Russians Discover Ukrainian Solution to Fiber-Optic Drones

The Ukrainian military has begun deploying special engineering barriers to prevent fiber-optic drones from flying behind the front line.

Footage of the Ukrainian invention was posted by Russian blogger Ramzai.

The idea behind the simple engineering design, which consists of a stretched barbed wire, is to break the fiber-optic cable that gets on it by rotating the barb around its axis.

This solution can be effective because fiber-optic drones do not pull the cable in the air, but rather lay it on the ground behind them.

In the intercepted video, a Ukrainian soldier says that the 150-meter-long fence is powered by a battery and controlled by a small controller. It rotates with a one-minute pause every minute, thus working 12 hours a day.

The need for manual installation of this design will not allow blocking the front lines, but it can solve another important problem – drone strikes in the rear of Ukrainian positions and ambushes on logistics routes.

Fiber-optic drones, enabled by uninterrupted communication, have become the main obstacle to the resupply and rotation of Ukrainian troops.

Already today, troops on both sides of the frontline are successfully using these drones to strike targets up to 40 kilometers deep. For example, in May, the operators of the Birds of Magyar brigade hit Russian tanks in a hideout at a record distance of 42 kilometers.

Trends toward increasing the flight range of fiber-optic drones are increasing: this month, the Russians tested a Molniya-2 aircraft-type FPV drone with a 40-kilometer coil.

Ukrainian developers are also working on a similar product, and in July they presented a prototype of a twin-engine version of the Darts drone with a 50-kilometer fiber optic coil. At that time, the product was undergoing its first flight tests and was not ready for combat use.

The key advantage of such aircraft with a similar range is their higher speed, which reduces the flight time during which the enemy or other circumstances can cut the fragile cable.

Prototype of the Darts attack drone with a fiber-optic communication system, July 2025. Photo credits: Armiia TV

Militarnyi previously published a detailed study of the hypothesis of finding fiber-optic drone control points using laser illumination and the practical results that Ukrainian and enemy researchers have come to.