- Russia will reject flight plans from October 1 for civilian drones over 250 grams that are not connected to its ERA-GLONASS tracking system
- ERA-GLONASS is Russia's eCall-style emergency telematics platform that effectively functions as a clearinghouse for tracker data
- Officials are pitching the system as a way to lift regional drone bans, yet Moscow-area and St. Petersburg restrictions remain in force for now
From October 1 2026, Russia will stop accepting flight plans for civilian drones that are not hooked up to ERA-GLONASS, the state telematics platform that was previously best known for dispatching ambulances to car crashes.
The Ministry of Transport recently announced the change, stating "connection to ERA-GLONASS will become a prerequisite for submitting flight plans" to the State Air Traffic Management Corporation.
The requirement, which comes at a time when it continues to engage in an increasingly escalatory conflict with Ukraine, much of which involves drones of various shapes and sizes, applies to any drone that weighs more than 250 grams.
Not a new requirement altogether
The obligation itself is not new: since March 1 2026, aircraft have had to carry remote identification hardware that reports the drone, its owner, location, altitude, and route, under a government decree issued in Feb. 2026 (RU), which amended an earlier 2024 decree.
ERA-GLONASS, which functions as an emergency call system and is Russia's counterpart to the EU's eCall service, is not entirely new; it was officially commissioned in Jan. 2015 and has been mandatory since Jan. 2017 for all passenger and freight vehicles in the region.
It has since doubled as a state-owned clearinghouse for drone information, storing it and tracking them across the board. According to Rosaviatsia, it accepts feeds from cellular, satellite, and hybrid trackers, as well as ADS-B, and passes position, altitude, route, identification index, and aircraft category to supervisory agencies and bodies authorized to stop drone flights.
It is fairly ambitious in its own right; in January, JSC GLONASS chief executive Alexey Raikevich told TASS, after briefing Vladimir Putin at a Moscow unmanned-vehicle exhibition, that the system was ready to monitor up to 1 million civilian unmanned vehicles on land, on water, and in the air.
The ministry's own numbers are much more revealing: after seven months, 1,027 users are connected, comprising 752 organizations and 278 individuals, including 50 professional drone operators, and 1,205 drones are registered.
For context, deputy industry minister Vasily Shpak said Russia produced 16,398 civilian drones in 2024 alone. Not all of these will weigh over 250 grams or remain in civilian hands, and imported consumer drones are not counted here at all; the gap between drones in circulation and drones on the register appears wide.
The boldest claim about the system, however, is one that does not pass the smell test: In January, Transport Minister Andrey Nikitin said the system could forcibly stop a drone's movement if necessary, and at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in June 2025, Raikevich said supervisors would be able to "press a button and land all the drones in a given area."
This does not align with the requirements the Russian government's decree established, which describe a one-way data feed from the drone to monitoring services rather than a command link that would make such an approach possible.
There is a significant military aspect to this at a time when Ukraine has managed to hit Russian targets with drones launched into Russian airspace from the ground. The best example is also the one that ran Russia billions of dollars in military equipment: Operation Spiderweb.
Whether the million drone tracking claims hold up or the 'kill switch' is actually a functional design at some level in Russian-made drones or otherwise remains to be seen, but it does highlight a growing awareness at the state level of how lethal even a single unaccounted-for drone can be at a time when both Ukraine and Russia are targeting civillian and energy infrastructure as part of a long-drawn out drone-enabled war of attrition.
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