Geran-3

Russia's jet-powered evolution of the Shahed one-way attack drone — a turbojet engine, higher speed, and jam-resistant navigation designed to overwhelm mobile air defenses, now in experimental combat over Ukraine.

Overview

The Geran-3 (Герань-3) is a turbojet-driven one-way attack drone that brings a step-change in speed and survivability to Russia's family of Shahed-derived loitering munitions. Where the ubiquitous propeller-driven Geran-2 (Shahed-136) cruised at barely 180 km/h, the Geran-3 strikes at 300–370 km/h in its combat phase, compressing air-defense reaction times and forcing defenders to expend costly missiles rather than machine guns. The type is a cost-reduced Russian localization of the Iranian Shahed-238, built at the JSC Alabuga special economic zone and first encountered in Ukraine in mid-2025. By spring 2026 it was still employed at experimental scale — around 10–12 airframes a night — but Moscow’s declared goal is to make jet-powered Gerans half of a projected 110,000-drone annual output.

Development

Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps unveiled the turbojet-powered Shahed-238 in November 2023, displaying three guidance variants — inertial/satnav, electro-optical, and anti-radiation — and claiming speeds around 500 km/h from a Toloue-10/13 micro-turbojet. Leaked documents from the Alabuga enterprise show Russian evaluators examined the jet prototype as early as April 2023, but Moscow initially balked at an asking price of up to $1.4 million per unit and stuck with the cheap piston-prop Geran-2.

The concept was revived domestically in 2024-2025. Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence (DIU) reported in February 2025 that Russia was setting up Geran-3 production at Alabuga, and the first wreckage appeared in Ukraine in early June 2025. A Defense Express analysis of the airframe that struck Kyiv on the night of 12 June identified it as a Russian-built Geran-3, distinguishable by its Shahed-family avionics panel and a compact jet engine. A detailed DIU teardown published on the War&Sanctions platform in September 2025 revealed a deliberately crude localization: an unshrouded Chinese Telefly JT80 turbojet bolted externally onto an airframe that otherwise mirrored the Geran-2, and a navigation suite carried over from the propeller version.

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