FP-2 specs. Fire Point art via Militarnyi
by DAVID AXE
In late February, a Ukrainian force of around a dozen battalion was stubbornly clinging to a 250-square-mile salient in Kursk Oblast in western Russia.
That salient was an embarrassment to Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin. So the Kremlin deployed its best drone unit to Kursk on a mission of supreme importance.
The Rubicon Center of Advanced Unmanned Systems wasn’t well-known at the time. But it quickly achieved fame in Russia — and notoriety in Ukraine. Surging unjammable fiber-optic first-person-view drones into Kursk, Rubicon destroyed hundreds of Ukrainian vehicles in the span of a few weeks, effectively collapsing the Ukrainians’ supply lines into Kursk.
In early March, the Ukrainian battalions in the salient beat a hasty retreat. And in the coming months, Rubicon packed up and moved to the next most important battlefield in Russia’s wider war on Ukraine: the one around Pokrovsk, a fortress city anchoring Ukrainian defenses in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast.
The Ukrainians aren’t just waiting around for Rubicon to do in Pokrovsk what it did in Kursk — sever the supply lines. They’re taking the fight to Rubicon. On Friday, Ukrainian forces located a Rubicon base in Ukrainsk, 13 miles south of Pokrovsk. They attacked with a new, more destructive strike drone — the Fire Point FP-2.
As a surveillance drone watched from overhead, four of the new FP-2s slammed into the building reportedly housing the Rubicon operators.