This year, Putin said, Moscow wants to produce 1.4 million.This begs the question: How bad could it get for Ukraine?A chart showing how Russian drone strkes against Ukraine have surged in 2024 (Nizar al-Rifai/The Kyiv Independent)Ukraine's air defenses, bolstered by Western-supplied systems such as Patriot and NASAMS, have become highly effective at defending cities from Russian mass missile attacks.But due to the high price of missiles for such systems, which makes using them against relatively cheap drones highly inefficient, Ukraine developed, and relied on different methods to combat them."They have established an approach using mobile fire groups and a huge network of sensors of different types to detect and track these drones," Federico Borsari, a fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), told the Kyiv Independent.