HAPS Missions into Russia: 77 Alerts, Mapped
An open-source map of HAPS alerts over Russia, aggregated from open Russian sources.
This is an open-source map of aerostat and balloon alerts over Russia. Russian air-threat monitoring constantly reports incoming objects — overwhelmingly drones and missiles — and aerostat and balloon alerts are only a small fraction of that traffic. We aggregated those alerts from open Russian sources over twelve months and plotted each one.
These are only the cases that surfaced in open sources. The real number is far higher.
Across that period there are 77 alerts, from September 2025 to May 2026. Mapped together, they show what isn’t visible alert by alert: objects entering over the frontline oblasts (Bryansk, Kursk, Rostov) and drifting east with the wind, reaching Tatarstan, Mari El, Kirov, and Perm Krai — about 1,700 km from the border — and south to Krasnodar, Sochi, and Crimea.
They are not all the same thing. Many are cheap balloons with corner reflectors — decoys meant to be detected and draw air-defense fire. A smaller share are capable HAPS carrying strike drones or communications relays over long distances, reported with suspended payloads at high altitude.
For operational-security reasons we won’t discuss specific missions — this is open-source aggregation only.
The takeaway is bigger than this map: HAPS are becoming an integral part of modern deep-strike campaigns — and not only in this war. NATO armies are testing the same class of platforms in exercise after exercise.
