Watch Ukraine's Best FP-1 Strike Drone Dodge a Russian Surface-to-Air Missile

FP-1s targeted a Shahed drone factory nearly 800 miles from the front

One day after striking a critical weapons factory in Cheboksary, in western Russia 600 miles from the front line in Ukraine, Ukrainian long-range strike drones targeted another important arms plant: the Shahed drone facility in Nizhnekamsk, 760 miles from the front.

As on Monday, the drones in the Tuesday raid were UAC FP-1s, which are fast becoming the main deep-strike assets in the Ukrainian Unmanned Systems Forces, the world’s first—and best—independent drone branch.

Ukrainian-Czech UAC tweaked a number of small things to extend the FP-1’s range and carrying capacity compared to older types. The main refinement is the landing gear: the FP-1 doesn’t have any. Instead of taking off on its own wheels like the PD-1 does, the FP-1 blasts off from an angled ramp. A fuselage-mounted rocket gives it a payload-increasing boost.

It’s unclear whether the propeller-driven FP-1s struck the Shahed plant and, if they did, how much damage they inflicted. Video from the ground in Nizhnekamsk depicts one of the roughly 15-foot drones narrowly dodging a Russian surface-to-air missile.

Expect the attacks to continue. Struggling to shoot down all of the thousands of Shaheds and other cruise munitions that Russia flings at Ukrainian cities every month, Ukraine increasingly targets the munitions “left of the boom,” to borrow a U.S. Army term.

That is, the Ukrainians are trying to blow up the Shaheds and other drones and cruise missiles in the warehouses where the Russians store them—or, better yet, damage the factories that produce them.

The propeller-driven, satellite-guided Shahed—developed by Shahed Aviation Industries in Iran—is one of Russia’s main weapons for attacks on Ukrainian cities. Since acquiring the first Shaheds from Iran in 2022, Russia has launched more than 10,000 of the explosive drones at targets in Ukraine.

A Russian drone and missile barrage on Monday night involved 315 drones including 250 Shaheds as well as seven missiles, two of which were North Korean-made KN-23 ballistic missiles.

“Residential buildings and urban infrastructure were damaged,” Ukrainian Pres. Volodymyr Zelensky stated. “In Odesa, even a maternity hospital became a Russian target. Thirteen people were injured. Tragically, there are fatalities. My condolences to the families.”

“Russian missile and Shahed strikes drown out the efforts of the United States and others around the world to force Russia into peace,” Zelensky added. It’s not for no reason that the industrial and logistical infrastructure behind the strikes is a top target for the roughly 2,500 long-range strike drones Ukrainian workshops produce every month.

Not to mention, Ukraine targets Russia’s strategic bombers—its primary cruise-missile carriers—at their bases across Russia. Operation Spider Web, orchestrated by the Ukrainian state security agency (SBU), smuggled more than 100 short-range attack drone near five air bases, the farthest more than 3,000 miles from Ukraine, and successfully hit at least four of the bases on June 1.

More than a dozen bombers, transports and radar planes burned.

The FP-1 raids are less dramatic but more scalable. It took the SBU more than a year to plan Operation Spider Web. By contrast, FP-1s can attack as far as 1,000 miles inside Russia every day with warheads weighing more than 250 pounds.

The recent drumbeat of FP-1 raids is part of a wider orchestra of deep strikes. In December, Ukrainian air force Sukhoi Su-24 bombers flung several British-made Storm Shadow cruise missiles at a Shahed drone factory in Oryol Oblast, in western Russia 100 miles from the Ukrainian border. A follow-up attack in January compounded the damage. In total, at least 200 Shaheds burned.

A few months later on or just before March 13, long-range attack drones belonging to the Ukrainian defense intelligence agency hit a hidden drone manufacturing facility in Obukhovo, just outside Moscow.

And an overnight drone raid a week later struck a cruise missile depot at the Russian air force’s Engels bomber base in southern Russia, 300 miles from the front line. The impacts triggered a succession of explosions that blew the roofs off of homes in the surrounding community—and reportedly destroyed 96 Kh-101 cruise missiles worth $960 million combined.

At perhaps $100,000 a copy, the FP-1 is just the thing to sustain the escalating attacks on Russian missile and drone stocks and production. It’s unclear how many FP-1s UAC builds every month, but hundreds wouldn’t be inconceivable. Zelensky has directed Ukrainian industry to produce 30,000 drones in the class of the FP-1 this year.

The aftermath of the June 9 Russian raids on Ukrainian cities. Ukrainian government photo

Secret navigation

How the FP-1 navigates in order to accurately strike precision targets a thousand miles inside Russia is one of its biggest secrets. Justin Bronk and Jack Watling, analysts at the Royal United Services Institute in London, outlined the possibilities.

• “The ubiquitous approach to navigation is to rely on global navigation satellite systems (GNSS), including GPS, Galileo, BeiDou and GLONASS,” Bronk and Watling wrote. The problem is that “the power of these navigational emissions is very low; they are, therefore, easy to receive, but also easy to jam through saturation of the frequencies used.”

• So Ukrainian drone developers might combined GNSS navigation with other methods for redundancy. “The normal reversionary method is inertial navigation, enabling the UAV to plot its own location relative to a known starting position,” the analysts explained. But “inertial navigation systems are highly susceptible to becoming increasingly inaccurate over time.”

• Which is why the best strike drones may even have a third navigation system, potentially involving terrain-matching. “If a platform has an electro-optical sensor and a pre-loaded map of the terrain over which it is flying, computer vision can be used to match the UAV’s camera view against identifiable terrain features and physical markers such as rivers, roads and forests,” Bronk and Watling wrote.

Read more: