“The idea was to make a drone that creates a sense of complete uncertainty for the enemy. So he doesn’t know if it’s really a deadly weapon … or essentially a foam toy,” the person said. With thermobaric, there is now a “huge risk” of an armed drone veering off course and ending up in a residential area where “the damage will be just terrifying,” he said.

In recent weeks, decoys have filled Ukraine’s skies by the dozens, each appearing as an indistinguishable blip on military radar screens. On the first weekend of November, the Kiev region spent 20 hours on air alert, the sound of drones buzzing with the boom of anti-aircraft defenses and gunfire.

Unarmed decoys now account for more than half of the drones targeting Ukraine, according to the person and Serhii Beskrestnov, a Ukrainian electronics expert whose black military van is equipped with electronic jammers to shoot down the drones.

Both the unarmed decoys and the Iranian-designed Shahed drones are built at a factory in Russia’s Alabuga Special Economic Zone, an industrial complex set up in 2006 about 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) east of Moscow to attract business and investments in Tatarstan. It expanded after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and some sectors switched to military production, adding new buildings and renovating existing sites, according to satellite images analyzed by The Associated Press.

In social media videos, the factory promotes itself as an innovation center. But David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington said Alabuga’s current purpose is only to produce and sell drones to the Russian Defense Ministry. The videos and other promotional media were removed after an AP investigation found that many of the African women recruited to fill labor shortages there complained they were tricked into taking jobs at the factory.

Russia and Iran signed a $1.7 billion deal for the Shaheds in 2022 after President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, and Moscow began using Iranian imports of unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, in combat later in that year. Shortly after the deal was signed, production began in Alabuga.

In October, Moscow struck with at least 1,889 drones — 80 percent more than in August, according to an AP analysis that has been tracking drones for months. Russia launched 145 drones across Ukraine on Saturday, just days after Donald Trump’s re-election called into question US support for the country.

Since the summer, most drones have been crashing, being shot down or being diverted by electronic jamming, according to an AP analysis of Ukrainian military briefings. Fewer than 6 percent have reached a discernible target, according to data analyzed by the AP since late July. But the high numbers mean a handful can escape every day – and that’s enough to be deadly.

Swarms have become a demoralizing fact of life for Ukrainians.

Russian drone tactics continue to evolve. Now, more powerful missiles often follow close behind as air defenses are exhausted by drones. The most destructive are ballistic and cruise missiles that fly many times faster than drones, which buzz loudly and can be tracked with the naked eye.

Even decoys can be useful to Russia. A decoy with a live camera allows the aircraft to geolocate Ukraine’s air defenses and transmit the information to Russia in the final moments of its mechanical life.

Night after night, Ukrainian snipers spring into action to shoot down drones with portable surface-to-air missiles.

One sniper, who like most Ukrainian soldiers asked to be identified by his call sign Rosmaryn, said he had shot down perhaps a dozen drones in nearly two years and saw one that was filled with rags and foam. Rosmaryn sees her opponent in almost human terms, describing the airship’s attempt to overtake her small unit.

“It was part of a swarm, flying as one of the last,” he said. “When it’s in the sky, we can’t tell what kind it is because it’s all inside the drone. We only find out after it’s been shot down.”

Many fly from 6,500 feet to about 10,000 feet before descending to lower altitudes on their final approach, Rosmaryn said. Leaked videos suggest Ukraine is now using helicopters to shoot down high-altitude drones.

Three Russian-origin decoys crashed in Moldova in the past week, authorities there said.

Due to optical deception, the radar cannot distinguish a drone armed with Shahed’s usual 50-kilogram payload or a thermobaric weapon – also known as a vacuum bomb – from those without a warhead or covered by live surveillance cameras. There are other drones of even rougher quality, armed and unarmed, but in lesser quantities than Shahed-style drones.

Therefore, even knowing that decoys now make up the bulk of an incoming swarm, Ukraine cannot afford to let anything pass.

“To us, it’s just a blip on the radar… It has speed, direction and altitude,” said Col. Yurii Ihnat, Air Force spokesman. “We have no way of identifying the exact target in flight, so we must either jam them with electronic warfare or use firepower to neutralize them. The enemy uses them to distract us.”

Engines and electronics for the Shahed and armed decoys are a mix of Chinese and Western imports, according to scraps seen by The Associated Press at a Ukrainian military lab. Without them, drones cannot fly. Despite nearly three years of sanctions, Moscow can still source the parts – mostly from China and via third countries in Central Asia and the Middle East.

Midway through a series of air alerts on November 2, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the Shahed swarms, which he put at 2,000 for the month of October alone, were possible because Western technology passed sanctions.

“Included in these Shahed lots are over 170,000 components that should have been blocked for delivery to Russia. Microcircuits, microcontrollers, processors, many different parts, without which this terror would simply be impossible,” Zelensky said.

Co-manufacturing drones — some to carry bombs, some to distract — saves Russia’s military money. Production of the decoys began earlier this year, and the plant now turns out about 40 of the cheapest unarmed drones a day and about 10 of the military ones, which cost about $50,000 and take longer to produce, according to a person familiar with Russian production of drones. .

In late October, Russian news outlet Izvestia said the aim of the decoy was to “weaken” the enemy by forcing them to waste their ammunition before sending in armed martyrs.

Both Beskrestnov and the person familiar with Russian drone production said Alabuga engineers are constantly experimenting, putting Moscow at the forefront of drone production. To make electronic interference more difficult, they add Ukrainian SIM cards, roaming SIMs, Starlinks, fiber optics – and sometimes can get real-time feedback before the drones are jammed, shot down or run out of fuel. Sometimes they attach a foam ball painted silver to make the drone appear larger on a radar.

But the latest thermobaric variant is causing new angst in Ukraine.

From a military point of view, thermobars are ideal for tracking targets that are either inside fortified buildings or deep underground.

Alabuga’s thermobaric drones are particularly destructive when they hit buildings because they are also loaded with ball bearings to cause maximum damage even beyond the superheated blast, Albright said.

Beskrestnov, who is better known as Flash and whose black military van is equipped with electronic jammers to shoot down drones, said thermobars were first used over the summer and estimated they now account for between 3 and 5 % of all drones.

“This type of warhead has the ability to destroy a huge building, especially blocks of flats. And it is very effective if the Russian Federation tries to attack our power plants,” he said.

They have a fearsome reputation because of the physical effects even on people trapped outside the original blast site, said Arthur van Coller, an expert in international humanitarian law at the University of Fort Hare in South Africa.

“With a thermobaric explosion, because of the cloud it would create, everything in its radius would be affected,” he said. “It creates massive fear in the civilian population. Thermobaric weapons have created the idea that they are really horrible weapons, and that creates fear.”