Drone strikes are blasting cities in ever greater numbers. Troops, already in short supply, are all needed on the front, where the Russians are slowly advancing. So, Ukraine is exploring another solution to defend the rear.
Interceptor drones have proven cost-effective at taking down Russian long-range attack drones of the Shahed variety. Ukraine also has many thousands of civilian volunteers serving part-time in Territorial Defense.
The idea is: why don’t we teach these volunteers to fly interceptors and put them to work defending their communities from Russian Shaheds?
This may become a reality in the coming months, provided that the Cabinet of Ministers, the national legislature, and Ukraine’s intelligence bodies give their full blessing. If they do, volunteer territorial defenders may improve Ukraine’s percentage of Shahed drones shot down, without needing to reposition troops from where they’re desperately needed.
"We want to allow volunteer groups, civilians, to also intercept Shaheds," said Lyuba Shipovich, head of the nonprofit Dignitas, which raises money, does advocacy, and helps train drone operators. Dignitas has been working with defense officials to put together a legal framework to enable these units to operate as air defenders.
"We don't have enough military forces to even close the front lines," Shipovich told Euromaidan Press in an interview. "The first priority for the military is the front, while these volunteers can stay in cities and protect territory within reach of their cities."
Creating the legal backbone of this initiative has been complicated but proposed amendments are ready to be submitted to the Cabinet very soon.
"We are close to ready to submit these changes to the Cabinet, so they may be accepted within a month," a source in the Ministry of Defense, who didn't want to be named for security reasons, told Euromaidan Press.
But passing these changes at the Cabinet level is only one step. Legislative changes are expected to take longer.
Working out a solution with intelligence agencies to allow the volunteers to use radar systems might take longer still. Radar gives people access to potentially sensitive information, a big problem if a unit gets compromised. Reforming security clearances while minimizing risk, let alone convincing intel officials, is expected to be very challenging.
Russian terror attacks and their hit percentage both on the rise
As part of their doctrine of terrorizing civilian populations into surrender, the Russians have committed to their strategy of massing strike drones on cities and civilian infrastructure.
This has been especially visible in 2025. According to the Institute for Science and International Security, the Russians have gone from 2,629 launches in January, an average of 84 per night, to 5,643 launches in September, an average of 188 per night.
Now that the heating season has started, Russia is expected to double down on trying to deny heat and electricity to as many civilians as possible, as it has been doing since the winter of 2022-2023.
Meanwhile, the percentage of successful hits has gone up, while the percentage of interceptions has gone down over this period. The Institute calculated 90 successful hits in January and 737 in September. The percentage of interceptions fell from 96.58% to 86.94%. Since April, the interception percentage never rose above the 80s.
The Russians have improved on their long range attack drone tactics. The drones started flying higher, deploying bigger payloads and implementing other hardware improvements, while continuing to pepper the mix with decoys.
As the Russians scale and improve, Ukraine responded by innovating new ways to fight them. One of the standouts is the drone interceptor — Ukrainians are heavily invested in expanding their use.
Drone interceptors and their pilots: effective, but more are needed
The overall percentage of attack drones like Shaheds shot down by interceptor drones, compared to other Ukrainian air defense weapons, is still only a fraction, likely below 20%, according to a Euromaidan Press source familiar with the subject.
But they’re supposedly effective: President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that when they were used, drone interceptors had a 68% success rate at knocking down Shaheds.
During one attack, Zelenskyy claimed that interceptors brought down 20% of Russian drones.
As is so often the case in Ukraine, the challenge lies more with scaling. Shipovich said there are not enough interceptors being produced. While most Ukrainian manufacturers can increase their rate of production, many of them lack the revenue to do so. The recent discussions about allowing weapons exports are in service to growing this kind of revenue.
Kyiv is also partnering with foreign allies to open joint production lines to try to pump out as many interceptors and all their technological accoutrements as quickly as possible.
There are multiple types of interceptors, ranging from plane-type models, to quadcopters, to ones resembling stubby, four-finned missiles, with a propeller on each fin. The ubiquitous FPVs are also frequently used in this role as well. Even though FPVs are generally less effective, the purpose-built interceptors tend to be in shorter supply, Shipovich said. She added that FPVs also require a greater degree of pilot skill to hit something.
While automatic target acquisition is a technology that is already being used in the field, for now, it has yet to fully outperform a skilled human pilot, multiple sources told Euromaidan Press.
As AI technology improves, this could change, as a single pilot could only fly one drone at a time, while better AI could possibly operate multiple units at once — an advantage that former Commander-in-Chief Zaluzhnyi cited as a technology that would decide the outcome of the Russo-Ukrainian war.
For now, to scale the use of interceptors, one also needs more pilots, which is where the volunteers come in.
Enter civilian volunteers
DFTG stands for Voluntary Formations of Territorial Communities in Ukrainian. While these volunteers report to a local Territorial Defense command staff, they are civilians, and their local purpose is built right into the name.
It takes as few as five people to form a DFTG chapter, though larger cities like Kyiv can have multiple formations, some of which have over 1,000 members. Most of these people have civilian jobs, and they spend a certain number of hours per month on their duties.
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The idea to harness these volunteers to defend their own communities from attack drones has circulated throughout 2025, especially after the Cabinet’s Order 699 in July, establishing the experiment. The pilots could operate out of small, spread-out headquarters, each supplied with their own electronic infrastructure, vehicles, and weapons. During an attack, they’d be able to go out and assist with air defense, using their drones.
Shipovich said that if teams of DFTG volunteers throughout Ukraine are properly equipped with both radar systems and interceptors, and trained in their operation, they can create wider zones of protection stretching for hundreds of kilometers across Ukraine.
There is at least one pilot project underway to train such volunteers to operate interceptors.
To go from pilot to wide adoption, proper legal structures must be built first. Amendments at the Cabinet level are expected to come first, according to Dignitas and Euromaidan Press’s source at the defense ministry.
These changes are required, because the use of volunteers raises many questions that need to be squared away.
Administrative challenges
The first issue is simply one of giving flying explosives to civilians, which current laws do not allow.
To respond quickly to air threats — and avoid having to tie up military officers to supervise their every step — volunteer air defense teams have to be able to operate semi-autonomously, while still answering to the authority of relevant military bodies in their areas.
There has to be an official chain of official responsibility behind the storage, issue, training, and oversight of such weapons.
Then there’s the issue of how the units will get paid. Should there be bounties for drone kills, creating uneven compensation structure? What should the rules be for businesses whose employees are defenders and need to take certain hours off?
An even bigger question is: who is going to fund them? Local budgets are already struggling and can ill afford all the tech the defenders would need. The state budget isn’t exactly flush with cash either, and using foreign support introduces another layer of complexity.
Dignitas is trying to come up with ways for businesses to fund the DFTG air defense teams in their areas. The argument is simple: it’s better to invest in local air defense solutions than to have to rebuild your office later.
Getting the blessing of the intelligence community
An even more complicated issue is one of radar. Drone interceptors are near-useless unless they can see their targets.
Ukraine has good, multifaceted sensor networks alerting air defense crews to the position of attack drones within seconds. But to actually hit a Shahed drone that’s flying over 200 kilometers per hour, even a second of latency is too much.
Ukraine's air defense uses a variety of short-range radar, from foreign-supplied systems, to the more common homegrown models including RADA, Giraffe, and the "Poltavka," with typical ranges between 7 and 50 kilometers.
"There are very, very few of them," Shipovich wrote in a Facebook post. "When at the end of 2024 it became obvious that it is also cheaper to shoot down Shaheds with drones, and for this you need radar, then there were not many radar systems left."
Both the manufacture and use of radar systems is tightly controlled by the General Intelligence Directorate (GUR), due to the sensitive data these systems provide. But this caution also means that there are not enough radar systems to go around for all the air defense teams that might need them.
Multiple people who spoke to Euromaidan Press expect that getting the intelligence agencies to disrupt their standard operating procedures will be challenging.
All DFTG volunteers already have to be cleared with the military upon joining up. But to create the necessary oversight to enable localized use of radar to target Russian attack drones would require adding layers of complexity on top of an already-complex, yet proven system of clearances.
However, such interruptions might be necessary to give Ukrainians the tools to protect their communities and infrastructure, Shipovich wrote.
“This definitely needs to be changed. The state cannot be the only one to produce radars, especially during wartime. I agree that large radar systems need to be regulated, but small radars that only see drones at short distances can definitely be given to the private sector.”
