“Add to this strong electronic-warfare systems and hundreds of additional flying decoys—perhaps some equipped with towed decoys to keep enemy air-defenses busy and distract or confuse them—and that’s perfectly enough,” Cooper said. “As dramatically demonstrated in Libya, Syria and then in Azerbaijan in the last two years, the Russians simply have no means to seriously counter such a threat.”

The country has developed its own domestic drones and has used them to devastating effect in several recent military conflicts. The effectiveness of Turkey's Bayraktar TB2 drones and the Anka-S unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) was first demonstrated in Syria.

Back in the early 2010s when I first started playing with drones, I speculated in the FT that if I could own a drone, anyone could, and that this would have big implications for global politics. At that time, drone technology was largely controlled by the U.S. and Israel, but I noted that it was inevitable that it would spread widely and change the nature of interstate conflict.

That was the bloody lesson of both Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine, in which scout drones pinpointed Ukrainian armored vehicles for devastating rocket barrages, and Azerbaijan’s 2020 offensive in Nagorno-Karabakh, in which armed and kamikaze drones decimated Armenian armor.