence are continually obscured. To address this quandary, future security strategies face similar adaptations, integrating drone-specific guidelines to ensure that human insecurity is minimised and the now-present cycles of civilian suffering are not perpetuated (United Nations Human Rights: Office of the High Commissioner, 2025).
Consequently, the realist security dilemma and technological dynamics of the drone war continue to spill over into wider geopolitical engagements and debates, raising concerns about wartime law, the banning of munitions and delivery systems, and an increased risk from non-state actors. The proliferation of low-cost technologies and hybrid tactics also risks further destabilising geopolitical flashpoints such as the Sahel region, Israel-Palestine, and the wider Indo-Pacific, where similar asymmetries could alter the course of current or potential conflicts. Therefore, until pragmatic diplomacy acknowledges the human insecurity at the tip of drone-munition evolution, its impacts on broader conflict and international security remain perilous.
As the Russia-Ukraine conflict continues to rage on, the emergent paradigm of weaponised drone warfare demands immediate attention and re-evaluation within our norms of global security. In challenging traditional realism’s structural foundations and escalating an already chaotic human insecurity crisis, this tech shift underlines a consistent need to adapt our international frameworks of conflict. This is not only to safeguard at-risk communities, but also to face the reality of an era of conflict where technology, destruction, and the need for victory once again outpace lived experience, peace negotiations, and the human cost of volatile, asymmetric, and low-cost ways of war.
Nathan McAfee, Analista Colaborador
