![\"Ukrainian](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/01000000-0aff-0242-7167-08dc566d90f4_w250_r1_s.jpg\"\/)
<\/p>\nMonths after their surprise invasion of Kursk in August 2024, Ukrainian forces were struggling to hold their lines in the Russian border region, facing intensifying pressure from a combination of Russian regular units and North Korean troops.<\/p>\n
Then, a newly formed, little-known elite Russian drone unit turned up the pressure in a major way.<\/p>\n
Part of a secretive, larger organization called Rubicon, the unit worked methodically, hammering the lines that supplied Ukrainian positions in the village of Sudzha, and making their holdout untenable.<\/p>\n
Finally, in March, Ukraine pulled out of Kursk.<\/p>\n
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Ukrainian soldiers fly a drone near the front line in the southern Zaporizhzhya region. (file photo)<\/p>\n
Nearly 44 months into Russia\u2019s all-out invasion, Ukraine has relied on ingenuity and speed to devise new weapons and tactics to counter Russia\u2019s bigger military. Moscow has responded in kind, slowly changing its tactics and ramping up its own technology.<\/p>\n
Rubicon is causing major problems across the 1,100-kilometer front line, and Ukraine is struggling to find ways to counter it. New findings from RFE\/RL\u2019s Russian Service<\/strong><\/a> now shed more light on the unit and how it could be structured.<\/p>\n \u201cRussia had several strong strike [drone] units in Kursk, but Rubicon was the main one there. Because of this, Ukraine was unable to supply its troops normally,\u201d said Rob Lee, a former US Marine officer who is now a military analyst with the Foreign Policy Research Institute.<\/p>\n “They were a key reason why Russia was able to take back essentially all of Kursk Oblast in February and March,\u201d he told RFE\/RL\u2019s Russian Service.<\/p>\n Rubicon has become \u201cRussia’s best technological unit,\u201d said Maria Berlinska, head of the Ukrainian Aerial Reconnaissance Support Center, a nongovernment group that assists the military.<\/p>\n \u201cRubicon has brilliant management, works systematically, selects the best personnel, provides training, and supplies all necessary resources. They pour money into it,\u201d Berlinska said in a Facebook post on August 21<\/strong><\/a>. <\/strong>\u201cEveryone who knows how Rubicon works agrees on one thing: It is very effective. It is a system, while most of [Ukraine\u2019s] front lines are still in a state of chaos.\u201d<\/p>\n Rubicon, a secretive elite drone unit, was set up shortly after Andrei Belousov became Russia’s defense minister. (file photo)<\/p>\n Who Commands Rubicon?<\/strong><\/p>\n Established in the summer of 2024, possibly on the orders of newly appointed Defense Minister Andrei Belousov, the secretive unit is formally known as the Rubicon Center of Advanced Unmanned Systems, though it does not appear in Russian legal databases and its affiliation with the Defense Ministry is unclear.<\/p>\n Its commander, according to findings by RFE\/RL\u2019s Russian Service, appears to be Colonel Sergei Budnikov, a 37-year-old former artillery and marine infantry officer. A photograph from a now-deleted social media account of the wife of Colonel Sergei Budnikov, the commander of Russia’s Rubicon drone organization.<\/p>\n Budnikov\u2019s name also appears on two letters of gratitude published in July 2025 on the website of Brotherly Heart, a charitable organization that helps Russian veterans of the Ukraine war and whose board consists of former Russian intelligence officers.<\/p>\n Other photos of Budnikov appear on his wife\u2019s now-deleted VK social media account.<\/p>\n A recruiter vetting Rubicon candidates told RFE\/RL that signing bonuses for the unit were on par with bonuses paid by other military units in the Moscow region: up to 3 million rubles ($36,000).<\/p>\n Rubicon appears to be a hybrid organization that not only acquires and develops new drone technologies, but also tests new tactics and trains drone operators themselves. As of spring 2025, there were seven known Rubicon units, each with approximately 130-150 personnel, said Lee, who frequently travels to Ukraine\u2019s front lines.<\/p>\n One of Rubicon\u2019s main bases or training centers appears to be located at the Patriot Park Exhibition and Congress Center, according to the video published by Solovyov and other videos released by the Defense Ministry, including one featuring Belousov touring the center.<\/p>\n The sprawling facility on Moscow\u2019s western suburbs, which has hosted major military exhibitions in the past, was hit by a Ukrainian attack drone on May 22; the scale of damage was unclear. Three days later, workers appeared to begin<\/strong><\/a> construction of a tower for a Pantsir air defense system.<\/p>\n Budnikov did not respond to e-mail inquiries from RFE\/RL\u2019s Russian Service.<\/p>\n Measure. Countermeasure. Counter-Countermeasure<\/strong><\/p>\n Military analysts have closely scrutinized the evolution of warfare as both sides rush to pioneer new technologies and new systems. The dominance of drones has shifted battlefield tactics substantially, in some cases entirely away from traditional artillery.<\/p>\n Both sides have also rushed to develop countermeasures.<\/p>\n For example, a growing number of roads on Ukrainian-controlled territory are now lined with tunnels of netting, designed to thwart drones going after moving vehicles. Ukrainian drone operators have experimented with drones that drop nets from above, to entangle Russian drones.<\/p>\n Russian soldiers install netting on the fa\u0441ade of a nursery in the Belgorod border region, to protect it from Ukrainian drone attacks. (file photo)<\/p>\n Ukraine and Russia have moved fast to build fleets of fiber-optic drones that spool out kilometers of filament as they fly, allowing drone operators to attack and surveil enemy locations without being electronically jammed.<\/p>\n \u201cUkraine had and still has an advantage in the development and high-quality use of unmanned technologies, but largely thanks to Rubicon, this gap has narrowed,\u201d Lee said.<\/p>\n “What really surprised me was how the Russians improved, how they were employing their drones,” Konrad Muzyka, a Polish-based military analyst, told RFE\/RL after traveling to Ukrainian forward positions in July. “Rubicon is wreaking havoc on the Ukrainian second lines and the third lines [of defense] and they are just doing it in a very systematic, very methodical way.”<\/p>\n Within Rubicon, each unit specializes in one aspect of Ukrainian drone warfare: some target first-person-view drones, others hunt reconnaissance drones, others focus on heavy-lift drones that might carry multiple explosives or small drones.<\/p>\n Rubicon also specializes in electronic-warfare and radio-signal reconnaissance, which helps to effectively locate Ukrainian drones and their operators.<\/p>\n Since February, Rubicon units have been systematically targeting Ukrainian drone operators who fly drones from positions far back behind the front lines. In one location, one Ukrainian brigade reported losing up to 70 percent of its drone operators in one week due to Rubicon targeting, Lee said.<\/p>\n As of September, according to statistics compiled by LostArmour, a pro-Kremlin open-source tracking site, more than 25 percent of all Rubicon strikes targeted drones, with another 15 percent targeting various radar, communications, and electronic warfare systems.<\/p>\n Lieutenant Colonel Kyrylo Veres, who commands a Ukrainian drone regiment, called Rubicon\u2019s operations \u201ctop-notch.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe places where they\u2019re operating, where they\u2019re working; I don’t envy [the Ukrainian] units,\u201d Veres told Ukrayinska Pravda in July.<\/strong><\/a> \u201cThey are the best. Top guys. Let\u2019s hope they don’t scale up.\u201d<\/p>\n Denys Mishchenko, a soldier with the Azov 12th Special Forces Brigade, said the Rubicon units \u201cneed to be studied, analyzed; countermeasures need to be found.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"Rubicon,](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/00db589a-0fc2-4702-413b-08dde4de7540_w250_r0_s.jpg\"\/)
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Budnikov appears in a video published in early February by Vladimir Solovyov, a Russian state TV host notorious for amplifying Kremlin propaganda and conspiracies.<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/8bc8a2e6-1b07-4370-8bb0-08dde5383204_w250_r0_s.jpg\"\/)
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