- A gun-armed Antonov An-28 light transport is already one of Ukraine's best Shahed-hunters
- Now the slow transport can fire interceptor drones—and extend its reach by tens of kilometers
- The transport allows interceptor operators to get above bad weather
One of Ukraine's most unusual and most efficient defenses against Russian Shahed attack drones—an aging Antonov An-28 light transport plane armed with side-firing gun—is about to become a lot more capable with the addition of air-to-air interceptor drones.
The An-28 crew has been testing at least two different types of interceptor: the SkyFall P1-Sun and the Wild Hornet Sting. Both drones launch from a simple rack attached to the starboard wing of the twin-engine An-28. After launch, operators aboard the transport steer the interceptors toward nearby Shaheds.
The aim: to slam into the Russian drones with a small explosive payload.
Video of the tests appeared online on Thursday. One observer, Timur Fatkullin, claimed the An-28 has already used the P1-Sun in combat. "You could call it a cheap air-to-air missile," Fatkullin explained.
The 1980s-vintage An-28 isn't normally associated with an air defense role. But late last year, some enterprising Ukrainian volunteers armed one of the transports with a 7.62-mm minigun firing from the transport's open side hatch.
Stable and cheap to operate, the An-28 is an excellent gunnery platform. In the roughly six months since the armed An-28 first appeared in the sky over Ukraine, its crew has shot down more than 220 Shaheds, Fatkullin claimed.
Four problems, one airplane
The tandem solves four problems that neither ground-launched drone interceptors nor an An-28 with a gunner could solve alone.
First, a minigun is effective only as far as the gunner can aim and see. Interceptors such as the P1-Sun and Sting can cruise for tens of kilometers. Operators aboard the An-28, connected to their drones via radio, see what the drones see through forward-looking cameras.
Launching from altitude also solves a battery and speed problem. Ground-launched interceptors burn significant power climbing to cruise speed. An air-launched drone inherits starts the chase already at altitude, already moving at roughly 300 km/hr, and with its battery untouched.
Normally cruising slower than 200 km/hr, the interceptors can accelerate to around twice that speed in order to overtake and strike Shaheds that hum along at 185 km/hr for the Shahed-136s at 185 km/hr and catch jet-powered Geran variants at their 300–350 km/hr cruise.
Weather is the third factor. Ground-launched drones are exposed to cloud cover that can blind their operators; an An-28 can climb above it. "The An-28 will allow drones to operate in zero visibility," Fatkullin wrote.
The fourth is radio range. Line-of-sight radio scales with altitude. An operator a few thousand feet up can guide interceptors much farther than a ground team can.
Hundreds of Shaheds
Interceptor drones costing around $3,000 apiece aren't the cheapest way to down $50,000 Shaheds—that honorific belongs to ground-based mobile gun vehicles such as the German-made Gepard—but they're still much more cost-effective than the best Western-made surface-to-air missiles, which can cost hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars apiece.
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The cost curve is now driving scale. Wild Hornets produces more than 10,000 Sting interceptors per month. Ukraine's military took delivery of roughly 40,000 interceptor drones in January 2026 alone, Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said. Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said Ukraine could scale that to 2,000 a day with sufficient funding. SkyFall's P1-Sun has destroyed more than 3,000 Shahed-type drones since the start of 2026, according to Hanna Hvozdiar, an adviser to Fedorov.
The Russians routinely launch hundreds of Shaheds at a time at Ukrainian cities and power plants, usually at a rate of once or twice a week. Normally just 10% of the 200-kg drones get through Ukrainian defenses, but that 10% is enough to inflict widespread damage.
The Russians kept scaling the Shahed attacks. Several hundred were launched a month while supplies came from Iran. But domestic production starting at the Alabuga factory, a second factory at Kupol, and the manufacturing of Gerbera decoys have ramped up attack numbers to thousands monthly. Ukrainian air defenses caught 99% of the drones by late 2024—but have struggled to keep up as monthly launches climbed past 6,000.
The imperative, for Ukrainian air defenders, has been to scale up defenses against the Shaheds without spending so much money that the defenses ultimately become unaffordable. Inexpensive interceptor drones, which Ukrainian factories churn out by the thousands every month, have helped the defenders balance capability versus cost.
And their numbers are rising. Deborah Fairlamb of Green Flag Ventures puts the broader pattern this way: one in three Russian aerial targets is now brought down by an interceptor drone rather than a missile.
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Ukrainian forces deploy an array of aircraft for anti-Shahed duty, including old training planes and at least one modified cropduster. There's a good chance many of them could get racks for interceptor drones. "This isn’t a one-off—there are already several projects where Sting is deployed from different platforms, both maritime and airborne," Wild Hornets stated.
The maritime version was demonstrated on 19 April, when Ukraine's 412th Nemesis Brigade launched a Sting from an unmanned surface vessel and intercepted a Russian Shahed over the Black Sea—a world first for naval-launched drone interception.
The Ukrainians are also getting better at striking Shahed-type drones at a longer range. On 4 April, a pilot from Ukraine's Bulava unit downed two Shaheds with a single Sting interceptor from 500 kilometers away, using Wild Hornets' HORNET VISION Ctrl remote-control system. By 23 April, Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov reported that pilots were guiding interceptors from up to 2,000 kilometers away—including from outside the country entirely.
Russia is adapting too. Jet-propelled Shahed variants now cruise at 300–350 km/hr and can burst to 500–600 km/hr — still faster than any interceptor Ukraine currently fields. Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov has called the jet variants the most urgent unsolved problem; Brave1 is channeling grants toward interceptors capable of exceeding 450 km/hr.
