Russia has struggled to effectively protect its Black Sea Fleet from Ukraine’s arsenal of exploding naval drones, which Kyiv used to attack Moscow’s warships throughout the war.
But a new video suggests that the Russian Defense Ministry is taking additional steps to protect its naval assets from Ukrainian drones by subjecting its sailors to a more realistic – if strange-seeming – training process.
Zvezda News, a state-run broadcaster of the Russian Defense Ministry, released footage on Wednesday showing Russian sailors rocking back and forth on swings while piloting first-person view (FPV) drones over the waters of the Gulf of Finland.
The video shows a Russian naval drone, also known as an unmanned surface vessel or USV, floating on the water’s surface. It is designed to mimic the Ukrainian systems that have wreaked havoc on the Black Sea Fleet.
In a Telegram statement, Zvezda said the swinging motion is designed to help sailors familiarize themselves with the waves. The channel said drones are “in great demand” among sailors and can “effectively combat” naval drones.
According to the British Ministry of Defense, Ukraine claims to have sunk, damaged or destroyed at least a third of its Black Sea fleet since the start of the war.
The Ukrainian military and security forces used a combination of locally produced naval drones and anti-ship missiles in this successful campaign, forcing the Black Sea Fleet to abandon its headquarters on the occupied Crimean peninsula and move closer to Russia.
The naval drones, especially the Sea Baby and the Magura V5, have been particularly problematic. Russia has taken a number of countermeasures to protect its warships, including increasing patrol flights with fighter aircraft, stationing machine gun crews on board the ships and strengthening defensive measures in ports.
Many of these labor-intensive efforts have had little success in containing the threat so far. A more cost-effective solution for Russia to defeat Ukrainian drones could be to deploy its own drones.
Samuel Bendett, a consultant to the Center for Naval Analyses and an expert on drones and Russian defense issues, said Moscow has been using FPV drones in training to defeat Ukrainian naval drones for some time.
A Sea Baby drone moves through the water during a presentation by the Ukrainian Security Service in Kyiv region, Ukraine, March 2024. AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka
“They’re basically refining their efforts to use the most advanced technologies to track and destroy these drones,” Bendett, who highlighted the development in a post on X, told Business Insider.
Although the FPV drones are cheap, easily accessible systems, Bendett said they are far more dynamic than using a machine gun to simply destroy the incoming threat. Russia can use the FPV drones for a range of missions, including reconnaissance, surveillance, target acquisition and reconnaissance, and threat elimination.
Using rockers to mimic the motion of waves in bad weather is a relatively new aspect of this training, Bendett said. However, the effectiveness of FPV drones could be quite limited in bad weather anyway, as they are small and lightweight and would be vulnerable in high winds and rain.
It is not uncommon for Russia to subject its soldiers to such training. In fact, it is practiced by other armed forces as well. For example, US soldiers train to defeat FPV drones by shooting at balloons fluttering in the wind, which is intended to mimic the unpredictable movements of an FPV drone in combat.
FPV drones equipped with various types of explosives pose an ever-present threat on the battlefield in Ukraine. Both sides regularly use them to carry out precision strikes on enemy tanks, positions and troops.
A Magura V5 multi-purpose marine drone during a demonstration in April 2024. Photo by Pavlo Bahmut/Ukrinform/Future Publishing via Getty Images
“We have a technology that has proven itself in ground combat. Now we can also apply it on the water and in maritime operations,” said Bendett.
Bendett pointed out that in the Zvezda video of the counter-drone training, Russia uses a domestically produced naval drone to mimic a Ukrainian system. This provides the sailors with an even more realistic training environment than if they simply put an object in the water that only simulates a naval drone.
Little is known about the Russian naval drone program, but these systems are likely to be used for more than just training purposes.
“They obviously didn’t just build it so it could be a target for USVs,” Bendett said. “They built it for operations against USVs, they built it for (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) operations, they built it for potential combat operations – whatever that means to them and whatever that means to them.”
