Baba Yaga (R-18 class)

Ukraine's family of reusable heavy multicopter strike drones — nicknamed "Baba Yaga" by Russian troops, built for nocturnal bombing, remote mine-laying, resupply, and communications relay, and now produced at a scale that Russia is struggling to match and increasingly turning to captured units to fill its own gap.

Overview

The name "Baba Yaga" — borrowed from Slavic folklore’s witch in a mortar — has become the battlefield umbrella for Ukraine’s heavy multirotor bomber drones. No single Ukrainian military designation covers the class; instead the label clings to every platform that loiters over Russian positions after dark, dropping fragmentation, thermobaric, and cumulative munitions from 100–500 metres before returning to base. The historical anchor is Aerorozvidka’s R18, a 2017 volunteer project that first gave Ukrainian troops a reusable heavy-lift multirotor. The modern workhorse is SkyFall’s Vampire-6 hexacopter, produced at a claimed rate of 100,000 units per year defence-ua.com, alongside Reactive Drone’s Kazhan and Ukrainian Dynamics’ Nemesis. Together they account for roughly two-thirds of all heavy-multicopter missions on the Ukrainian front AIN, making the class one of the most prolific reusable strike systems of the war.

Development

The lineage starts with Aerorozvidka’s R18, developed in 2017 as an adaptation of commercial agricultural octocopters to carry heavier payloads than the hobby-grade quadcopters flooding the Donbas front Wikipedia. Early R18s carried roughly 5 kg of explosives, often modified RPG-7 warheads, over a 5 km radius, forcing launch crews dangerously close to Russian lines. The full-scale invasion of 2022 accelerated everything. SkyFall, a Kyiv-based startup, built the first Vampire prototypes “in a garage” and delivered them to the front on 6 July 2022, according to a company representative Army Recognition. Reactive Drone’s Kazhan (“Bat”) appeared later that year, entering larger-scale production in 2024. By 2025 the class had undergone a generational leap: AI-assisted targeting, triple-band redundant communications, solid-state batteries with auto-heating for winter operations, and mission radii extended by Starlink relay became hallmarks of the latest iterations Caliber.az.

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