Drone Attacks: International Law, Civilian Harm, and Ukraine

A drone attack is a strike carried out by an unmanned aircraft, either a reusable armed drone that fires missiles or an expendable drone that flies itself into a target and detonates. Once a niche American counterterrorism tool used against al-Qaeda in Pakistan, drone attacks have become a defining feature of armed conflict worldwide, with strikes rising by 4,000% between 2020 and 2024.¹ They dominate the fighting in Ukraine, drive the confrontation between the United States and Iran, threaten Red Sea shipping, and remain the subject of unresolved arguments about civilian harm, sovereignty, and who, if anyone, is accountable when something goes wrong.

The Weapons Behind the Headlines

News coverage lumps very different aircraft under the same label. Three categories account for almost everything a reader will see.

The first is the UCAV, or Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle. These are large, reusable, missile-carrying aircraft such as the U.S. Predator and Reaper, and they have been the backbone of American counterterrorism operations for two decades.²

The second is the one-way attack drone, also called a loitering munition. These are expendable aircraft with built-in warheads that detonate on impact, functioning closer to a guided missile than a plane. Sizes range from hand-carried micro systems to aircraft over 300 pounds. The concept dates to a 1973 DARPA project, but modern versions, including the Iranian Shahed-136 and the U.S. LUCAS system, have become central to current conflicts. The Vertical Flight Society has identified more than 210 types. The U.S. Pentagon requested roughly $622 million for one-way attack drone programs in its fiscal year 2024 budget, an 85% increase over the prior year.³ The logic driving that spending is what analysts call “precise mass”: the affordability and quantity of drones combined with precision that used to require expensive cruise missiles.

The third is the FPV, or First-Person View drone. These are small, cheap aircraft often built from commercial parts for a few hundred dollars. An operator flies one using video goggles, steering it directly into a vehicle, trench, or soldier. In parts of Ukraine, FPVs are believed to cause 60% to 70% of front-line casualties.²

What International Law Says About Drone Attacks

There is no treaty specifically on armed drones. The International Committee of the Red Cross said in 2014 that drones have no inherent features preventing operators from complying with existing laws of war.⁴ The rules that apply come from three bodies of law: the rules on when a state may use force, international humanitarian law during armed conflict, and international human rights law.

When a State May Strike at All

The UN Charter’s Article 2(4) generally prohibits the use of force between states. There are two recognized exceptions: authorization by the Security Council under Chapter VII, and the inherent right of self-defense under Article 51 when an armed attack occurs.⁵ After September 11, Security Council Resolutions 1368 and 1373 called terrorism a threat to international peace and reaffirmed the right of self-defense, which the United States has cited as legal ground for its counterterrorism strikes.

The harder question is how far those justifications reach. The U.S. government maintains that it is in a continuing armed conflict with al-Qaeda and “associated forces” that is not tied to any particular territory. Many international legal scholars and European institutions reject that framing, arguing that armed conflict requires specific thresholds of organization and concentrated hostilities within defined zones.⁵ The U.S. also says it strikes inside other sovereign states only with consent or when a state is “unwilling and unable” to act against a threat. Critics note that neither the criteria for valid consent nor the “unwilling or unable” standard have been transparently defined.

The Rules During an Armed Conflict

When a strike does occur inside an armed conflict, three core rules apply, as described by the ICRC.⁶ Distinction requires that attacks only be directed at combatants and military objectives, with civilians presumed civilian in doubtful cases; directly targeting civilians is a war crime. Proportionality prohibits attacks whose expected civilian harm would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.⁷ Precaution requires all feasible steps to avoid or minimize civilian harm, including canceling a strike when there is doubt about a target’s military status.

Technology complicates all three. Research by Professor Shiri Krebs of Deakin University has found that aerial video from drones does not remove cognitive bias but moves it into the “space of image interpretation,” where operators can misread civilians as combatants.⁴ FPVs add their own problem. Their poor image quality makes it hard for an operator to tell a lawful target from an unlawful one, or to judge proportionality accurately.⁶

Targeted Killing and the Citizen Problem

The killing of a specific named person is the most legally exposed use of a drone, especially when the target holds citizenship in the striking state. Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen and alleged senior leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, was approved for targeted killing by the National Security Council in May 2010 and killed by a drone strike in Yemen in September 2011.⁸

Al-Awlaki’s father challenged the kill order in federal court before the strike; the court sided with executive authority.⁸ In June 2014, the Second Circuit ordered the release of a redacted Office of Legal Counsel memorandum laying out the legal reasoning for the killing. Attorney General Eric Holder later acknowledged that four U.S. citizens had been killed in drone strikes since 2009.⁹

The constitutional question is whether the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee that no person shall “be deprived of Life… without due process of law” requires judicial review before a citizen is targeted, or whether internal executive review is enough. Some scholars have proposed a FISA-style court to review targeted killing orders; others have argued Congress should either prohibit the practice or build a formal oversight mechanism.⁸ The U.S. government has maintained that capture and criminal prosecution remain options when feasible, as shown by the 2014 federal conviction of Osama bin Laden’s son-in-law, Sulaiman Abu Ghaith.⁹

Civilian Casualties and the Numbers Gap

Casualty counts are contested. Estimates from U.S. counterterrorism strikes suggest roughly 3,500 deaths across about 300 strikes, including 300 to 400 civilians, though figures vary widely by source.⁹ Airwars, an independent monitoring organization, estimates a minimum of 22,000 civilians killed by U.S. airstrikes since the War on Terror began in 2001, counting both drone and manned aircraft operations.¹⁰

The distance between official and independent counts is wide. In July 2016, the U.S. government reported killing between 64 and 116 “non-combatants” in 473 counterterrorism strikes from January 2009 through the end of 2015. Airwars and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism recorded a civilian range of 380 to 801 for the same period.¹⁰ In 2020, the Department of Defense reported 85 civilian deaths but paid zero dollars in compensation, despite a $3 million budget for that purpose.⁷

A 2020 UN Special Rapporteur report rejected the idea of “surgical strikes,” citing evidence that drone strikes in Afghanistan between 2010 and 2011 were ten times more likely to cause civilian casualties than conventional air attacks.¹¹ The same report documented the psychological toll on populations living under persistent drone surveillance, including post-traumatic stress disorder and disruption of daily life.

UN scrutiny has been sustained. Special Rapporteur Ben Emmerson reviewed dozens of strikes between 2001 and 2013 across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Iraq, Somalia, and Palestine, and identified what he called an “accountability vacuum.” A 2014 follow-up analyzed 37 specific strikes and found plausible indications of civilian deaths or life-threatening injuries in 30 of them.¹² Special Rapporteur Agnès Callamard reported in 2020 that at least 102 countries held active military drone inventories and about 40 possessed or were procuring armed drones, and projected that over 40% of all drones would be armed within a decade.¹¹

Ukraine: The Current Center of the Drone War

The war in Ukraine has produced the most intensive use of drone attacks in any conflict to date, on both sides and at an industrial scale.

Russia’s Shahed Campaign

Russia launched 54,538 Shahed-type drones against Ukraine in 2025, of which roughly 32,200 were strike-capable variants.¹³ From September 2024 onward, Russia raised its launch rate from about 200 per week to over 1,000 per week by March 2025.¹⁴ Successful hits reached roughly 110 per week, nearly ten times the previous year’s average, even with interception rates often above 75%.

Originally Iranian-designed, Shaheds are now mass-produced inside Russia at facilities including the IEMZ Kupol and Alabuga plants, using smuggled Western electronics and about 200 distinct Chinese-made components, among them engines and onboard computers. Each drone costs roughly $20,000 to $50,000, forcing Ukraine to spend expensive Western interceptors on cheap expendable aircraft. Newer Russian variants include the jet-powered Shahed-238 capable of 550 to 600 km/h, the Geran-3 with a 2,500-kilometer range, and the Garpiya-3, a long-range system reportedly manufactured in China for Russian use.¹⁴ By mid-summer 2025, Russian forces were using “Wolfpack” tactics that combined strike and decoy drones to saturate air defenses.¹³

The strikes have hit energy sites, industrial plants, and residential areas in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa, and other cities, with some drone trajectories extending into Moldova, Romania, and Poland.¹³ Russia has also been found adding tungsten balls and toxic chemicals to some Shahed components to maximize civilian harm.¹⁴

FPVs Against Civilians

A June 2025 UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission report found that FPV drones had become a “leading cause of civilian death and injury in Ukraine,” in some months surpassing missiles, artillery, and aerial bombs. Despite their high-resolution cameras, the report documented FPV strikes on people not taking part in hostilities — cyclists, private cars and buses, ambulances, humanitarian delivery teams, and residents on their own property. The UN assessed that some incidents may amount to “intentionally directing attacks against civilians, a war crime.”¹⁵

Ukrainian Strikes Into Russia

Ukraine has built a large domestic drone industry to return fire. Annual production grew from 800,000 drones in 2023 to 2.2 million in 2024 and at least 4 million in 2025, with a target of 7 million for 2026.¹⁶ One startup, Fire Point, went from producing 30 drones a month in 2023 to roughly 100 “deep-strike” drones a day. Its FP-1 drone, which can travel up to 1,600 kilometers and costs $55,000, is reportedly responsible for 60% of deep strikes inside Russian territory.¹⁷

On June 18, 2026, Ukraine launched a drone attack on Gazprom’s Moscow Refinery, blowing the lid off a storage tank and causing a large explosion. Experts described it as the “most interesting development over the past year” and cited it as evidence of Ukraine’s growing long-range capability.¹⁸ Intensified Ukrainian strikes on Russian-occupied Crimea have contributed to what analysts call the region’s worst fuel crisis in a long time.

U.S. Counterterrorism Drone Campaigns

The United States pioneered armed drone use for counterterrorism, beginning with strikes in Pakistan’s tribal regions in June 2004.¹⁹ The Obama administration codified standards requiring “near-certainty” that no civilians would be killed and limiting lethal force to individuals posing a “continuing, imminent threat” when capture was not feasible.²⁰ Under the first Trump administration, Somalia was partially designated an “area of active hostilities” in 2017, giving the military greater latitude and more than doubling strike frequency compared with the Obama era.²¹

On January 28, 2025, President Trump issued a directive reverting to his first-term rules of engagement and delegating strike authority away from the White House to combatant commanders.²² The administration conducted 126 counterterrorism operations against al-Shabaab and ISIS-Somalia in 2025, reportedly killing nearly 200 militants.²³

Congressional oversight has been constrained by classification and institutional fragmentation. Information is often compartmented under different classification regimes, meaning no single member of Congress or committee has full visibility across all platforms, strikes, and theaters.²⁴ The 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force remains the primary legal basis invoked by four consecutive presidents for drone strikes worldwide.²⁵ The FY2018 National Defense Authorization Act added structure: the president must submit a report to Congress detailing the legal, factual, and policy justifications for using military force, and must update Congress within 30 days of any changes to strike policies outside areas of active hostilities. The same law requires annual reports on civilian casualties, including date, location, operation type, and casualty assessments.²⁶

Drones in the U.S.–Iran Confrontation

On February 28, 2026, U.S. Central Command launched Operation Epic Fury, a large-scale campaign against Iran that included the first combat use of the LUCAS one-way attack drone.²⁷ LUCAS is a reverse-engineered American variant of the Iranian Shahed-136, deployed in numbers to saturate Iranian air defenses so higher-end munitions could get through.²⁸ By April 6, 2026, the operation had struck over 13,000 targets and damaged or destroyed more than 155 Iranian vessels.²⁹

A ceasefire memorandum of understanding was signed around June 17, 2026, with terms including the end of the U.S. naval blockade within 30 days, Iranian commitments to safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz, a $300 billion U.S.-backed reconstruction plan, and an Iranian reaffirmation of its non-nuclear weapons stance.³⁰ The deal collapsed quickly. On June 25, Iran launched drones at commercial ships exiting the Strait of Hormuz. The U.S. intercepted three of four drones and on June 26 struck Iranian missile and drone storage sites and coastal radar, calling the attacks a “foolish violation of our Ceasefire Agreement.”³¹ A senior Iranian parliamentary official described Iran’s actions as “ceasefire management.”³²

Iran retaliated on June 27–28, 2026, with ballistic missiles and drones aimed at the Ali Al Salem airbase in Kuwait and the Fifth Naval Fleet at Port Salman in Bahrain.³³ The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claimed to have “destroyed eight important US military facilities.” U.S. officials reported no casualties or major damage. A residential building near Bahrain’s international airport was damaged by an Iranian drone.³⁴

Houthi Attacks on Red Sea Shipping

Since November 19, 2023, when Houthi forces seized the cargo ship Galaxy Leader, more than 100 merchant vessels have been targeted in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. Four ships have been sunk, one seized, and at least eight seafarers killed. The effect on trade has been severe. Suez Canal traffic, which previously handled about 80 containerships per week, dropped to 26 per week by mid-January 2026. Major carriers such as Maersk rerouted around the Cape of Good Hope, adding 10 to 14 days to voyages and driving up fuel costs.³⁵

After a period of relative calm from November 2025 through late February 2026, Houthi officials announced they would restart missile and drone operations against maritime traffic in response to U.S.–Israeli strikes on Iran. War-risk insurance premiums in the Strait of Hormuz area surged from roughly 0.10% to 2%–3% of vessel value, and spot shipping rates from the Middle East to Asia nearly tripled.³⁶ The European Union’s Operation ASPIDES continues to run a naval presence in the corridor, with warships escorting commercial vessels.³⁵

Chinese Components in the Drone Supply Chain

Chinese-manufactured parts have proven critical to Russia’s ability to sustain its drone campaign. In October 2024, the U.S. Treasury Department imposed the first sanctions on Chinese entities for directly developing and producing complete weapons systems in partnership with Russian defense firms. The sanctioned entities included Xiamen Limbach Aircraft Engine Co., which produces the L550E engine used in the Garpiya drone, and Redlepus Vector Industry Shenzhen Co Ltd, which acts as a procurement intermediary.³⁷ According to Treasury, the Garpiya drones are designed by Chinese experts and produced at Chinese factories before being transferred to Russia for use in Ukraine.³⁸

Enforcement is another matter. Reporting has found that other Chinese companies continued offering Limbach L550 engines, a component the U.S. has barred for sale to Iran and Russia, and marketed them alongside images of Shahed-style drones.³⁹ China officially denies supplying weapons to Russia.

Autonomous Weapons and the Next Round of Rules

The next frontier is lethal autonomous weapons systems, which can select and engage targets without human intervention. UN Secretary-General António Guterres has called such systems “politically unacceptable and morally repugnant” and has recommended that states conclude a legally binding instrument by 2026 to prohibit those that function without human control and regulate all others.⁴⁰

State positions fall into three camps. The United States, Russia, and Israel argue that existing international humanitarian law is sufficient and oppose new binding treaties. A group of “prohibitionist” states seeks a categorical ban. Most European states, including Austria, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, favor a two-tier approach that would ban systems deemed inherently unpredictable while regulating others.⁴¹

Negotiations run through the Group of Governmental Experts on LAWS under the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, whose mandate extends through 2026. Progress has been slow. The CCW’s consensus process lets any single state block outcomes, and the expert group has been described as trapped in a “cycle of substantive annual discussions without substantive outcomes.”⁴² General Assembly resolutions supporting regulation have drawn broad support, with 166 states backing the most recent one in December 2024, but a binding instrument remains out of reach as the technology continues to proliferate on the battlefield faster than diplomats can negotiate.

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