Ukraine Sea Baby Boats Launch FPV Strikes From Sea
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- Sea Baby strike boats operated by Ukraine's SBU now carry six to eight FPV drones in side compartments alongside thermobaric Shmel rockets, attacking around the Kinburn Spit roughly 40 miles east of Odesa, per Russian accounts via Forbes.
- SBU designers assume a 930-mile (1,500-kilometer) range on a 4,400-pound (2,000-kilogram) payload, with some onboard FPVs guided by fiber-optic cable that Russian electronic warfare cannot jam.
- Ukraine's naval drones have sunk or damaged roughly a dozen Russian warships since 2022, forcing the Black Sea Fleet to pull its main operations back to Novorossiysk, according to the U.S. Naval Institute.
- U.S. special forces sank a target ship with a Ukrainian Magura at the Balikatan 2026 exercise off the Philippines on June 24 — the first time the technology has been used in the Indo-Pacific.
- Uforce, the London-based maker of the Magura, is in talks with Indo-Pacific buyers and weighing at least two production sites in the region, CEO Oleg Roginsky told Bloomberg.
- Sub Sea Baby underwater drone struck the Improved Kilo-class submarine B-271 Kolpino at its berth in Novorossiysk on Dec. 15; satellite imagery showed a 9-meter crater in the pier and the vessel still berthed more than a month later — assessed by analysts as a mission kill.
- Ukraine's navy led a NATO red team and beat the alliance's blue force in all five scenarios at the REPMUS naval-drone exercise in Portugal in September, the first time Kyiv had run the opposing force.
Why it matters: The U.S. Navy plans to field thousands of small uncrewed surface vessels across the Indo-Pacific by 2030, per Surface Development Group One leader Capt. Garrett Miller, and Kyiv's combat-tested designs now directly inform that pivot. Each Sea Baby costs a few hundred thousand dollars — below the price of a single modern torpedo — while delivering jamming-resistant FPV strikes, turning a Ukrainian battlefield improvisation into an active procurement template for a potential Pacific conflict.
