ODESA, June 8 -- The patrol boats had barely cleared the harbor when the drones found them. Two Ukrainian fast assault craft operating off the Odesa coast were struck and destroyed on June 6 by Russian Geran-2 loitering munitions, according to the Russian Defense Ministry, which released footage of the strikes. By the time the fires were visible from shore, the Black Sea's two-year strategic narrative had acquired a complication neither side had fully anticipated.

The Geran-2 was built to kill city power grids. Its Iranian ancestor, the Shahed-136, was designed for mass saturation strikes against fixed infrastructure - the kind of weapon you fire by the dozen into the dark and hope one finds a substation. Russia has used it that way thro...