Russia Taps Power Of Tech Startups For New Kamikaze Drones, Aiming For ‘Cruise Missile For The Price Of A Washing Machine’

A new Russian loitering munition has successfully completed combat tests in Russian-occupied Ukraine, according to state new agency TASS. Claimed to be cheap, effective and able to be produced in large numbers, the Privet-82 is one of the first products of a new private-enterprise approach by the Russian military. The company that produced it is already pushing ahead to field their next product: an "ultra-cheap cruise missile for the price of a washing machine."

The Privet-82 is a simple, low-cost loitering munition from one of a new generation of Russian tech ... [+] startups

Russia's drone industry has so far failed to keep pace with developments in the war, performing miserably. By contrast, Ukraine has a vast, thriving ecosystem of drone startups and volunteer groups producing a wide range of scouts and loitering munitions: UKRJET, which makes the UJ-22 reconnaissance drone; UKRSPECSYSTEMS, which makes the PD-series and Shark; Escadrone, which turns out small FPV kamikazes by the thousands, and many more. Ukraine's defense ministry says it is working with more than 80 locally-based drone makers for the Army of Drones initiative and plan to field a staggering 200,000 drones this year.

By contrast, Russian troops have repeatedly complained about the difficulty of getting small quadcopters on the frontline. Dobryna, a supposedly Russian-made alternative to Chinese consumer drones, has been savaged by Russian critics as an overpriced and ineffective assemblage of Chinse components, with one calling it "a treacherous and criminal attempt to milk the budget by selling the army a racing drone that is completely unsuitable for military purposes. A toy for a lot of money." Dobryna's lack of secure communications and inability to carry a grenade are particular concerns.

Russia's workhorse Orlan-10 artillery reconnaissance drone has been widely mocked for its poor build quality, with some captured models found to be held together with tape and to have plastic water bottles for fuel tanks. The makers were also involved in a scandal involving importing Chinese electronics, rebranding them as Russian and jacking up the price.

The Lancet-3 loitering munition, made by a subsidiary of the Kalashnikov concern, has been more successful, destroying a number of Ukrainian artillery pieces. The 30-pound weapons can find and knock out armored vehicles from more than 20 miles away, but are few in number and appear to be expensive, possibly because they rely on electronics smuggled from the U.S. Like other large Russian firms, Kalashnikov also has corruption issues.

For long-range kamikaze drones, Russia has had to import thousands of Shahed-series loitering munitions from Iran as it cannot make them itself.

This pattern of underperformance may be set to change with new drones like the Privet-82. The makers, Oko, describe themselves on their website as "a young design bureau from St. Petersburg, working on the principles of an IT startup." They are a team of "enthusiastic professionals in the fields of microelectronics, IT, design and aircraft construction," specializing in low-cost military unmanned aerial vehicles.

Sam Bendett, an expert on Russian uncrewed systems and adviser to the CNA and CNAS think tanks, told me that Oko is typical of a slew of new companies responding to Russian government requests for new thinking on drones.

"Many Russian companies answered the call from volunteers for cheap, readily available UAV solutions, especially in the FPV-kamikaze class," says Bendett. " And the MoD is now looking at a range of options, including drones like Privet."

Privet-82 looks like a direct competitor to the Lancet-3, and is similarly driven by an electric propeller. With a flight range of twenty miles, it carries a twelve-pound warhead – initially a pair of 82-mm mortar bombs, hence the name – cruising at 55 mph before diving at 100 mph. In a newspaper interview, Oko claimed Privet-82 is highly resistant to jamming, and uses a combination of satellite navigation and operator video guidance. In the terminal phase it uses computer vision to automatically identify targets. Oko say they can produce a hundred a month, far more than the number of Lancets seen so far.

And while Kalashnikov developed Lancet for the military, Privet-82 is a purely private development.

"This is a self-initiated project and the company is probably banking on MoD orders at some point," says Bendett.

Bendett notes that groups like Oko have received a huge boost from Dmitry Rogozin, formerly Russia's Deputy Prime Minister in charge of the defense industry and now head of the Tsar's Wolves, a quasi-official organization of military technical experts tasked with getting new technology to the front line as quickly as possible. Rogozin has done much to push Russian drone development.

"It is extremely important to finalize a special procedure for [the MoD's] adoption of private military-industrial companies' and individual engineering teams' self-initiated projects," Rogozin stated in a Telegram post this month.

It seems that Putin is using Rogozin to bypass Russia's slow and inefficient defense industry, in an attempt to copy the way Ukraine's groundswell of new startups bypassed their Soviet-legacy industry to supply drones in 2014.

"At this point, these type of projects are getting lots of attention and Oko may just get enough of it to start producing these drones," says Bendett. "As for mass-scale production, that remains to be seen."

If Oko do get the go-ahead, it will improve the chances for their follow-on project, the Privet-120 long-range kamikaze drone, the one with the catchy tagline of a "cruise missile for the price of a washing machine."

Rather than expensive carbon fiber or composites, Privet drones are made of wood — good enough for a ... [+] single one-way flight.

The Privet-120, with a range of 150 miles, would be a direct competitor to the Shahed, and is intended for saturation attacks to swamp Ukrainian defenses. Interestingly, it is not designed for military targets, but the 35-pound warhead would target "small but critical infrastructure: electrical transformers, railway switches, checkpoints, gas stations."

The Privet-120 will initially use GPS guidance backed by an inertial system, as seen in the Shaheds, but the makers plan to upgrade this with vision-based navigation using machine learning to create a low-cost, unjammable weapon.

A washing machine costs around $500 in Russia. If Oko's simple wooden-framed drone can really be mass-produced at that price, thousands of them could bombard Ukraine for the cost of one $6m Kalibr cruise missile. Or the project may simply be another scam, with the makers planning to deliver a few sub-par prototypes before disappearing with the money in an old-school Russian defense industry scandal.

But Russia may be raising its game. Bendett points to videos from rival makers Archangel, also building a loitering munition for Russian forces, which appear to show modern design software, 3D printers and other up-to-date technology.

"This is now the war of volunteers and their tech arsenals," says Bendett.

Ukraine has a good head start in drone technology. But as the war continues into its second year, Russia may start to catch up.