Three Nights of Drones Breach Moscow's Air Defense, Exposing Cost Flaw

Three nights in a row, a drone flew past 130 Russian air defense sites and hit the Mosfilmovskaya tower in Moscow — the most prestigious residential address in Russia, home to politicians, executives, and the occasional arms dealer. Floor 36 took the damage, 7 kilometers from the Kremlin. No casualties. Plenty of psychological impact.

That damage to floor 36 is the least interesting thing about what happened here.

The interesting part is the math. Russia has deployed roughly 100 Pantsir-S1 systems and 20 S-400 batteries to protect Moscow UNITED24 Media, a network of air defense sites that represents the densest, most sophisticated air defense concentration on the planet. Ukrainian drones got through anyway — three nights in a row BBC News. Not because Russia ran out of interceptors or made an operational mistake, but because the underlying economics of air defense are broken.

A Ukrainian Fire Point FP-1 drone costs somewhere in the range of $10,000 to $50,000, depending on configuration and source. A single Pantsir-S1 interceptor missile costs $50,000 to $100,000. Russia has been firing dozens of interceptors per night across multiple fronts. Ukraine can absorb losses and keep launching. The cost exchange ratio is brutal and asymmetric, and it runs in the direction of the attacker.

Ukrainian officials have been explicit about what they are doing. President Zelensky said the Kremlin was afraid drones would fly over Red Square during Victory Day celebrations and that Ukraine needed to keep up the pressure BBC News. His government has been methodically demonstrating something more significant than any single strike: that Ukrainian drones can reach Moscow at will, past a layered air defense network that the Russian military has spent decades building and deploying.

Primorsk port, with capacity of a million barrels per day, was struck May 2-3 Reuters. St. Petersburg received 60 drones in one night of a larger attack that saw 117 interceptors fired across Russian regions BBC News. Three consecutive nights of Moscow strikes prompted Russia to cancel the military vehicle portion of its Victory Day parade for the first time since 2007 RFE/RL.

The FP-1 is not a mystery weapon. Ukrainian officials have discussed its capabilities publicly. It has a published range of 1,600 kilometers, a modular warhead design in the 60 to 120 kilogram range, radar-absorbent materials, and inertial plus GPS navigation Wikipedia — Fire Point FP-1. Ukraine has scaled production to over 100 units per day by mid-2025, with more than 5,000 manufactured total, according to UNITED24 Media sourcing UNITED24 Media. The platform is designed to be produced quickly, in volume, and to be inexpensive enough that shooting it down is economically painful for the defender even when the shoot-down succeeds.

That is the actual story. Not whether a building in Moscow was damaged — it was, on floor 36 Moscow Times — but that the cost curve underlying modern air defense has been broken, and the implications of that are not limited to Ukraine.

The 130-site air defense network around Moscow is the hardest air defense problem in the world. Dense, layered, expensive, operated by a state that treats the capital as a non-negotiable priority. If three drones can slip through that grid three nights in a row, the question every air defense planner in the world has to answer is: what does this mean for my system?

The answer is uncomfortable. Ukraine is not using exotic technology. The FP-1 is built from commercial components and industrial manufacturing. The capability gap that allows it to reach Moscow is not a software breakthrough or a stealth innovation — it is the simple mathematics of cost exchange, applied at scale. Any state or non-state actor with the ability to produce drones at industrial scale and launch them in quantity faces an attacker with a fundamentally different cost structure than the defender. This is the same dynamic that made the machine gun devastating against massed infantry charges, or that made improvised explosive devices effective against armored convoys. A technology becomes strategically significant not when it is sophisticated but when it is cheap enough and widespread enough that defensive economics cannot absorb the cost of stopping it.

The practical consequences are already visible. Defense procurement conversations in NATO capitals and across Asia are shifting as military planners absorb what the Moscow strikes demonstrate: the current generation of air defense architecture was designed around threats that cost millions of dollars per incident to address. A $10,000 drone that does not need to be stealthy, does not need to be fast, and does not need to survive multiple hits — only to arrive in sufficient numbers — breaks that architecture.

Moscow's air defense did not fail because it was incompetent or underfunded. It failed because the problem it was built to solve — expensive, infrequent, high-value threats — is not the problem it now faces. Three drones got through three nights in a row. The next question is how many other air defense networks built on the same assumptions face the same arithmetic.