Gerbera

Low-cost multi-purpose Russian drone — a Shahed-136 lookalike that serves as a saturation decoy, one-way attacker, scout and signal relay — built to impose ruinous economics on air defenses and inflate raid size at extreme cost asymmetry.

Overview

The Gerbera (Russian: Гербера) is a small, cheap unmanned aerial vehicle that emerged over Ukraine in mid-2024 and quickly became a signature element of Russia’s mass-drone campaign. Its defining pitch is economic: an airframe built from plywood, painted foam and mostly imported components that costs roughly $10,000 per unit, yet forces Ukraine to expend missiles, gun ammunition or dedicated interceptor drones on every track, because defenders cannot know which incoming airframe is armed. The drone mimics the visual and radar signature of the much larger Shahed-136/Geran-2 family, deliberately inflating the apparent size of strike packages and drawing protective fire away from the true weaponised Gerans. As the conflict has widened, the Gerbera has also been sent across NATO borders, triggering the first air-to-air engagements of enemy drones over alliance territory.

Development

The Gerbera was first seen on the battlefield at the end of July 2024, when an almost wholly intact example was recovered in the Kyiv region, according to The War Zone. Early Russian social-media material credited the Gastello Design Bureau and advertised three configurations — kamikaze, reconnaissance and decoy — suggesting an origin inside Russia. However, Ukraine’s Defence Intelligence (HUR) subsequently established that the airframe was designed by Chinese model-aircraft maker Skywalker Technology, which ships kits to the Alabuga Special Economic Zone in Tatarstan for final assembly by JSC Alabuga, the same industrial hub that licence-builds the Shahed-136 as the Geran-2 Kyiv Independent. The Gerbera does not appear in Skywalker’s public catalogue, indicating a bespoke Russian contract. By late 2024 the Institute for Science and International Security assessed that Alabuga could produce up to 50 Gerberas a day, and a teardown confirmed its chiefly Western and Chinese electronics with no Russian-origin chips ISIS. Continuous incremental upgrades — better cameras, mesh-network modems, supplemental fuel bladders and progressively more capable anti-jam antenna arrays — followed through May 2026.

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