Former American ambassador of NATO Kurt Volker weighs the Iran Nuclear Deal and the Russia-Ukraine peace talks during an appearance on ‘Varney & Co.’
The Russian army has launched thousands of missiles and drones in Ukraine in the past month, so that the intensity of attacks at a frightening pace has been increased that many Ukrainian citizens have driven underground in search of safety in bomb shelters every evening.
Last week the biggest attacks since Russian saw its full invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
But with long-term sanction packages in his place and president Volodyymyr Zenskyy on Wednesday for even more difficult sanctions still, where the seemingly endless drones from Russia comes from?
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A Shahed-Type drone flies on 7 June 2025 in the air above Kharkiv, Ukraine. (Pavlo Pakhomenko / Nurphoto via / getty images)
“They are easy to produce, in fact a wooden construct with lightweight material and a core head in it.
“The drones are not the same high military quality that we are used to in the West, but it’s good enough,” he said.
Russia initially imported a number of different Shahed drone variants from Iran, and when they saw how effective they could be, Moscow established a recognized production agreement, in which Iranian engineers and drone experts were involved in establishing production plants in Russia and importing many of the components they needed.
First responders respond to drone attacks on Chuhubiv, Ukraine. (East2West)
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But the production systems quickly evolved, in which Russia developed its own version of the Shahed, called the Geran-2, which is delivered with upgrades.
“There have been at least six fairly important adjustments that the Russians have made to the Shahed drones, including painting them black instead of white, so it’s more difficult to shoot at night,” says Hoffmann.
“Russia is now the Shahed expert, although the drone was originally from Iran.”
The drones that Russia shoots in such huge numbers in Ukraine are slower and less powerful than conventional missiles, but their main goal is to saturate the air and overwhelming defense systems. Ukraine must use expensive intercepts to focus on the Shahed or Geran drones, and the defensive arsenal can quickly empty.
Zenskyy said on Tuesday evening “dozens of enemy goals were being brought down” with the help of interceptor drones, and that his country “scales up” the interceptor -drone technology.
At the start of the week, President Donald Trump promised to send more defensive weapons to Ukraine in the light of the renewed Russian air supply, just a few days after the Pentagon had paused arms, stating that American stocks may be low.
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Ukrainian explosives experts and police officers investigate parts of a Shahed -Drone after an attack in Kharkiv on 4 June 2025. (Sergey Bobok / AFP via / getty images)
Hoffmann says that Ukraine could follow a strategy to touch drone launch locations and focus on the Russian defense industries, including factories producing components for drones such as explosives, computer chips and other advanced electronics.
“Trying to deal with the drone attacks Only the use of rocket tape weather is a losing game. Europeans are heavily reinforcing the capacities of air rocket defense, but it is not enough. Russia expands its attacking capacities faster and attacking weapons are cheaper to produce than defensively,” he said.
Defense -Secretary Pete Hegseeth published last week sweep new orders To speed up drone production and commitment, so that commanders can purchase and test them independently, as part of an aggressive pressure to surpass Russia and China in unmanned warfare.
The other area where the West could hit Russia’s ability to produce more drones and missiles is to punish third countries where the Kremlin has been able to circumvent around international limitations.
Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a flag -increasing ceremony via a video link in a state residence outside of Moscow. (Alexey Nikolsky/Sputnik/AFP via/getty images)
Countries such as Malaysia and Kyrgyzstan are marked as hubs for transferring sanctioned components to a higher level to Russia, says Hoffmann, who warns that sanctions can ultimately harm the countries that impose them by disrupting trade and global supply chains and raising costs.
It is a harsh reality of international diplomacy.
“Sanctions against Russia hurt us [in the West] To a certain extent. But if you start punishing any other country that does business with Russia, it would hurt us even more, “notes Hoffmann.
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Nevertheless, Zenskyy said that more can be done by the international community to harm Russia to buy weapons.
The last wave of attacks, he wrote on X on Wednesday, “another proof of the need for sanctions – corrosive sanctions against oil, which Moscow’s war machine has been feeding war with money for more than three years.”
