Ukraine's new mid-range strike drones are turning Russia's once-safe rear areas into new kill zones

Ukraine is using new drones to strike Russian rear areas once seen as safe.

The attacks are creating new logistics problems far behind the front.

Analysts say the campaign is helping Ukraine seize battlefield momentum.

Ukraine is using a new kind of drone to turn areas that Russian forces once considered safe into a new "kill zone," disrupting supplies, threatening its command posts, and making Moscow's war harder to sustain.

Drones have been central to Ukraine's fight against Russia's invasion . Short-range first-person-view (FPV) drones surveil and attack soldiers and weapons near the front, and long-range drones regularly hit military and oil targets hundreds of miles inside Russia.

Ukraine is now using new fixed-wing drones to hit a middle range it had not previously focused on: roughly 20 to 300 kilometers from the front lines. It's hitting Russian warehouses, vehicles, transport hubs, and command posts. A Ukrainian defense official said it's hammering Russia both practically and psychologically.

"Nowadays, we're fighting not at a distance of 5 to 10 kilometers or deep strikes, where this fight was going on for the last few years. Now, we're fighting for the middle strike zone, so drone zone between 50 and 150 kilometers," Taras Berezovets, head of the military cooperation department of Ukraine's Territorial Defense Forces, a branch of the armed forces, said this week at a drone summit held in Latvia.

This mid-range strike capability is "very crucial for one simple reason," he said. Russia had assessed this range to be a relatively "safe area." Berezovets explained that it creates problems for Russia "from a psychological point of view," because "the area which they considered to be safe now is a new kill zone."