UKRAINE, KHARKIV, Feb. 26 — Russia hit Kharkiv with a fiber-optic FPV drone for the first time since Russia’s full-scale invasion, reported Serhii Beskrestnov with a call sign “Flash,” advisor to Ukraine’s minister of defence on Feb. 25. The Kharkiv regional prosecutor’s office confirmed this information. 

According to prosecutors, a Russian FPV drone hit a tree in Kyivskyi district of Kharkiv. They opened a pre-trial investigation into a war crime. 

“These are the real threats we will have to deal with technologically. Signals intelligence won’t help detect them, radio detection and ranging might help but if FPVs will fly lower and they aren’t a panacea,” Beskrestnov wrote on his Telegram channel. 

Kharkiv is located 20 miles from the Russian border. Russian optic-fiber FPV hit its northern outskirts. Beskrestnov later wrote that Russian could have “found” an “land corridor” to lay optic fiber, because “to spread 25 kilometers (~15 miles) of fiber through a heavily populated area is not simple.” 

Some fiber-optics Russia produces can fly across a 31 mile-range, but Kharkiv monitoring channel TLK suggests this one was carried by the mother drone and went online only near Kharkiv. 

Like the usual first-person view drones (FVP), such drones transmit images or video back to the “base” but use a thin optic wire connected to an operator’s controller to do so, making electronic warfare (EW) inefficient. 

Various reports say Russia started using such drones in the east of Ukraine either in the summer or spring of 2024, responding to the rise in electronic warfare used by the Ukrainian Armed Forces. 

Read more

⚡ The fifth year of the Russian full-scale invasion started, so it’s been four years since most of us here at our Kharkiv-based newsroom became war reporters. Please consider supporting our journalism via a one-time donation — or join our community.