Sea Baby

Ukraine's SBU-developed multi-purpose uncrewed surface vessel — from one-way ramming strikes on the Kerch Bridge and Black Sea Fleet ships to a modular platform firing rockets, missiles, and mines, culminating in the world's first underwater drone attack on a submarine.

Overview

The Sea Baby (Ukrainian: "Морський малюк" – Mors'kyi malyuk) is a family of uncrewed surface vessels (USVs) developed in-house by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) for asymmetric naval warfare. Conceived as an explosive-laden one-way attack drone, the design has evolved into a reusable multi-mission platform capable of laying mines, firing thermobaric and artillery rockets, engaging air and surface targets with adapted missiles and heavy machine guns, and acting as a mothership for smaller aerial attack drones. Its heavy warhead — up to 850 kg on the baseline model and a claimed ~2,000 kg on the 2025 generation — made it the largest Ukrainian USV charge when revealed and was explicitly sized for fortified infrastructure targets such as the Kerch Bridge. A submerged derivative, “Sub Sea Baby,” achieved the world’s first successful uncrewed underwater vehicle (UUV) attack on a submarine in December 2025.

Development

The SBU’s Brig. Gen. Ivan Lukashevych proposed a dedicated agency USV effort after the February 2022 invasion; early designs were drafted in July 2022 with Ukrainian Navy specialists before the SBU took development entirely in-house at a covert production facility, according to Wikipedia. While the parallel military-intelligence (GUR) program produced the Magura V5 optimized for agile anti-ship strikes, the SBU sized Sea Baby from the start for heavy warheads against static, heavily defended targets — specifically the Kerch Bridge and port infrastructure TWZ. After a Starlink-denial incident during an attempted early mission, the program added redundant satellite-communication channels, and late-2023 hulls carried an 850 kg warhead, a major increase from the ~108 kg of early builds Covert Shores. Continuous evolution brought modular weapon fits in 2024, and in October 2025 the SBU unveiled a new generation with a claimed ~1,500 km range, ~2,000 kg payload, AI-assisted friend-or-foe target recognition, and a drone-launching capability — a shift the project commander framed as moving “from a single-use strike craft into a reusable, multi-purpose platform” Euronews. Ukraine later signaled a willingness to export the Sea Baby line as part of a “controlled export” of battle-tested weapons.

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