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Battlefield First! Ukrainian Sea Drone Drops Two Russian Su-30 Fighters with Sidewinders
How many times have I said the words “Battlefield First” in the past ten years of covering the Ukraine conflict? A lot…
Hey friends, I don’t usually post on Mondays, but I wanted to get this breaking news out.
On May 3, 2025, Ukraine quietly redrew the map of modern warfare. In a first-of-its-kind operation, two Russian Su-30 Flanker fighter jets were shot down by air-to-air missiles launched from an unmanned surface vessel in the Black Sea.
According to Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence (HUR), the strike occurred near Novorossiysk, a Russian port city, using a US-supplied AIM-9 Sidewinder missile fired from one of Ukraine’s newly upgraded Magura-7 naval drones.
Two Su-30s were reportedly destroyed in the engagement, marking the first confirmed kill of a manned, fixed-wing aircraft by a surface drone.
The drones were operated by Group 13, a special unit within HUR, in coordination with Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) and conventional defense forces. While sea drones were already a core component of Ukraine’s asymmetrical playbook, this operation moves them into a whole new category: floating, fast, mobile anti-aircraft systems capable of denying airspace over hundreds of miles of contested waters.
