Weekly review, week to 13 September 2026

The week in three paragraphs

The main substance of the week was the race around a new class of Russian strike weapons — jet-powered "Gerans" and the small "Banderol"/"Dan-T" cruise missiles. Russia is simultaneously increasing their output to three thousand units a month and changing tactics: daytime strikes, flight at 5–7 km or, conversely, right at the water's surface. Ukraine for the first time announced working and cheap interception of the "Banderol", but the economics of defense remain shaky. In parallel, Ukrainian long-range strikes have nullified the notion of a "safe rear" — a drone flew 3000 km to the Yamalo-Nenets Okrug.

The technological shift of the week is the transformation of artificial intelligence from a concept into a documented combat tool and a means of targeting. A report by the company Anthropic showed for the first time how commercial AI is used to design missiles, conduct cyberattacks and reconnoiter a fleet. Satellite-free navigation has ceased to be exotic: several players at once showed visual, magnetic and optical-gyroscopic navigation with specific accuracy figures. And in the Black Sea the first battle in history between two naval drones took place.

Ahead lie the entry of Ukrainian ballistic missiles into combat use, the further move of jet drones to altitudes out of reach of cheap air defense means, and an intensifying struggle for the satellite domain: deployment of the Russian "Rassvet", growth in the number of CRPA antennas and ground-based jamming means. Space is increasingly becoming the fourth layer of the theater of operations, not a background.

Main structural shifts

Jet-powered air attack weapons have become a separate class of threats; the first cheap Ukrainian interception has already been shown, but its maturity is unclear This refers to jet-powered "Gerans" and the "Banderol" and "Dan-T" cruise missiles — products that in terms of interception difficulty have approached cruise missiles but cost many times less.

The key points are scale and economics. Production of jet-powered "Gerans" grew from about 1500 units last month to 3000 in the current one, and on an assembly-line basis: the wreckage found had been manufactured literally the day before source. Conventional "Gerans" were intercepted in daytime with 97–98% effectiveness, so Russia switched to jet-powered ones, which fly at an altitude of 4–5 km at 400–550 km/h and leave the fire zone of mobile groups source. The warhead reaches 90 kg source.

A Ukrainian response has appeared, but its maturity is unclear. The Brave1 cluster showed the interception of a "Banderol" by a means that costs less than the missile itself, and stated that this is not the only such solution source. The guidance principle has not been disclosed.

Strikes deep into Russia have reached the greatest range of the war and have been reoriented toward gas processing and the fleet. This changes the geography of vulnerability, not just the count of facilities hit.

An FP-1 drone for the first time reached the Yamalo-Nenets Okrug and hit the deethanization gas treatment unit at the Urengoy Condensate Treatment Plant — more than 3000 km from Ukraine, the most distant target since the start of the invasion; the plant's capacity is about 19.5 million tons of feedstock per year source. Separately, NASA satellites recorded a fire at the "Urengoyskaya" compressor station — a target not previously reported source.

Russia's fleet has come under pressure on all seas. Within a few days, "Kalibr" carriers in Novorossiysk were hit (a "Neptune" strike on the frigate "Admiral Essen" was confirmed), and the Makhachkala port on the Caspian was attacked at 1000 km source. The Black Sea Fleet has begun welding anti-drone structures right onto ships in port source.

Artificial intelligence has definitively become an object of war — both as a tool for weapons development and as a class of targets. This is a watershed recorded by two events of the week at once.

The Anthropic report for the first time documented the military use of commercial AI: a cell in northern Yemen ran three guided missile weapons development programs, distributing copies of Claude among code writing, research and verification source. The complexity barrier has collapsed — campaigns at the level of entire teams have become feasible for a single operator.

At the same time, in Kyiv the BeMobile data center was hit for the first time; it was used on behalf of the AFU for processing, storing and transmitting intelligence and for supporting the operation of networked military equipment source.

Technology dynamics and trends

Jet-powered "Gerans" have found a simple counter-technique against saturated Ukrainian short-range air defense — going to altitude. The logic is not stealth but the economics of interception. [TECH] At an altitude above 5 km, and in some cases 7 km, the drone is clearly visible to radars but leaves the zone of most cheap means of destruction source.

According to the analysis cited, the German Gepard is effective up to about 3.5 km, the Skyranger 35 about 4 km, the Stinger and Piorun up to 3.5–4 km, and the "Strela-10" about 3.5 km. Even anti-aircraft interceptor drones struggle at 7 km: a propeller works worse in thin air. That leaves the "Buk", FrankenSAM and IRIS-T SLM, but spending a scarce expensive surface-to-air missile on a "Geran-4" is economically unprofitable.

The jam resistance of satellite navigation has turned into a race in the number of antenna elements. [TECH] This is a direct response to Ukrainian EW. The "Shaheds" are expected to move from 16-element CRPA antennas to 20-element ones, and VNIIR "Progress" will begin producing 24-element antennas in 2027 source.

The scale of the problem was revealed by a Ukrainian OSINT analysis of the "Kometa" antennas: jamming such an antenna requires about 50,000 times more power than for an ordinary GPS receiver source. In parallel, inertial navigation on the "Shaheds" has been upgraded, reducing dependence on the satellite, and some attacks are carried out with no online control at all.

Satellite-free navigation has become multi-layered and has left the labs for serial products. This is a fundamental response to total jamming, and over the week enough solutions have accumulated to form a separate trend.

• [TECH] Northrop Grumman and SandboxAQ for the first time publicly combined magnetic and visual navigation on the Lumberjack expendable strike drone. Quantum-sensor magnetometers match magnetic field anomalies against a map without needing satellites, lighting or visibility of the surface — which is important over open water. The software was installed in the onboard systems in less than an hour source.

• [TECH] The American startup ANELLO Photonics has moved the optical gyroscope onto a silicon photonic chip. The three-axis module weighs less than 182 g and consumes about 4 W, and in the company's own flight test with GPS turned off over a 740 m segment, the error after approximately 20 minutes of flight was less than 20 m; there is as yet no independent verification of these figures source.

• [TECH] Spain's UAV Navigation has updated the VNS01 system: under favorable conditions the error is held at about 30 m even during prolonged satellite absence and does not grow with distance traveled source.

• The Russian SuperCam S180 and S350, as well as "Geoscan", have received their own optical navigation based on map matching source.

AI terminal guidance against moving targets has crossed the line from demonstrations to qualification trials. Ukraine's MoD and Brave1 conducted trials under a single scenario: the drone flew 2 km, acquired a moving lightly armored target on its own from at least 500 m and hit it fully autonomously source. Six of seven companies passed (at least two hits out of three attempts).

Russia leads in this segment in onboard integration. Zelensky's adviser openly acknowledged Ukraine's lag: Russian drones carry Nvidia Jetson Nano computers with the YOLO v5 neural network, and onboard storage has grown from 128 GB to 2–4 TB source. The drone receives the task "find the railway, attack the first locomotive" and operates without GPS using visual navigation, remaining immune to EW against the control channel.

Drone production is moving into containers and automation — what is changing is not the product but the logistics. The "Ushkuynik" Scientific and Production Center showed a mock-up of an FPV final assembly shop inside a 40-foot container on the principle of no people inside, only a line of manipulators, with a capacity of up to 400 drones per day source. The logistical point: transport not finished drones (80% air) but densely packed components — one truck replaces four.

In parallel, market consolidation is under way. The Ukrainian-American Swarmer is buying the Ukrainian UGV and UAV manufacturer Ratel Robotics for $224 million — payment in cash and shares; chairman of the board Erik Prince stated that the company intends to continue buying manufacturers whose products have been tested on the battlefield source.

Naval warfare has reached the "drone versus drone" level. A battle between two USVs has been recorded for the first time. The target was detected by HUR units and destroyed by the Ukrainian Navy's Sargan 3000 USV with an RWS Protector remote machine gun module (12.7 mm) source. The event marks a new class of tasks: surface robots are becoming both hunters and targets. Russian commentators acknowledge the lag — the bet on the expensive "Zefir" USV slowed down the industry source.

The space and information-command domain went through its busiest period in weeks. Here the shifts were explicit in all directions.

Satellite communications: Ukrainian military intelligence recorded the first combat use of the Russian "Rassvet" constellation over Ukraine — several hours of communications at the end of July source. There are still only a few dozen spacecraft in orbit, fewer than a hundred, which does not provide Starlink-level coverage source.

Jamming of satellite communications has become a separate direction of the race. [TECH] The Russian "Peresvet" jams not the satellite but the Starlink terminal→satellite uplink channel at a range of up to 300 km; the coverage of one point is about 20 km², the cost about $1–1.2 million, and the main limitation is huge power consumption source. The Bundeswehr has begun, under contract, a study of ground-based satellite communications jamming systems with combat readiness by 2029 source. The US Space Force has adopted the Meadowlands ground-based jamming system source.

Orbit control: the US Space Force has approved the third DARC deep-space radar site in Texas — a network of three geographically separated radars will provide round-the-clock all-weather tracking of objects in geostationary orbit (36,000 km), with an eye to the growth of Chinese capabilities source. China put six "Yaogan" reconnaissance satellites into orbit in a single launch source.

Weak signals (Under the radar)

• Commercial Earth remote sensing is becoming a tool for real-time targeting. According to the WSJ, US officials linked high-quality satellite images obtained by Iran from Chinese companies to the July 17 missile strike on Muwaffaq al-Salti Air Base in Jordan, where three US service members were killed source. The specific companies were not named, no direct involvement of the PRC authorities was claimed, and China rejected the accusations; according to the officials, the images were obtained before and after the attack. Separately, they fear that such assistance improves Iran's ability to track American ships.

• Access to data on the closure of Russian airspace has become public. The OSINT service tablo.pp.ua tracks the status of 200+ Russian airports in real time (operating/restricted/closed), with history for any date, updates every 6 hours and API access source. Separately, the findrassvet.ru tracker for the Russian "Rassvet" constellation has been launched, with the catalog updated 3–5 times a day source. The tools expose a picture that is not officially announced.

• Drone ground control software has turned out to be vulnerable to attack from a compromised aircraft. The Infected Drones repository contains 15 vulnerability write-ups in QGroundControl, Mission Planner, MAVSDK and other programs source. [TECH] In QGroundControl 5.1.3 for Windows, files are written simply when the aircraft is connected, and the code executes at the user's next login. The practical conclusion for those working with captured drones: connecting and reading data require an isolated workstation.

• A critical auto-landing bug in popular drone firmware. [TECH] In Betaflight 2026.6.1, when transitioning to landing, the controller sets a target 200 m below the copter, as a result of which, with a set 2.2 m/s, the aircraft descended at an average of 7.8–10.3 m/s — effectively in free fall source. It affects builds with Flight Plan, GPS Rescue and Altitude Hold. A direct threat to operators' drones.

• Digital FPVs used at night are devaluing portable analog video detectors. [TECH] On the Zaporizhzhia axis, the use of FPVs with the Ascent GT PRO digital module (4.9–6.4 GHz) was recorded: standard analog "video interception" tools do not show the picture from such a drone source. A more advanced modification, the Walksnail Ascent Max-WF with a 3100–7320 MHz range, has appeared on the market: when the link is lost it goes into search within a subband almost 1 GHz wide, forcing jamming means to chase the hopping source.

Vector projection and implications

High confidence: jet drones will continue moving to altitudes of 5–7 km, which will force Ukraine to urgently look for a cheap means of interception at this level. The dynamics are already confirmed: conventional "Gerans" were intercepted in daytime at 97–98%, which forced Russia to switch to jet-powered ones, and these now climb above the zone of cheap means. Expensive "Buk" and IRIS-T SLM surface-to-air missiles are economically incommensurate with a mass-produced drone. The nearest countermeasure is either cheap interceptors with jet or turbine propulsion for altitudes of 6–7 km, or a bet on EW against the navigation channel, the window for which is narrowing as the number of CRPA antenna elements grows.

High confidence: GPS-free navigation will become a standard option on serial strike drones of both sides in the coming months. Over the week, working solutions based on three independent physical principles — visual, magnetic and optical-gyroscopic — were shown, with specific accuracy figures of about 30 m. This is a direct consequence of total jamming along the line of contact. The countermeasure is becoming not jamming the channel but deceiving the sensors: spoofing the magnetic field and substituting visual landmarks, but there are as yet no mature means here.

Medium confidence: the struggle for the satellite domain will become a separate dimension of the war, with the growing importance of ground-based uplink jamming. Russia is deploying "Rassvet" and "Peresvet", while NATO and the US are in parallel building their own satellite communications jamming means with a 2029 horizon. If the pace of "Rassvet" deployment (hundreds of spacecraft and ground terminals) holds, Russia will gain a stable control channel for jet drones over any point in Ukraine — but sanctions on components may slow this down, as Ukrainian intelligence itself points out.

Medium confidence: strikes on computing infrastructure and data centers will become a regular class of targets on both sides. The first strike on the BeMobile data center in Kyiv sets a precedent, and specialized Russian channels already openly call it a signal for data center operators inside Russia. As the role of AI in processing intelligence and planning strikes grows, the computing base is turning into critical infrastructure requiring physical and network protection.

Low confidence: drone-versus-drone naval battles will grow into a separate niche of USV armament designed specifically to intercept their own kind. The first battle was asymmetric — the Russian boat was unarmed. But the Ukrainian side is already building coastal defense on a combination of USVs and mesh modems, and Russia's acknowledged lag in this segment creates an incentive for a race. A likely development is the appearance of specialized "counter-drone" surface platforms with small-caliber artillery and passive direction-finding.

External analysis (Western sources)

• The Anthropic report on military use of Claude is more substantive than the Russian-Ukrainian sphere suggests: an Iran-linked group gathered intelligence on US Navy positions — vessel identifiers, transponder data, personal information about service members — and also analyzed vulnerabilities of shipborne communications systems source. Russian-language channels mentioned these cases in digest form, without detailing the scale.

• The depletion of American missile arsenals after the war with Iran is a factor absent from the Russian-Ukrainian sphere. The US Navy is accelerating production of Tomahawk warheads through a workaround contract on the SLAM-ER, while in parallel replenishing SM-3 and PAC-3 MSE source. This also explains the shortage of Patriot interceptors for Ukraine: according to CSIS, replenishment is not expected until 2029 source.

• Synchronized multi-domain strikes have exposed gaps in American air and missile defense — a direct parallel with the Ukrainian problem of intercepting ballistic missiles and jet drones. Breaking Defense notes: even a generally effective system suffers real damage under simultaneous strikes across several domains, which forces a rethinking of the concept of layered defense source.

• The US Air Force is returning to anti-aircraft artillery against drones on the Ukrainian model — the same interception economics that makes Russian mobile groups bet on heavy machine guns rather than expensive systems source. The criteria are low cost per shot, mobility and mass.

• RUSI proposes a new metric for assessing strikes — "recovery tempo", i.e. the time it takes a damaged system to return to sufficient functionality source. The thesis: the most dangerous Russian adaptation is turning recovery into a continuous process, which shifts the assessment of strike effectiveness from the "fact of destruction" to the "duration of the function's absence".

• The Anduril Dive-LD underwater drone captured by Iran was designed as "attritable", so the very fact of its capture changes the logic of such incidents: the adversary gains the platform but not critical technologies source. Production is planned to increase from 12 to 200 units per year — a bet on mass rather than secrecy.