OPINION | Moscow’s warning: The drone threat India cannot afford to read as someone else’s war

On 18 June, Ukraine launched its largest drone attack on Moscow in years, striking the Moscow Oil Refinery in the city’s Kapotnya district for the second time within a week. Black smoke hung over the capital for hours, four Moscow airports suspended flights, a shopping centre and an apartment building caught fire, and 17 people were wounded by falling debris. Russia’s ministry of defence said its air defences destroyed hundreds of drones overnight, including some which were intercepted as they approached the capital itself. None of that mattered to the refinery, which burned anyway.

This is the uncomfortable arithmetic of contemporary drone warfare. Moscow sits behind one of the most heavily layered air defence networks in the world with long-range S-400 batteries, Pantsir close-in systems, dense electronic warfare cover, and a security establishment with four years of continuous wartime practice. The refinery still burned, for the second time in a week, because intercepting most of an attack is not the same as intercepting all of it. A handful of drones reaching their target is sufficient when the target has been chosen well.

The battle is won or lost in software, not the sky

The platforms involved are not stealthy. Long-range, fixed-wing attack drones carrying tens of kilograms of explosives are detectable by modern radar under normal conditions. What defeats the defender is volume and simultaneity, not invisibility. When dozens of drones approach from multiple directions at low altitude, exploiting terrain masking and ground clutter, the problem stops being whether the threat can be seen and becomes whether the defender can decide fast enough. Operators must separate real threats from decoys, allocate scarce interceptors, coordinate jamming, and do all of this under time pressure with a zero error rate. Saturation does not need to defeat every layer of a defence. It only needs to create enough confusion for a handful of drones to slip through, which is precisely what happened over Moscow.

Energy infrastructure is the target of choice

Ukraine’s choice of targets has been deliberate and consistent for over a year. Not air bases or government buildings, but the fuel and energy infrastructure that sustains a war economy. The cumulative effect is already visible in Russian regions, where reports point to fuel shortages and gas stations rationing sales, with one independent monitor estimating that roughly a quarter of stations have introduced some restriction. A single drone strike will rarely destroy a refinery outright, but it can sever a pipeline, disable a pumping station or ignite a distillation unit, enough to force a shutdown and impose costs wildly disproportionate to the price of the weapon used. The objective is disruption rather than destruction, and disruption is cheap to inflict and expensive to prevent.

This is not a distant war.  Pakistan has already rehearsed it

For Indian observers, the temptation is to treat Moscow as a European problem playing out 4,000 kilometres away. That temptation should be resisted, because Pakistan has already demonstrated the same intent, if not yet the same scale or persistence.

On the night of 8–9 May 2025, during the retaliatory phase that followed Operation Sindoor, Pakistan launched roughly 400 drones at 36 locations along the western border, from Leh to Sir Creek. India’s armed forces, using the Akashteer and IACCS networked air defence grid together with the Akash missile system and short-range guns, intercepted attacks at 26 of those locations. Among the platforms identified were Turkish-origin Asisguard Songar drones and Byker YIHA-III loitering munitions, some directed not at military stations but at densely populated areas around Amritsar. The intent to use volume to overwhelm a defended border, with civilian targets in proximity, was already visible in that single night.

That episode lasted hours, not weeks. Drone activity along the Line of Control and International Border has continued since, including reported sightings near Poonch and Samba as recently as January 2026, suggesting this is now an emerging pattern of activity, of probing and signalling rather than a one-off incident. What Moscow demonstrates is what happens when the same saturation logic is applied with sustained intent, longer-range platforms and deliberate targeting of energy infrastructure rather than border townships.  The possibility of such an evolution cannot be ruled out.

India’s western vulnerability belt

India’s western seaboard concentrates exactly the kind of infrastructure Ukrainian planners have been targeting in Russia, much of it within the range envelope already demonstrated by long-range drones in active conflicts:

• Major refineries and petrochemical complexes in Gujarat, including Jamnagar, are among the largest single-site refining complexes in the world.

• LNG import terminals and energy processing facilities along the Gujarat and Maharashtra coast.

• Strategic petroleum reserve storage.

• Container, energy and defence cargo ports, including Kandla, Mundra and Pipavav.

• Industrial corridors supporting manufacturing and logistics.

• Power generation and transmission infrastructure.

• Telecommunications backbones and data centres.

• Rail and freight hubs that would carry the logistics of military mobilisation in a crisis.

Many of these sites sit within 400 to 500 kilometres of the international border, a distance that, until recently, was assumed to provide meaningful warning time and operational depth. That assumption no longer holds. Drone range, autonomy and resilience to jamming are all improving faster than the defensive architecture built around the old assumption of geographic depth.

Increasingly, India's emerging semiconductor fabrication facilities, electronics manufacturing clusters, defence industrial corridors, drone manufacturing ecosystems, ammunition production centres, space-sector infrastructure and satellite ground-support facilities must also be viewed as components of critical national infrastructure. These assets represent future centres of strategic and economic power and may become attractive targets during periods of confrontation.

What India already has and where the gaps sit

India is not starting from zero, and Operation Sindoor demonstrated real capability. Indian armed forces networks, including the Akashteer, the Indian Army’s AI-enabled air defence control and reporting system, fused radar and sensor data with the Air Force’s IACCS into a single recognised air picture. Behind it sit the S-400 (three squadrons operational, with further deliveries underway), the Akash and MRSAM systems, DRDO’s D4 anti-drone suite combining jamming with laser and interceptor drone kills, and newer systems such as Bhargavastra, a low-cost micro missile platform built specifically against swarms. The SAKSHAM counter UAS grid, approved in 2025, is intended to extend this coverage further.
But that architecture was built, and tested, around defending military formations and forward areas during a short, intense crisis.

Moscow’s experience points to three gaps that India’s current posture has not yet closed. First, duration. A campaign measured in weeks, with repeated strikes on the same target, draws down interceptor stocks and operator endurance in a way a single night barrage does not. Second, civilian economic coverage. The sensor and kill chain density built around cantonments and military formations does not automatically extend to a privately operated refinery, port or LNG terminal, precisely where an adversary following Moscow’s logic would look. Third, the cost-exchange economics of using missile-grade interceptors against tens of low-cost drones is not sustainable at scale, which is why cheaper hard kill options such as the “L- 70” or Bhargavastra and laser-based systems need to extend from forward military zones to economic infrastructure as well.

Practical Steps: Lessons for five audiences

For the Military

• Extend Akashteer/IACCS sensor fusion and dedicated low altitude radar coverage to Gujarat’s refinery port belt and other designated economic infrastructure, not only cantonments and tactical formations.

• Build doctrine and interceptor stockpiles for sustained, multi-day saturation campaigns rather than single-night barrages. May 2025 was resolved in hours; Moscow’s campaign has run across weeks.

• Prioritise low-cost hard kill and electronic warfare options, Bhargavastra, laser-based directed energy weapons, jamming, missile-grade interceptors, massed Air Defence force with ground-based weapon systems like the Schilka or L70, wherever the threat is a swarm of cheap platforms, to correct the cost exchange imbalance.

• Run joint exercises that simulate coordinated, multi-axis strikes specifically on energy and port infrastructure, periodically.

For civil administration

• Formally designate refineries, major ports, power substations, LNG terminals and data centres as protected critical infrastructure with mandated minimum counter-drone coverage, on the model already used for civil aviation security.

• Build dedicated rapid response firefighting, hazardous materials and industrial-recovery capacity colocated with major energy assets, so a strike produces hours of disruption rather than days.

• Run district and state-level mock drills that simulate coordinated drone strikes on economic infrastructure, distinct from the single-site sabotage drills currently practised.

• Preposition alternate fuel logistics and supply routing so that a localised strike does not trigger the kind of panic buying and rationing now visible at Russian filling stations. Citizens are increasingly part of the national resilience architecture. Modern drone campaigns seek not only to damage infrastructure but also to generate uncertainty, panic and disruption. The effectiveness of a national response, therefore, depends not merely on military capability but also on public awareness and confidence.

For citizens

• Citizens should be familiar with official warning mechanisms, avoid amplifying unverified information on social media, follow local administrative advisories and maintain confidence in emergency response systems. Just as fire drills and disaster management exercises have become part of civic preparedness, periodic awareness programmes on drone-related contingencies may become necessary in the future. The objective is not to create fear. It is to build familiarity. A prepared population is inherently more resilient than a surprised one.

For planners and infrastructure operators

• Require counter drone readiness audits for private and public sector operators of refineries, terminals, ports and power plants, applying the same rigour to physical and aerial-threat resilience that is now expected of cybersecurity audits.

• Build redundancy into the siting and design of new energy and petrochemical assets, dispersed storage, hardened control rooms, and buried critical pipelines rather than relying solely on perimeter defence.

• Feed industrial monitoring and site sensor data into the national low-altitude surveillance grid, so early indicators of an approaching low-signature threat are not confined to military sensors alone.

For policymakers

• Institutionalise a national critical infrastructure protection architecture that fuses military, civil aviation, coastal and industrial sensor networks under a single decision support layer, closing the gap between defended military zones and undefended economic ones.

• Set mandatory minimum drone resilience standards for designated strategic infrastructure, with audit and enforcement mechanisms rather than voluntary guidance.

• Invest in indigenous mass production of low-cost counter-drone systems, extending the logic that has already produced Akashteer, D4 and Bhargavastra, so that cheap drones are met with cheap kills rather than expensive missiles.

• Treat rapid recovery as a deterrent in its own right.  An adversary that calculates a strike will be dealt with, and the facility restarted within hours has far less incentive to attempt one in the first place.

The larger lesson

The fires in Moscow are not simply a chapter in someone else’s war. They are a demonstration, in real time, of what happens when a saturation drone campaign is sustained against energy infrastructure rather than attempted once. Pakistan has already shown, on the night of 8–9 May 2025, that it is willing to attempt a version of this against India on a smaller scale, for one night, against a mix of military and civilian targets. The difference between that night and a Moscow-style campaign is not intent. It is scale, duration and choice of target. India’s defence establishment has built real and tested capability since then. The task now is to extend national preparedness beyond the border and the cantonment to the refinery, the port, the data centre, the semiconductor fabrication facility, the defence industrial corridor and the citizen. Future resilience will depend not only on the ability to intercept drones but on the ability of the nation to continue functioning effectively despite repeated attempts at disruption.

(Lt Gen M.U. Nair (Retired) is the former National Cyber Security Coordinator, Government of India, and a former Signal Officer in Chief, Indian Army.)

(The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of THE WEEK.)