Russian sailors practice flying drones in swings so they can chase Ukraine’s exploding drone boats from warships on the waves

• Ukraine has used naval drones to damage and destroy ships of the Russian Black Sea Fleet.

• Russia has begun deploying small FPV drones to train its crews to locate and eliminate the threat.

• Today, these drones are operated by sailors as they rock back and forth on swings to simulate waves.

Russia has struggled to effectively protect its Black Sea Fleet from Ukraine’s arsenal of exploding naval drones, which Kiev used in attacks on Moscow’s warships during the war.

But a new video shows that the Russian Defense Ministry is taking additional steps to protect its naval units from Ukrainian drones, by putting sailors through a more realistic — if strange-looking — training process.

Zvezda News, a state network run by Russia’s Defense Ministry, shared footage on Wednesday showing Russian sailors rocking back and forth as they piloted drones in first-person view (FPV) mode over the waters of the Gulf of Finland.

The video shows a Russian naval drone, also known as an unmanned surface vehicle (USV), on the water’s surface. This drone is said to be mimicking the Ukrainian systems that have wreaked havoc on the Black Sea Fleet.

In a Telegram statement, Zvezda said the swinging motion is intended to familiarize sailors with the waves. The channel said drones are “highly sought after” among sailors and can “effectively fight” against naval drones.

Ukraine claims it sank, damaged or destroyed a ship at least a third of the Black Sea Fleet since the beginning of the war, the British Ministry of Defence said.

The Ukrainian military and security services have used a combination of locally produced naval drones And anti-ship missiles during this successful campaign, which forced the Black Sea Fleet spread from its headquarters to the occupied Crimean peninsula and move closer to Russia.

The naval drones – the main ones are the Sea Baby And Magura V5 — have been particularly difficult. Russia has taken a number of countermeasures to protect its warships, such as conducting increased patrols with fighter jets, machine gun crews on board her ships, and adding more defenses in the harbor.

Many of these labor-intensive efforts have been largely unsuccessful in curbing the threat. A more cost-effective solution for Russia to defeat Ukrainian drones might be to use its own drones.

Samuel Bendett, an advisor at the Center for Naval Analyses and an expert on drones and Russian defense, said Moscow has been using FPV drones for some time in training to defeat Ukrainian naval drones.

“They are essentially refining efforts to use the most advanced technologies to detect and destroy these drones,” said Bendett, who oversaw the development in a post on Xtold Business Insider.

While the FPV drones are low-cost, attributable systems, Bendett said they are much more dynamic than simply using a machine gun to destroy the incoming threat. Russia can use the FPV drones for a range of missions, including intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition and reconnaissance purposes, in addition to eliminating threats.

Using swings to mimic the motion of waves in bad weather is a relatively new aspect of this training, Bendett said. However, the effectiveness of FPV drones can be limited in bad weather anyway, because they are small and light and vulnerable to strong winds and rain.

It is not uncommon for Russia to train its soldiers in this way. In fact, it is a practice that other militaries follow as well. For example, American soldiers who train to defeat FPV drones do so by shooting at balloons fluttering in the windwhich must simulate the unpredictable movements of an FPV drone during a battle.

FPV drones carrying various types of explosives are a ubiquitous threat on the battlefield in Ukraine, with both sides regularly using them to carry out precision strikes on enemy tanks, positions and troops.

“What we have is this application of technology that has proven itself in ground combat, and now we have applied it to the water and to maritime combat,” Bendett said.

Bendett pointed out that in the Zvezda video of the anti-drone training, Russia uses a domestically produced naval drone to mimic a Ukrainian system. This gives sailors an even more realistic training environment, as opposed to simply placing an object in the water that only simulates a naval drone.

Little is known about Russia’s naval drone program, but these systems will likely be used for purposes other than training.

“They clearly didn’t build it just to be a target for USVs,” Bendett said. “They built it for counter-USV operations, they built it for (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) operations, they built it for potential combat operations — whatever that means for them and for them.”

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