When the UK allowed Ukraine to use British-supplied Storm Shadow cruise missiles against targets inside Russia in late 2024, Moscow predictably accused London of escalating the war and threatened retaliation.

Russia’s latest warnings over Kyiv’s use of British-made drones that “the deeper its involvement in the conflict… the higher the price it will pay” may therefore sound familiar. But there is an important difference: scale.

With a range of 250km, Storm Shadow has given Ukraine an extremely capable weapon for striking high-value targets behind Russian lines. But Britain and its allies possess finite inventories of the expensive cruise missile. Replenishing stocks takes time, money and industrial capacity, placing a practical ceiling on their use.

Long-range drones could loosen that constraint. They may carry smaller warheads and be considerably easier to intercept than a cruise missile but they are far cheaper and easier to manufacture. If Britain and Ukraine produce them in sufficient quantities, their significance will lie less in what any single drone can destroy than in the cumulative effect of repeated mass strikes deep inside Russia.

This does not make drones infinitely scalable. Production depends on components, manufacturing capacity and secure supply chains, while their effectiveness depends on overcoming Russian air defences and electronic warfare. But these differ from the finite inventories limiting cruise missiles.

The UK now has a substantial uncrewed-systems sector. Its drone programmes include the jet-powered Nyan, AR3, K3 Scout and Octopus, spanning long-range strike, surveillance, maritime autonomy and counter-drone warfare respectively. They are backed by the Uncrewed Systems Centre in Swindon, which the government describes as Europe’s “largest drone testing centre”.

Even so, no testing facility can replicate Ukraine’s situation: a live battlefield where designs are continuously evaluated against a capable enemy. According to aerospace manufacturer Tekever, this real-world experience has driven more than 100 upgrades to its AR3 surveillance drone.

Octopus takes this relationship further and is emerging as a model for UK drone manufacturing: take battlefield-tested Ukrainian designs, refine them with British engineering expertise, then mass-produce them in UK factories. Designed to counter the Iranian-designed Shahed drones Russia used against Ukrainian cities and infrastructure, Octopus is expected to be produced at a rate of thousands a month.

The UK government’s technology-sharing arrangements with Kyiv and co-leadership of the international Drone Capability Coalition extend this knowledge exchange to other systems.

This effectively inverts the traditional relationship between Ukraine and its western arms suppliers: no longer is Kyiv simply the customer. Ukraine increasingly contributes battlefield-tested designs and operational knowledge, while Britain can provide engineering expertise, industrial capacity, certification, capital and access to international markets.

But this is not the only arrangement Ukraine’s partners have adopted. Under the “Danish model”, European governments have financed weapons production in Ukraine itself, despite the risk of Russian attacks on these facilities.

Germany, meanwhile, has become the clearest example of Kyiv’s “Build with Ukraine” scheme, under which Ukrainian and German firms establish joint ventures to manufacture drones in Germany. Some of these are known as “resilience factories”, relying on local supply chains and workforces far away from the threat of Russian strikes and with the added deterrent of being manufactured on Nato soil.

Nevertheless, in aggregate, all these imported drones amount to just 5% of Ukraine’s drone consumption. For example, the UK’s “biggest ever drone package for Ukraine,” announced earlier this year, will amount to 150,000. This is far fewer than the 10 million drones Ukraine is seeking to domestically produce this year – even if most will be short-range battlefield systems rather than weapons capable of reaching deep into Russia.

Were the UK to increase its drone output, this would also strengthen its own military. The government’s recent defence investment plan outlined a drone-centric strategy across air, land and sea. This includes a Royal Navy “hybrid fleet” combining crewed warships with cheaper autonomous vessels.

Yet it remains unclear whether the funding matches this reliance on drones. Just £5bn has been earmarked across all three services, covering every type of uncrewed system and spread over four years. This raises doubts about whether production can reach the scale and speed the strategy requires.

The obstacles to scale

Government financing is only part of the equation though. Private investment is needed not only to keep smaller drone firms and their supply chains in business and to help them scale, but also to signal commercial credibility to prospective international customers.

At the same time, drone manufacturers remain dependent to varying degrees on Chinese batteries, motors, electronics and other components. On August 9 it was reported that cameras fitted to Royal Navy K3 Scout uncrewed vessels had been found communicating with an IP address in China, although the Ministry of Defence said these were non-sensitive signals.

The incident highlights one risk from Chinese components. Another is industrial reliance. Eliminating such dependencies would make many drones more expensive and difficult to produce. Leaving them untouched, however, creates security and supply risks during a crisis.

If Kyiv brings battlefield experience of which designs work, and Britain’s contribution is to turn those designs into secure, commercially viable and scalable industrial production, then the UK must overcome these constraints to make the desired drone surge succeed.

How might Russia respond?

Seen from Moscow, British support for Ukrainian long-range drones therefore presents a somewhat different problem from the earlier Storm Shadow decision. The issue is not simply that British technology can strike targets in Russia, but that British industrial capacity could help Ukraine sustain such attacks at greater scale.

Direct Russian military retaliation against Britain remains unlikely, given the obvious escalation risks of attacking a Nato country. A more plausible response is continued activity below the threshold of open conflict. Russia has already been accused of organising sabotage and arson against facilities linked to support for Ukraine, including warehouses in east London, logistics infrastructure in Germany, as well as hostile activity directed at defence industry executives.

In the medium term, the question is whether Ukraine and its partners can withstand this pressure and innovate, manufacture and strike quickly enough to impose costs faster than Russia can defend, repair, disperse and adapt. This contest will become increasingly important as winter approaches.