Ukraine has stepped up its campaign against Russia’s defence-industrial base with a strike on a key drone-production facility in the southern city of Taganrog, underscoring Kyiv’s growing focus on disrupting Moscow’s ability to wage long-range warfare.

According to a report by Kyiv Independent, Ukrainian forces struck a factory involved in the production of strike and reconnaissance drones overnight on January 13, triggering a large fire and multiple explosions. The operation was attributed to Ukraine’s security services and naval units.

“The SBU's Alpha Special Operations Center, together with units of the Ukrainian Navy's forces and equipment group, struck the production buildings of the Atlant Aero plant,” the Security Service of Ukraine said in a statement.

The strike on the Taganrog plant is the latest in a string of black-ops that have successfully targeted Russian military assets deep within Russia’s borders. Ukrainian special forces have successfully blown up military airfields on the Crimea peninsula as well as targeting Russian oil tankers docking in ports in both the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea, secretly attaching limpet mines to their hulls that are detonated hundreds of kilometres away when they are at sea. Key infrastructure, such as the Togliatti-Odesa ammonia pipeline have also been hit.

In the most spectacular operation to date, Ukraine smuggled a truck full of drones into Siberia and struck an airfield in Operation Spiderweb on June 1 that destroyed dozens of irreplaceable strategic bombers thousands of kilometres away from the frontline.

However, despite the campaign, the very biggest drone factories, like the recently opened Alabuga Special Economic Zone facility, have remained beyond reach and Russia’s expanding production of drones and missiles has continued to expand in the last year. In 2025, Russia’s production of arms and ammo went into surplus as it moved into the lead in the arms race with Ukraine. The Kremlin produced an estimated 2mn drones and 2,500 missiles in 2025, double the amount it made in the previous

Pressure on the front reduced

The facility, operated by Atlant Aero, is located in Taganrog, close to the Sea of Azov and only a few hundred kilometres from the Ukrainian front line. The plant produces the “Orion” drones, one of the workhorses of the Armed Forces of Russia (AFR), as well as electronic warfare systems and digital integration technologies used in strike FPV (first-person-view) drones and loitering munitions, according to the SBU.

“The destruction of the plant will reduce the production of (unmanned aerial vehicles) UAVs and weaken the technical capabilities of the occupiers to conduct reconnaissance and strike operations using drones,” the agency said, as cited by The Kyiv Independent. “Each stopped production line means hundreds of drones that will not fly over Ukrainian cities, kill civilians, or destroy homes.”

Moscow has previously acknowledged drone attacks on industrial facilities in the Rostov region but often downplays the extent of damage.

The strike highlights the central role drones have come to play in the war. Russia has relied heavily on a mix of domestically produced UAVs, such as the Orion, and Iranian-designed Shahed drones to carry out deep strikes against Ukrainian infrastructure and cities. In response, Ukraine has increasingly targeted military production sites, logistics hubs and airfields inside Russia, as well as economic targets including Russian refineries. Taganrog has been hit before, previously targeted in June last year.

Ukraine’s expanding long-range strike arsenal - combining domestically developed drones, modified missiles and intelligence-led black-ops - has allowed it to reach targets once considered beyond its reach. Western officials have privately acknowledged that these will not stop production, but are intended to just slow output, force dispersion and raise the cost of sustaining the war.

Biggest Alabuga plant untouched

The Atlant-Aero facility in Taganrog is a smaller production node within Russia’s broader UAV industrial base. It specialises in components and subsystems for Russian drones.

It has been repeatedly targeted by Ukrainian strikes, most recently on 13 January 2026, where a blaze and a “series of loud explosions” were reported after the attack on production buildings.

In contrast, the site near Yelabuga in the Republic of Tatarstan, one of Russia’s largest drone production facilities and a strategic cornerstone of its UAV output, remains untouched.

Built inside the Alabuga Special Economic Zone, this plant was established on the basis of Iranian technology to produce Iranian-designed Shahed-style loitering munitions — known in Russian service as Geran-2 — and reconnaissance drones.

It was explicitly intended to reach an annual output of 6,000 drones, with plans to operate 24 hours a day and add another 6,000 units per year. By April 2024, around 4,500 Shahed drones had reportedly been delivered from the Tatarstan facility to Russian forces.

And development work continues. Last week Russia used the new and improved Geran-5 drone for the first time with an improved range of 1,000km that can carry a bigger payload of 90kg of explosives.

Since the nature of the war changed from the drone war that started in 2023 to a missile war this summer, the AFR has changed tactics. As it increasingly takes the lead in drone and missile production it has started to fly waves of hundreds of drones at a target to degrade the air defences, before following on with a half a dozen powerful missiles at least some of which get through the defences and can completely destroy the target.

In an attack on January 12, Ukraine’s Defence Ministry admitted that it only brought down a fraction of the missiles launched by Russia against Ukraine. Ukraine’s supply of air defence ammo is dwindling, increasingly leaving its skies open to missile attacks.

“It's the ballistic missiles that are causing the most grief. The interception rates on them are in the single digits. Production of missiles is way up and interception rates are way down,” says journalist and bne IntelliNews columnist Leonid Ragozin. “Ukrainian air defence forces downed seven of 25 missiles fired by Russia last night. Quite a contrast with earlier in the war when all but a few missiles would be shut down, at least as per official reports.”

As bne IntelliNews reported, last year the Ministry of Defence released a list of the interception rates of various Russian missile types that showed that it has effective defences against many classes of missiles and drones, but for some of the more sophisticated, like the Oreshnik ballistic missile or the Kinzhal hypersonic missiles, Ukraine remains largely defenceless.

And now Russia is ramping up the missile attacks, targeting heating and power infrastructure as temperatures plunge. At the weekend half of the homes in Kyiv were without power or heating following yet another barrage on the capital. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy called on European allies to release their stocks of air-defence ammo to prevent a humanitarian disaster that would leave Ukrainian cities in the dark for the rest of winter.