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.

🔒 The full V2U file is for BattlePolicy Pro members. Below the line: development history, design and capabilities, variants, the combat record, advantages and limitations, comparable systems, outlook, the full specifications table, our sourcing, and the analyst assessment — procurement, suppliers and the BattlePolicy verdict. Unlock the full file with BattlePolicy Pro →