“She had been calling her friends and relatives, telling them there was a Shahed nearby,” Andrusyk, 40, said of her colleague. “She was too busy warning others to have the time to make it to the corridor herself.”

Since the start of this year, Moscow has escalated its air war to unprecedented levels. After quieter periods over the past two years, Ukrainians are once again spending the night in bomb shelters, like they did in 2022, and waking to the sight of smoke drifting across the skylines of their cities. To make matters worse, Washington has paused shipments of the munitions needed by Ukraine to defend its skies.

The Shahed, the long-range suicide drone that obliterated the Andrusyks’ home, is in some ways not a sophisticated weapon. Fitted with a wooden propeller and held together by glue, it is the poor relation to Moscow’s formidable arsenal of ballistic and cruise missiles.

While a Kinzhal missile — which Russia has also fired into Ukraine — can reach speeds of up to 7,680mph, the Shahed typically trundles through the sky at little more than 100mph.

And yet over the past year, the Shahed has come to form the spearhead of Russia’s nightly campaign of terror against Ukraine’s civilian population and infrastructure, a low-cost and plentiful weapon designed to wear down defences and break public morale.

Last summer, Russia launched an average 350 Shaheds per month. In June this year it launched 5,438, of which between 15 and 20 per cent reached their target; the rest were either shot down or had their navigation signal jammed.

Kyiv suffered its deadliest aerial assault of the war on June 17, with 30 people killed and 172 injured in the course of an attack that lasted nine hours. Over the night, 539 Shaheds were launched at Ukraine.

The drone’s distinctive whirring noise, similar to the sound of a moped or a hedge-trimmer, is by now well known to nearly every Ukrainian. It is undoubtedly what saved the lives of the Andrusyks. It is also a part of what makes the Shahed such an effective weapon of psychological warfare.

“Last year, we had ballistic missiles falling on us,” said Andrusyk. “But with a ballistic it’s so fast you don’t even have the time to be scared. Now, with these Shaheds, you can hear them, you know they are coming, but you don’t know where they will land — and that is far more terrifying.”

The current level of Shahed launches is the culmination of a two-year programme by Moscow of rapid industrial development, with help from its friends. The drones that kill Ukrainian civilians on a weekly basis were originally designed in Iran, are equipped with components from China and, according to reports, are to be assembled by labourers from North Korea.

Collectively referred to sometimes as the “axis of autocracies” or the Crinks — China, Russia, Iran, North Korea — these four nations, loosely aligned by their antipathy towards the West, have grown closer over the course of the war in Ukraine. In exchange for intelligence, oil and aircraft, Moscow has received from its partners essential support in resisting the West’s military and economic pressures.

The latest Shaheds are a product of that collaboration. First developed more than a decade ago in Iran, the drones came to the attention of military watchers in 2019, when Houthi rebels attacked Saudi oil facilities using a previously unknown weapon provided to them by Tehran.

In the summer of 2022 they arrived in Ukraine.

Having initially purchased Shaheds from Iran, the following year Russia in effect bought the franchise in a deal estimated to be worth $2 billion and set up a production line of its own at the Alabuga industrial complex in Tartarstan, 600 miles east of Moscow.

Since then, Russia has modified the Shahed several times over. Rechristened Geran — “geranium” in Russian — current models retain the original delta-wing shape but now carry small tungsten-alloy balls designed to disperse on impact, causing greater damage. Improvements to the engine and airframe have also enabled them to carry larger warheads of up to 90kg.

Colonel Yurii Ihnat, spokesman for Ukraine’s Air Force Command, said that recent models have also been found to be carrying Starlink and Ukrainian Sim cards allowing them to connect to local mobile data networks, providing continuous communication with an operator able to help them evade air defence systems. The Russians are also increasingly making use of decoy drones to draw fire away from weaponised ones. “They are evolving these drones all the time,” Ihnat said.

In the original Shahed design Iran provided to Russia, more than 90 per cent of the electrical components were manufactured in the West. Initially, Moscow imported these through third-country trading, allowing them to get around sanctions. Now it simply obtains many of those components from China.

The drone’s four-cylinder engine, for example, is made by a Chinese company, Xiamen Limbach. Transceivers, signal generators and converters are manufactured by the Beijing Microelectronics Technology Institute.

However, the supply of humans needed to assemble these components remains a difficulty. “Workers only stay for two to three months because some of the materials that they use are very toxic and people become unwell,” a Ukrainian military intelligence source said. “They constantly need to recruit more people. We see advertisements in every corner of Russia and the occupied territories of Ukraine.”

They look further afield, too. When in April Ukrainian drones attacked the Alabuga site, several African women were reported to have been injured. Now Russia is reportedly turning to North Korea for help. According to NHK, the Japanese public broadcaster, Kim Jong-un is to send up to 25,000 North Koreans to work at Alabuga.

Over the course of two years Russia has developed a template for making cheap and effective aerial weapons at scale. “Now they have this blueprint they have the potential to produce massively,” said Yasir Atalan, a data fellow at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.

He estimates that Russia’s military-industrial machine is churning out more than 6,000 Shaheds per month, up from 1,000 last year. By the end of this year it could be producing as many as 10,000 drones a month, he says.

For the air defence teams whose job it is to shoot them down, that is an unnerving prospect.

Mykola Misechko spends his days presiding over courts as a judge in Kyiv. He spends his nights roving around the outskirts of the city with a radar and a heavy machinegun as a member of a volunteer air defence crew.

In recent weeks he has seen the drones not only becoming more numerous but also faster and more elusive, some reaching speeds of 250mph. Volunteers have been working flat out, chasing Shaheds from dusk until dawn. He yearns for more sleep, he says.

“But we’ll keep doing what we do,” said Misechko, 45, whose call sign, aptly, is Moon. “When you shoot down a drone, it is an immense feeling, because you know that what you’ve done could have just saved someone’s life. And you never know where they are flying to. One of them could be heading for your home, your family.”

Additional reporting by Viktoria Sybir