Ukraine’s Sea Drones Are Now Launching Unjammable Fiber-Optic Drones

A new kind of Ukrainian sea drone may be accelerating the evolution of naval warfare.

Russian footage from last week’s attacks on the port cities of Tuapse and Novorossiysk appears to show a Ukrainian uncrewed surface vessel, essentially a kamikaze boat, carrying multiple fiber-optic first person view drones in hinged compartments along its hull. These are no ordinary FPVs. The fiber-optic connection allows the drones to fly without radio signals, making them immune to electronic jamming, one of the biggest threats in modern drone combat.

The innovation marks the first reported use of fiber-optic drones launched from the sea. Until now, Ukraine had deployed these unjammable drones mainly on land to strike Russian jammers and fortified positions. Mounting them on naval platforms extends their reach far beyond the coastline and turns each boat into a mobile drone carrier.

In December 2024, Ukraine had already hinted at this capability. The Ukrainian Navy released a video showing naval drone carriers launching strike FPV drones from internal bays fitted into Magura-class unmanned sea vehicles. The modified hulls appeared to use hatches that opened at sea, allowing the FPVs to take off while sheltered from saltwater and weather. Those early experiments foreshadowed what Russian footage now shows – sea drones doubling as motherships for precision FPV strikes.

“Given Ukraine’s manpower-limited navy, it has relied on cheap, unmanned systems built to be effective and disposable,” says Gregory Falco, an autonomous systems expert at Cornell University.

The footage, shared by Russian military bloggers, followed a wave of Ukrainian strikes that disabled oil terminals in Novorossiysk and Tuapse, temporarily halting port operations. If verified, the use of naval launched fiber-optic drones would signal another step in Ukraine’s evolving drone navy, where cheap, expendable platforms replace traditional warships.

Yuri Lapaiev, editor-in-chief of Tyzhden magazine, wrote for the Jamestown Foundation that the September 24 strike marked “the first time Ukraine has used maritime drones to target Russia’s oil industry.”

Days later, Turkish fishermen found an explosive laden Magura drone washed ashore 900 miles from Ukraine. Local authorities sealed the port after confirming it was packed with explosives. The discovery highlights how far Ukraine’s sea drones can now range and how much they have diversified in mission and design since the first Maguras appeared in 2022.

“That’s a spillover of the war,” says Olena Kryzhanivska, a defense analyst and author of the Ukraine’s Arms Monitor newsletter. “When we see an armed conflict of such scale and intensity as between Russia and Ukraine, it’s an expected outcome that the wider region will be directly affected.”

Both Russia and Ukraine are now experimenting with ways to extend the range of their drones, particularly ordinary FPVs and the fiber-optic variants, which are resistant to jamming. “The potential of these drones has largely reached its peak,” Kryzhanivska said. “But, integrating them with other systems, such as naval drone carriers, ground-based platforms, or aerial launchers, opens up new possibilities.”

Russia is experimenting with its own “mother ships” for naval drones, which move close to target areas before releasing FPVs. “This symbiosis of technologies is likely to persist,” Kryzhanivska said.

Deborah Fairlamb, co-founder of Green Flag Ventures, a venture capital fund for local Ukrainian startups, said operators using fiber-optic drones – immune to many forms of electronic warfare – can place them with astonishing accuracy, sometimes within a 10-by-10-inch square.

Roy Gardiner, an open-source weapons analyst, says the innovation could change the dynamics of the Black Sea war. “Fiber-optic FPVs carried on sea drone launchers like the one found off Krasnodar allow successful strikes on land or naval targets regardless of EW jammer defenses,” Gardiner said.

“While radio repeater UAVs can assist strike drones launched from sea platforms attacking Russian equipment in Crimea, sea-launched fiber-optic FPVs are particularly suited for more distant targets like Tuapse and Novorossiysk,” he added.

Heiner Philipp, an engineer with Technology United for Ukraine, noted that countering fiber-optic drones remains challenging. While conventional tools like shotguns can bring down the drones themselves, cutting the fiber cable mid-flight with simple instruments such as scissors or knives can also disable them.

The discovery of both the Magura kamikaze drone off Turkey and the fiber-optic drone carrier off Krasnodar shows that Ukraine’s drone navy now operates across nearly the entire Black Sea.

“At this point, Ukrainian drone developers are on the leading edge when it comes to many different drone types for different missions, an experience that is unmatched even by the most developed economies and industries around the world,” says Samuel Bendett, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.

Cheap, expendable, and in some cases unjammable, these drones are replacing traditional warships with something new – a swarm fleet of floating launch pads in an era of the timid navy.