One of Ukraine’s stealth attack drones has made another fleeting appearance somewhere over the 1,100-km front line of Russia’s 42-month wider war on Ukraine. A video that circulated online in recent days may mark only the second appearance of the mysterious drone.
This black-painted UAV is special.
Most of Ukraine’s long-range attack drones feature the same basic design elements: long straight wings, narrow booms connecting the fuselage and engine to the trail and propeller propulsion. By contrast, the mystery drone is a flying wing with no separate fuselage—and it’s propelled by a jet engine. Reportedly a $2,000, US-made SW140B turbine.
ukrainian jet drone in action https://t.co/y2yQozc2Jl pic.twitter.com/v3CyptmJTE
— imi (m) (@moklasen) July 23, 2025
The flying wing planform, which lacks highly reflective right angles, scatters radar waves in all directions instead of bouncing them straight back at the emitting dish.
All that is to say, the black drone could be highly stealthy. And that should help it slip past Russian air-defenses on its way to strike targets deep inside Russia. There’s no official information about the mystery drone—we don’t even know its name—so we can’t say for sure how far it ranges.
One Ukrainian drone keeps smashing Russia’s top war factories—so Germany’s paying for 500 more
But one of the black drones that crashed in Russia in June 2024 appears to be around 10 feet long. If the Ukrainian drone carries as much fuel as a Russian Shahed attack drone, which is roughly as long, it might be capable of traveling hundreds of miles.
The mystery drone has company. There’s a slightly bigger Ukrainian jet drone, also with a flying wing planform, that has made a couple of appearances on social media since last year. The main difference between the two stealth drones, besides their size, is that the bigger model has a single vertical stabilizer; the smaller model has twin vertical stabilizers. The bigger drone is powered by a German-made JetCat P400-PRO turbojet costing $14,000.
It’s clear both stealth drones exist in small numbers, likely owing to their higher cost and complexity compared to other drone types. The Ukrainian Unmanned Systems Forces’ main attack drone is the straight-wing, propeller-driven An-196. Ukrainian firm Ukroboronprom builds the An-196 by the hundreds: Germany recently ponied up $100 million to pay for 500 of the drones.
The stealth drones’ rarity may imply the USF deploys them only for the most difficult missions requiring the attacking drones to penetrate dense air-defenses.
Russia’s got stealth drones, too
The Russians possess a similar but much bigger drone—the 46-foot-long Okhotnik. One of the few copies of the Okhotnik came to a bad end over the front line in eastern Ukraine in October when it lost contact with its operators—and began flying toward free Ukraine.
An escorting Russian Sukhoi Su-57 stealth fighter shot down the Okhotnik, and the wreckage fell on the Ukrainian side of the front line. Ukrainian police recovered the drone’s remains, and the precision glide bomb the drone carried, right before a Russian Iskander missile streaked down—clearly intended to destroy what was left of the Okhotnik.
It’s not clear what, if anything, the Ukrainians have done with the information they gleaned from the Okhotnik’s crash. To be fair, the Russians have also recovered the remains of several Ukrainian stealth drones. If there’s anything either side can learn from the other when it comes to radar-evading drones, they’ve both learned it by now.
The basic principles of stealth aircraft design are well-known by now, however. The challenge for both Ukraine and Russia isn’t to build a few radar-evading drones—it’s to build lots of radar-evading drones.
Until either side can scale up production, both will continue relying on non-stealthy drones for most of their attacks. The Shaheds in Russia’s case. The An-196s in Ukraine’s.
