Question in the Subject.
No one can know for sure, since that’s info likely Ukraine keeps privy, but sites like Ukraine’s Arms Monitor have quoted estimates of $40,000 to $60,000 per deep-strike drone. So we might be looking at something like $50 million for a barrage of 1,000 deep strike drones going in to hit St. Petersburg.
It should be noted, though, that that’s really, really cheap by warfare standards. The Block V Tomahawk missile made by the United States costs around $3 million each (per Google) and you’d only be able to launch a mere handful of them at Russia for the cost of Ukraine hitting with a thousand drones.
A single fighter jet these days can cost nearly double the price tag of 1,000 such drones combined in total.
We really need more vocabulary for unmanned vehicles. A “drone” can be anything from a hundred-dollar toy to a complete warplane with everything warplanes have except a pilot. Ukraine is making use of the full spectrum of these things, but of course they’re very different from each other.
It depends on the drone. The flamingo cruise missile costs $600,000. A quadcopter drone with a 20 mile range may only cost $1000.
Long range drones like the FP-1 are about 60k each.
a rough estimate, I’d assume about $100,000 per drone, so about 100 million to launch all those drones. However I’m sure Russia lost far more than 100 million trying to shoot them down and
in lost buildings.
I believe Ukraine spends about 60-80 billion a year on their military, and they get another 40-50 billion in military aid from NATO. So their total annual military budget is about 100-120 billion.
Sometimes Ukrainian operations will use multiple kinds of drones in concert, too. Like, you’ll have one big long-range winged drone to get to a target deep inside Russian territory, but then the payload it’s carrying is a bunch of smaller quadcopters each carrying a single grenade, to spread out and hit a bunch of smaller targets, like planes on a runway.