Gerbera (drone)
Based on Wikipedia: Gerbera (drone)
The Ten Thousand Dollar Decoy
In September 2025, something unprecedented happened over Poland. More than nineteen drones crossed into the airspace of a country protected by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, better known as NATO. Polish F-35 fighter jets scrambled to intercept them—the first time in the alliance's history that its aircraft engaged enemy targets over member territory.
Many of those drones were Gerberas.
The name sounds almost whimsical—Gerbera, like the cheerful daisy. But there's nothing cheerful about this Russian drone. Named after the flower (the Russian spelling is Гербера), it represents a new kind of weapon: cheap enough to lose by the hundreds, versatile enough to kill, spy, or simply waste your enemy's expensive missiles.
A Budget Shahed
To understand the Gerbera, you first need to understand what it's copying.
The Shahed-136 is an Iranian kamikaze drone that Russia began using extensively in its invasion of Ukraine. "Kamikaze" in military parlance means a one-way weapon—it flies to its target and explodes. The Shahed carries fifty kilograms of explosives, roughly a hundred and ten pounds, and newer variants pack ninety kilograms. It's devastating against infrastructure, able to knock out power stations and apartment buildings alike.
But the Shahed has a problem: it's expensive. Not by cruise missile standards, but expensive enough that losing dozens in a single night hurts.
Enter the Gerbera.
The Gerbera looks almost identical to a Shahed. Same distinctive cropped delta-wing shape, like an arrowhead. Same pusher propeller at the rear. Same general size, though the Gerbera is slightly smaller. From a distance, from a radar screen, they're nearly indistinguishable.
That's the point.
Plywood and Foam
Here's what makes the Gerbera remarkable: it's built like a hobbyist's project.
The internal frame is plywood. The body is polystyrene foam—the same material used in cheap coolers and packing materials. The engine is a sixty-cubic-centimeter unit from a Chinese company called Mile Hao Xiang Technology, available on Chinese marketplaces for around four hundred and fifty dollars. Some Gerberas use a slightly larger seventy-cubic-centimeter engine from another Chinese firm.
Ukrainian intelligence estimates the total production cost at around ten thousand dollars.
Compare that to the Shahed. While exact figures are classified, estimates typically place it in the range of twenty to fifty thousand dollars. The Gerbera costs a fraction of that.
This cost differential creates a brutal asymmetry. A single surface-to-air missile—the kind used by air defense systems—can cost anywhere from one hundred thousand to several million dollars. When a Ukrainian battery fires one at an incoming drone, they're hoping it's a Shahed, not a Gerbera. Shooting down a ten-thousand-dollar decoy with a million-dollar missile is a losing trade, repeated a hundred times over.
The Chinese Connection
Who actually builds the Gerbera? The answer reveals the murky networks of modern drone warfare.
Initial reports credited a Russian firm called Gastello Design Bureau. But Ukraine's Defense Intelligence service tells a different story. According to their investigation, the real developer is Skywalker Technology, a Chinese company.
The supply chain works like this: Skywalker assembles drone kits in China. These kits then ship to the Alabuga drone factory in Yelabuga, a city in Russia's Tatarstan region. At Alabuga, workers finalize the drones for military use.
Interestingly, you won't find the Gerbera in Skywalker Technology's product catalog. This suggests it wasn't an off-the-shelf design that Russia simply purchased. Instead, it appears to have been developed specifically under contract with the Russian government—a custom weapon built to Russian specifications but assembled with Chinese expertise.
The components inside come from around the world. Chips from Analog Devices and Texas Instruments, both American companies. Parts from NXP Semiconductors in the Netherlands. Components from STMicroelectronics and U-Blox, both Swiss firms. And additional parts from XLSEMI in China.
This global supply chain highlights the challenges of sanctions enforcement. Despite Western efforts to restrict Russia's access to military technology, components from multiple sanctioned countries end up inside these drones.
More Than a Decoy
The Gerbera started as a distraction. When it first appeared on Ukrainian battlefields in July 2024, its job was simple: look threatening, absorb missiles, let the real weapons get through.
But the drone has evolved.
Some Gerberas now carry cameras. Specifically, they've been spotted with a stabilized camera unit from a company called Topotek, along with a mesh network modem from Xingkay Tech. Together, these components cost about eighty-five hundred dollars—nearly as much as the rest of the drone.
That mesh network capability is particularly clever. Multiple drones can connect to each other, sharing data and relaying signals back to operators. Think of it like a chain of cell phone towers flying through the sky. If electronic warfare systems try to jam one drone, the others can route around the disruption. This makes the swarm harder to disable.
Some Gerberas carry explosives. Not the fifty or ninety kilograms of a full Shahed, but smaller charges—up to five kilograms, about eleven pounds. That's enough to destroy a vehicle, damage a building, or kill anyone nearby. In April 2025, the first confirmed case of a Gerbera conducting a direct tactical strike was documented.
So the Gerbera now operates in three modes. As a decoy, saturating defenses with cheap targets. As a reconnaissance platform, watching and relaying intelligence. And as a kamikaze weapon, smaller than a Shahed but lethal nonetheless.
The Ukrainian Response
Ukraine has had to innovate rapidly to counter this threat.
Traditional air defense missiles are too expensive to waste on decoys. So Ukraine turned to a different solution: drone-on-drone warfare.
In October 2024, Ukraine began deploying interceptor drones developed by a non-profit organization called Wild Hornets. These "Sting" interceptors are first-person-view drones—essentially large racing quadcopters—piloted by operators wearing video goggles. The pilots fly their drones directly into incoming Gerberas, destroying both in the collision.
The math makes sense. A Sting interceptor costs around five thousand dollars. A Gerbera costs ten thousand. Every successful intercept destroys two drones, but the economics favor the defender.
By May 2025, one specialized unit—the Darknode unit of Ukraine's 412th Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Regiment—had used drones to intercept a hundred enemy aircraft. Seventy-six were Shaheds. Twenty-four were Gerberas.
A Ukrainian defense company called "General Chereshnya" has posted footage of its interceptor drones downing multiple Gerberas mid-air. The videos are striking: small quadcopters chasing delta-winged aircraft through the sky, then the flash of impact.
Operation False Target
Russia's strategy has a name: Operation False Target.
The numbers reveal its scale. In November 2024, Ukraine's Defense Intelligence reported that roughly half of all Russian drone launches were decoys—Gerberas and a similar drone called the Parodiya (the name literally means "parody"). At the Alabuga factory, about seventy-five percent of new production was going to these unarmed decoys.
The logic is straightforward. If you launch a hundred drones and only twenty-five carry real warheads, defenders must treat all hundred as threats. They exhaust their missiles, tire their crews, and create gaps for the armed drones to slip through.
It's an old military concept with new technology. During World War Two, Allied forces created entire phantom armies from inflatable tanks and fake radio traffic to confuse German intelligence before the Normandy invasion. The principle is the same: make the enemy uncertain about what's real.
Crossing the Border
Which brings us to NATO airspace.
On July 10, 2025, something flew from Belarus into Lithuania. Initially authorities thought it was a Shahed. It crashed near the Šumskas border checkpoint, barely a kilometer from the Belarusian frontier. Lithuanian Prime Minister Gintautas Paluckas and the Speaker of Parliament were taken to shelters as a precaution.
The wreckage revealed a Gerbera.
Eighteen days later, it happened again. Another aircraft entered from Belarus, triggering a large-scale emergency alert across Lithuania. This time the drone flew much farther, crashing nearly a hundred kilometers inside the country—at the Gaižiūnai military training area.
That detail raised eyebrows. Landing at a military facility could be coincidence. Or it could be reconnaissance.
This second drone carried two kilograms of explosives.
The Lithuanian government summoned the Belarusian embassy representative to demand explanations. Military analyst Egidijus Papečkys suggested the incursions were most likely accidents—drones that lost their way or their guidance. But Mindaugas Sinkevičius, interim leader of Lithuania's ruling Social Democratic Party, called them "likely intentional provocations."
Lithuanian diplomat Eitvydas Bajarūnas went further, framing the incidents as hybrid warfare—a term for attacks that stay below the threshold of conventional military conflict. The idea is to probe, test responses, sow confusion, and assert presence without triggering Article Five of the NATO treaty, which commits all members to defend any member under attack.
Defense Minister Dovilė Šakalienė offered a more measured assessment. The leading theory, she said, was that Ukrainian electronic warfare systems had disoriented the drones, sending them careening off course into Lithuanian territory. But the investigation continued.
The Polish Incursion
Then came September 9, 2025.
More than nineteen drones crossed into Polish airspace from the east. F-35 Lightning II jets—America's most advanced stealth fighters, which Poland had recently acquired—scrambled to intercept. For the first time, NATO aircraft engaged hostile targets over NATO soil.
Two analysts quoted by BBC Verify concluded that the scale of the incursion suggested deliberate action. Nineteen-plus drones don't accidentally wander across a border simultaneously.
If they're right, it represents a significant escalation. Not an invasion—NATO wouldn't go to war over drone incursions—but a message. Russia demonstrating that it can reach into NATO territory. That the alliance's airspace isn't inviolable. That cheap drones can slip past expensive defenses.
The Economics of Modern Warfare
The Gerbera embodies a broader shift in military thinking.
For decades, Western defense strategy centered on technological superiority. Better sensors, smarter missiles, stealthier aircraft. One American fighter jet could defeat five enemy fighters. One precision-guided bomb could destroy a target that previously required dozens of unguided munitions.
Quality over quantity.
The Gerbera inverts this. It accepts that it won't survive. It accepts that it won't hit hard. But it forces opponents to spend more defeating it than it cost to build. It clogs radar screens, exhausts missile stocks, tires air defense crews. And occasionally, one gets through carrying five kilograms of explosives.
This isn't new in warfare. Medieval armies used peasant levies to absorb arrows meant for knights. World War One generals sent waves of infantry against machine guns. The principle of attrition—wearing down the enemy through accumulated losses—is ancient.
What's new is automation. A Gerbera doesn't need a pilot willing to die. It's a flying robot, guided by GPS and mesh networks, carrying a payload that might be a camera, might be a warhead, might be nothing but foam and plywood. Build enough of them and launch them in waves, and eventually something gets through.
The Warning from Moldova
For Moldova, wedged between Ukraine and NATO member Romania, these developments carry particular weight.
The country has repeatedly dealt with drones and missiles violating its airspace during the war next door. Each incident raises the same questions Lithuania now faces. Accident or provocation? Electronic warfare interference or deliberate reconnaissance? And most pressingly: what happens when one of these drones hits something?
The Gerbera represents this uncertainty in physical form. A weapon that might be armed or might not. A reconnaissance platform or a decoy. A test of responses or a genuine attack. Its ambiguity is a feature, not a bug—keeping defenders uncertain, forcing them to treat every contact as potentially lethal.
This is the new shape of air warfare in Eastern Europe. Not sleek fighter jets dueling above the clouds, but swarms of cheap drones probing, watching, occasionally striking. Some carry cameras. Some carry bombs. Some carry nothing at all.
And distinguishing between them, before they reach their targets, has become one of the war's central challenges.