If you're flying in US airspace, yeah, absolutely. Part 107 strictly limits you to one drone per pilot. To run a swarm here, you have to get a specific waiver from the FAA proving you have solid collision avoidance algorithms and link fail-safes in place.

But the 800-drone deployments happening in Kharkiv right now are obviously a completely different animal. They operate entirely outside civilian frameworks. Because the local RF and GPS jamming is so extreme (often >85% attenuation), they can't rely on remote pilots or cloud links anyway. Instead, they use localized, offline edge-compute loops—mostly using STM32F7s and NVIDIA Jetsons running Model Predictive Control (MPC)—to handle the targeting and swarm coherence autonomously.