Eric Schmidt: Russia has caught up with Ukraine in drone development pace

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has said that Russia has nearly eliminated Ukraine’s technological advantage in the drone war and is now improving its systems at roughly the same speed as Kyiv.

He made the remarks in an interview with the British magazine The Economist.

Schmidt is the founder of Project Eagle, a company developing Hornet drones for the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

“The assumption was always that Ukraine creates something new and Russia is big and slow. Something has changed. Russia is now improving at roughly the same speed as Ukraine, but it has far more resources,” Schmidt said.

As an example, he cited jet-powered Shaheds. According to him, it was initially expected that around 10% of such drones would be fitted with jet engines, but their share now exceeds half. Ukraine, meanwhile, does not yet have its own equivalent of a jet-powered Shahed.

Schmidt also mentioned receiving data about Russia’s plans to deploy up to 80,000 jet-powered Shaheds against Kyiv and other cities before the end of December, calling this a “serious problem.”

In addition, Schmidt said Russia has built a mesh network from Chinese components in which some drones can act as relays for others and transmit high-resolution images of targets. He also expects Russia’s Rassvet satellite network, an equivalent of Starlink, to appear in roughly a year. Once it is launched, blocking such communications will be virtually impossible, he believes.

Schmidt separately cited research based on a leak of internal memos, according to which Russia is already using Chinese AI models in making some military decisions. He added the caveat that he does not know how widely such technologies are used in practice.

In Schmidt’s assessment, Russia and Ukraine are currently developing the technologies of future wars, with the pace of innovation exceeding anything he observed during decades of work in the technology industry.

The publication had previously also cited a Ukrainian expert’s opinion on the Rassvet satellite network.