Inside Ukraine's race to crank out unjammable, fiber-optic drones that can break through Russia's electronic warfare

Yahoo

07-02-2025

Ukrainian companies are increasing the production of fiber-optic drones.
The drones can't be jammed with traditional electronic warfare, making them a huge threat in combat.
BI spoke with several people involved in the effort to scale up production to keep pace with Russia.
Drones radically changed the Ukraine war. Soldiers then learned to fight back with electronic warfare. It's been a cat-and-mouse game since, and now, the fight is evolving once again.
This time, a new breed of drones is the catalyst.
George, an Eastern European drone pilot with Ukraine's International Legion, vividly recalls the first time he deployed one of these drones.
It was last fall, and he had just received intelligence that five Russians were positioned in a cellar in the village of Hlyboke, an area where intense Russian jamming had made it almost impossible for Ukrainian forces to fly their drones.
He flew his drone and its three-and-a-half-pound explosive payload through Russia's electronic shield. It slipped past the frequency jammers and into a hole in the target structure. Smoke engulfed the enemy position as a recon drone watched the scene from above.
His team cheered as they observed the strike on a screen from miles away. George had just live-tested a fiber-optic drone that could bypass electronic warfare, and the implications were huge.
"That first time I used the fiber optic, I never wanted to go back to the regular. It just cannot compare," George, an Eastern European drone pilot with the International Legion, told Business Insider. For security reasons, he and several other sources asked to be identified only by their first names. BI verified their identities.
Russians first brought fiber-optic drones to the war this past spring, and since then, Ukraine has been racing to develop and produce them at scale. The weapons became more prominent in the fall, especially in Russia's Kursk region, where Ukrainian forces launched a shock invasion in early August.
BI spoke to executives at several Ukrainian companies producing fiber-optic drone supplies. Some said they're starting to close the gap with Russia, which had a head start.
"Whichever side adapts quicker and learns and transforms its capabilities, that side becomes dominant," George said. "Well, the Russians have been dominant. It's clear. No one can say otherwise."
Troy Smothers, a US Marine veteran who runs the firm Drone Reaper, said his phone immediately lit up with calls from Ukrainian units after the footage of the strike in Hlyboke was posted online (there was some delay between the strike and the video post). Pilots who saw the demo wanted in on the tech, a simple fiber-optic kit. In Ukraine, many individual combat units procure their own parts for drone projects.
"Ukrainian developers are actively ramping up the production of fiber-optic drones," Nataliia Kushnerska, a senior executive in Ukraine's defense industry, told BI. "There is a strong demand for this from the Ukrainian military, addressing a real need on the front lines where electronic warfare tools are increasingly disrupting drone operators' activities."
Fiber-optic drones are regular first-person-view drones that can carry a small explosive payload. Instead of relying on a radio frequency signal connection, which can be jammed, they're equipped with spools of long, thin cables to ensure a stable link between the drone and its operator.
Because of the fiber-optic cables, these drones are highly resistant to traditional electronic warfare systems like frequency jammers, making them dangerous and difficult to defend against. They produce high-quality video transmissions without bandwidth issues, allowing the operator to guide them for pinpoint strikes on enemy troops or vehicles.
"There is almost no defense against these drones," Max, the CEO of the Kyiv-based company BattleBorn, which develops and makes a range of drones, told BI. "They hit expensive equipment very often and efficiently."
BattleBorn is one of many Ukrainian companies producing fiber-optic drones. Alex, the COO, told BI that his drones have a range of up to 6.2 miles — he expects this will soon increase to 9.3 miles — and can carry anywhere from 3 to 17.6 pounds of explosives, depending on the size of the drone.
There is a trade-off to relying on fiber-optic cable connections, though. Manufacturers have to make space on the drones for their spools, thus reducing the payload these platforms can carry. Alex said producing the coil — which is quite fragile and can be vulnerable to damage — is also a complicated technical process.
Kushnerska, the chief operating officer of Brave1, a Ukrainian government platform that facilitates innovation within the country's defense industry, said dozens of teams across the country are working on fiber-optic drones.
Some teams make their own spools domestically, while others source their hardware from overseas, mainly China. Kushnerska said that Ukrainian companies can produce thousands of fiber-optic drones a month, and the number of participating firms is only growing.
Krab Technologies, a company based in Kharkiv, custom-designed a spool kit that crams roughly 10 kilometers of fiber-optic cable onto a drone while only increasing its weight by less than 2.2 pounds. The company's owner, Vlad, said his firm uses a Chinese-produced 0.25mm fiber-optic cable — about as thick as a coarse strand of human hair. That's about half as thin as the fiber optics that he said Russia's forces use.
"We're getting a big quantity of orders from military units," Vlad said. "We have more than 15,000 spools ordered."
Vlad's fiber-optic drones cost about $350 at their cheapest. His most expensive offering is a 13-inch drone that can carry a seven-pound explosive payload and has a range of roughly 12.5 miles. That one costs $900. Regular hobby-style first-person view drones, which rely on signal connections, cost just a fraction of that price. But Ukraine will likely have little to no alternative as radio frequency jammers become more prolific on the battlefield.
"The moment you reach the zero line, you're jammed," said George, referring to the moment one crosses out of Ukrainian-held territory.
By his estimates, a typical day of fighting would see 70% of the regular first-person view drones fail to reach their targets. For pilots like him, operating on the field has become a slog of sending drone after drone at his target, hoping one will get through.
"It's not just about the video signal," he said. "It's incredibly hard to get through the signal disruptions because you can't control your drone anymore. You feel like it's being controlled by someone else."
Vlad of Krab Technologies said that a common strategy in Ukraine is to use the more expensive fiber-optic drones to target the jammers first, then send in the regular loitering munitions to do the rest of the work.
Fiber-optic drones aren't perfect — the cable can snap or get hung up on obstacles — but they offer options to punch holes in the formidable electronic warfare shields hindering front-line drone operations, especially as AI-driven autonomous systems still haven't come online.
They can target advancing forces shielded by mobile electronic warfare, increasing the already high costs of enemy advances, as well as protected fixed positions.
After observing Moscow's forces using fiber-optic drones this past Spring, Smothers, the US Marine veteran, and several friends reverse-engineered their own spool from photos of a downed Russian model discovered by Ukrainians in March 2024. Once they had a design, Smothers said, he then toured Ukraine with about 50 fiber-optic kits for four-and-a-half months, pitching the tech to drone units.
A big part of wartime innovation, he said, is demonstrating that the tech works in battle.
"You take a guy like myself who doesn't have a drone background or even an electronic background, if I can deploy it, that means the average military member can use that design and be effective with it," he said. Smothers worked in the real-estate industry back home and was an infantry sergeant in the Marines.
He returned to the US in the winter to procure 30- and 50-kilometer fiber-optic spools from an American defense firm. Since early January, he's been offering them to Ukrainian units.
Ukrainian officials are pushing the defense industry to make more drones. In mid-January, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that 2025 "must be a record-breaking year" for drone production output. Kyiv has raised its annual manufacturing capacity to 4 million units, a significant increase from previous years.
Meanwhile, the Ukrainian defense ministry recently announced that it will provide combat units with $60 million monthly to procure drones to quickly meet front-line needs. This initiative allows soldiers to sidestep slower, centralized purchasing.
Since his fiber-optic strike in Hlyboke this past fall, George said he'd flown a few more wired drones in combat over Kharkiv. But he stressed that his unit still has too few of these platforms. Russian troops, on the other hand, have been hunting his comrades with fiber-optic drones for over a year.
"In probably a year or two, there will be something else coming up, something new," George said, "but right now, this must be the priority because this can actually do the work."
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