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

“They’re basically refining the efforts of using the most advanced technologies to look for and destroy these drones,” Bendett, who pointed out the development in a post on X, told Business Insider.

While the FPV drones are cheap, attritable systems, Bendett said that they are far more dynamic than using a machine gun to simply destroy the inbound threat. Russia can use the FPV drones for a range of missions, including intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition, and reconnaissance purposes, in addition to threat elimination.

Using swings to mimic the motion of waves in adverse weather is a relatively new aspect of this training, Bendett said. However, the effectiveness of FPV drones may end up being quite limited in bad weather anyways because they’re small and light and would be vulnerable to strong winds and rains.

It’s not uncommon for Russia to put its soldiers through training like this. In fact, it’s a practice other militaries do as well. For example, US soldiers training to defeat FPV drones are doing so by shooting at balloons flapping in wind, which is supposed to mimic the unpredictable movement of an FPV drone in combat.

FPV drones strapped with various types of explosives have been an omnipresent threat on the battlefield in Ukraine, with both sides regularly using them to carry out precision strikes on enemy armor, positions, and troops.

“What we have is this application of technology that’s proven itself in ground combat. Now we have it applied on water and in maritime engagements,” Bendett said.

Bendett pointed out that in the Zvezda video of the counter-drone training, Russia is using 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’s only simulating a naval drone.

Little is known about Russia’s naval drone program, but these systems will likely be used beyond training scenarios.

“They obviously didn’t build it just so it can 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 possible combat operations — whatever that means to them and for them.”