Useful Over Ukraine?Įarly in the war, a spate of videos showed missile strikes by Orion UCAVs, which can be used to confirm the destruction of five trucks, a couple towed howitzers, and three tanks. Though, it is worth bearing in mind that the drone may still access GPS or other satellite-navigation systems instead. However, others are skeptical that Russia’s GLONASS navigational satellites are in sufficiently good state for Russia to depend on them for long-range drone flights. As far as public resources go, Russia is on track to start mass production sometime this year.”Īsked if Sirius was likely to come standard with satellite communication antennas, Bendett said that he believed it was “likely, but unclear to what extent.” “At the moment,” he said, “work is ongoing given all the resources invested on this project which is also supposed to be mostly domestically sourced. Russia’s war has drained away much R&D funding, but according to Bendett, service entry may not be that distant now. Production will begin at a facility in Dubna (55 miles north of Moscow). The last submodel, operated by Russia’s navy, is intended to have payloads for anti-submarine ops, search-and-rescue, maritime reconnaissance, and signal-repeater duties. Sirius will supposedly come in three variants-one for attack, one for reconnaissance only, and one for maritime patrol. Those trials, in turn, allowed Russia the operational drone capabilities with which it began the war in Ukraine. However, following embarrassing military setbacks during Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008, Moscow purchased drone technology from Israel, giving domestic firms the tech injection needed to develop and finally combat test Orion UCAV and KYB kamikaze drone prototypes over Syria in 2018. Russia’s long lack of similar capability allowed China, Israel, Turkey, and even Iran to capture most of the killer drone market for years, at least with regards to countries without access to U.S. began using large combat drones (or UCAVs) two decades earlier in Afghanistan. That’s somewhat shocking, given that the U.S. Russia’s first missile-armed combat drone to enter service, the Inkhodets (“Orion”) medium-altitude long endurance (MALE) drone began production in 2021, just a year before Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine. Sirius drone on display at Russia’s Army 2021 arms expo in August 2021.
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