KYIV. Ukraine has turned its naval drones into mother ships. The Black Sea robo-boats that terrorized Russia’s fleet are now launching squadrons of FPV attack drones and thermobaric rockets from open water, expanding the strike envelope of an already revolutionary weapons program.
The Sea Baby, developed by Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU), now carries six to eight FPV attack drones in side compartments alongside Shmel thermobaric rockets. Some of the onboard FPVs are fiber-optic guided, making them immune to electronic jamming. With a range of 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) and a payload capacity of 4,400 pounds (2,000 kilograms), the Sea Baby can loiter in the Black Sea and release its aerial swarm far from Ukrainian-held coastline.
“the SBU became the first in the world to pioneer this new kind of naval warfare, and we continue to advance it,” Brig. Gen. Ivan Lukashevych told Defense News.
Ukraine operates two distinct families of uncrewed surface vessels. The Sea Baby is run by the SBU, the domestic security service. The Magura, built by Uforce for the GUR military intelligence directorate, follows a separate development track. Both use AI-assisted targeting and navigation systems that allow them to operate autonomously when communications are jammed, a critical capability against Russia’s electronic warfare assets.
The cost per boat runs a few hundred thousand dollars, less than a modern torpedo. That price tag has made the economics of naval drone warfare impossible for traditional navies to ignore.
Uforce CEO Oleg Roginsky confirmed the company is in talks with Indo-Pacific buyers and weighing production sites in the region. “Magura’s successes on the Ukrainian-Russian front confirm their value for use in the Indo-Pacific region,” he said.
The United States has already taken notice. On June 24, U.S. special forces sank a target ship with a Ukrainian Magura drone during Exercise Balikatan 2026 in the Philippines. It marked the first operational use of a Ukrainian naval drone in the Indo-Pacific theater. The Pentagon plans to field thousands of small uncrewed surface vessels in the Indo-Pacific by 2030, and U.S. defense planners have been studying Ukraine’s battlefield-tested acquisition methods. A July 2025 report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies urged Washington to copy Ukraine’s approach to buying and fielding drones at speed.
Ukraine’s robo-boat campaign has already achieved what no navy has done in modern history. Since 2022, Ukrainian naval drones have sunk or damaged approximately 12 Russian warships, forcing the Black Sea Fleet to abandon its base at Sevastopol and pull back to Novorossiysk. On December 15, 2025, a Sub Sea Baby underwater drone struck an Improved Kilo-class submarine in port, marking the first time an uncrewed underwater vehicle ever attacked and damaged a submarine.
NATO allies have been training with Ukrainian tactics. At the REPMUS exercise in Portugal in September 2025, Ukraine’s navy led the red team and won all five scenarios, demonstrating that the tactics honed in the Black Sea translate directly to NATO operational frameworks.
The implications for global naval warfare are stark. A navy facing Ukrainian-style drone swarms must now contend not only with surface drones packed with explosives but with aerial munitions launched from those same drones in open water. The robo-boats have become mobile launch platforms that can release a volley of guided FPVs before a traditional warship’s weapons systems can track and engage them.
What began as a desperation move to counter a vastly superior fleet has become a template for the future of naval combat. And Ukraine keeps finding new ways to make the platforms do more work.