In August, as Ukraine’s forces advanced into Kursk, supported by electronic warfare (EW) assets that rendered Russia’s conventional reconnaissance and attack drones impotent, Moscow unveiled what it claimed was a new fiber-optic controlled drone that was impervious to jamming.
Videos posted on social media on Aug. 12 and 18 purported to show what were claimed to be attacks on Ukrainian BTR-4 reconnaissance vehicles near the village of Giri using fiber-optic controlled first-person view (FPV) drones.
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It was not possible to confirm the location or source of the images, but they were of greater clarity and exhibited less interference and break up than is usual with the conventional imagery we are used to seeing on Telegram, suggesting they were indeed produced by a fiber-optic drone.
The drone was dubbed by pro-Kremlin milbloggers as the “Vandal Prince of Novgorod” and claimed it had been developed by the Ushkuynik Scientific and Production Center in Novgorod. Little was known about this enterprise other than the occasional mention in the Russian media as working on anti-drone high speed interceptors.
However, having analyzed images of the drone culled from Russian social media posts Serhii Beskrestnov, a Ukrainian radio technology expert and drone pilot specialist, who goes under the pseudonym Serhii Flash has questioned the origin of the “Vandals.” Images posted on Facebook include a close up of a label containing Chinese characters.
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Beskrestnov suggests that the drones in question remarkably resemble a Chinese commercial drone called Skywalker that is readily available through resellers for around $2,000. His assessment is supported by images of the Chinese model posted on X/Twitter by the blogger Clash Report:
If Beskrestnov’s assessment is correct then it once again highlights Moscow’s continuing reliance on foreign technology and if, as Russian milbloggers suggest, the Russian Ministry of Defense is paying nearer $17,000 each for the drones, it raises yet more questions about the capability and possible continuing corruption in the Kremlin’s procurement processes.
Commercial drones such as the Chinese Skywalker come with a considerable weight penalty. The quadcopter it uses has a lift capacity of around 4 kilograms (9 pounds) while a 5-kilometer (3-mile) fiber optic cable reel weighs about 1.2 kilograms (2.5 pounds) which limits the possible payload to less than 3 kilograms (6.5 pounds).
However, as Kyiv Post reported in August, the German company HIGHCAT has designed the purpose built HCX military fiber optic quadcopter drone. Its base drone has a 5.5-kilogram (12-pound) payload capability, and its proprietary fiber-optic cable is carried on a reel that contains 20 kilometers (12.5 miles) of cable that weighs only 2.2 kilograms (4.8 pounds) – sufficient to lift its HD thermal imaging camera as well as reasonably sized weapons.
Nevertheless, the use of fiber-optic controlled drones on the battlefield is one way of overcoming the growing EW threat to the use of drones.
The drones do not use radio signals making them and their operators almost impossible to detect and locate via standard direction-finding techniques and make them largely immune to electronic jamming.
The fiber-optic link removes the need for onboard computer capability or batteries as these can be ground based with power being supplied through the tether while its high-resolution imagery tracks and allows for identification of objects in real time. The relatively cheap drone is expendable while its “brain” is held in the ground based expensive controller that can be reused for multiple strikes.
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