V2U

The drone with nothing to jam — the V2U is Russia's autonomous strike weapon: a small catapult-launched aircraft that navigates by comparing what its camera sees to preloaded terrain imagery, hunts targets with a neural network running on an Nvidia Jetson computer, and — in airframes recovered from late 2025 onward — carries no radio modem at all. Ukrainian intelligence tore one down in June 2025 and found a machine built almost entirely from Chinese commercial parts around an American AI chip. CSIS's assessment is blunt: Russia has likely fielded a fully autonomous unmanned system in combat, and keeps iterating despite the civilian casualties.

Overview

The V2U is the system where the autonomous-weapons debate stopped being theoretical. A ~1.2 m-wingspan, electric, catapult-launched loitering munition employed since February 2025 on the Sumy and Kharkiv axes, it differs from everything before it in how it finds its way and its prey: visual navigation — live camera feed matched against a 128 GB onboard imagery database — in place of jammable satellite links, and an onboard YOLO-class neural network that detects vehicles, infrastructure and people by shape, contrast and motion. The compute core, identified in Ukrainian military intelligence's (HUR) June 2025 teardown, is an Nvidia Jetson Orin module on a ~$380 Chinese carrier board. Early airframes kept an LTE modem (with Ukrainian SIM cards) as a manual-control fallback; units recovered in October–November 2025 had no modem or external communications whatsoever — operator control physically impossible, electronic warfare "largely ineffective… there is no signal to jam," per CSIS. Field reporting describes group employment — two to seven aircraft in staggered formation, wings painted with distinct markings apparently for mutual visual recognition — though CSIS is explicit that the swarm interpretation remains inferential. The manufacturer is unknown, even to HUR. The warhead is a ~3 kg combined-effect charge; range spans 40 km to 100+ in a gasoline-engined variant; and the most-cited incident — a seven-drone group deviating from its planned mission to attack vehicles at a market in Velykyi Burluk — is either a targeting failure or a policy, and both readings are grim.

Development

The V2U surfaced obliquely: photographed at a September 2024 cadet expo in Kazan, then unnamed until Ukraine's HUR published a full component teardown on its War & Sanctions portal on 9 June 2025, per Defense Express — an "unboxing" that identified the Jetson Orin brain, the Chinese Leetop carrier board, a 128 GB SSD holding terrain and target imagery, a downward-facing Chinese LiDAR, a single deprioritized GPS module, and an LTE modem-router with a Ukrainian mobile operator's SIM for optional manual control, per Militarnyi. Combat employment had begun that February in the Sumy region; by mid-May 2025 Ukrainian EW authority Serhii "Flash" Beskrestnov counted 30–50 sorties per day across several sectors — tempo he read as partly live AI training, per FDD's Long War Journal. May 2025 brought the flagship incident: a reported seven-drone group at Velykyi Burluk that abandoned its pre-planned route after spotting vehicles near a Nova Poshta depot and people at a market, held a circular pattern, and attacked in coordination — with FDD's pointed caution that if the targets were civilian and autonomously chosen, the system either cannot distinguish civilians or is programmed not to. The decisive evolution came in autumn: October–November 2025 airframes recovered with no communications hardware at all — the transition to full autonomy — followed by reports of variants hunting at ~100 km and, by CSIS's April 2026 assessment, continued iteration in combat, with recovered software suggesting reconnaissance and even courier versions of a modular family.

🔒 The rest of the V2U file is for BattlePolicy Pro members. Stop here and you miss the part that actually matters: the full teardown findings and supply chain, how real the autonomy actually is claim by claim, the swarm question examined skeptically, how it stacks up against the Lancet and Ukraine's AI drones, the complete specifications table, and our analysts' assessment notes. Unlock the full file with BattlePolicy Pro →