The Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine announced a trend of replacing Western components in Russian strike UAVs with Chinese ones. The GUR reported this in response to a request from the Radio Liberty Donbas Realities project.
It is noted that in the Geran-2 UAV (one of the names of the Shaheda in Russia), which were discovered in May 2025, the share of Chinese electronics increased to 60-65%. Thus, electronic components produced in China for the first time pushed components from the United States to second place. Swiss electronics came in third place.
It also became known that on Russian strike drones, the interference-resistant antennas of the satellite navigation system are being replaced with more resistant to electronic warfare and with a larger number of antenna elements - now there are 12 and 16 of them instead of four and eight.
"One of the new features is the use of 3G modems in UAVs, which provide information about their location and telemetry to the Telegram bot so that the enemy can analyze the placement of our electronic warfare systems and air defense systems," the GUR representative noted.
He also spoke about the expansion of the range of warheads. For example, there are cases of the use of the Geran-2 UAV with a system for dropping slow-acting cluster elements. In addition, the weight of the warhead of Russian and Iranian production is increasing to 90 kg.
Among other things, measures were recorded to increase the moisture protection class of attack UAVs for the purpose of their effective use in difficult weather conditions and testing of a version of the attack UAV "Geran-3" with a jet engine.
We will remind you that after analyzing the wreckage of one of the Shahed drones, with which the Russians shelled Kyiv on the night of July 4, Ukrainian experts discovered body components of Chinese manufacture.