Ukraine's Best New Attack Drones Flew 600 Miles to Blow Up a Critical Defense Plant in Western Russia

The VNIIR-Progress factory is a high-value target

14th UAS Regiment photo

On or just before Monday, Ukrainian drones motored more than 600 miles to blow up a factory in Cheboksary in western Russia.

Squint at the video of the strike and it seems the drones involved in the attack were UAC FP-1s. The FP-1 is one of Ukraine’s newest and best long-range strike drones. It may be one of the types in the arsenal of the 14th UAS Regiment, Ukraine’s leading deep-strike drone unit.

The VNIIR-Progress factory is a high-value target. It produces parts for S-400 air-defense batteries, tanks, fighting vehicles, drones, manned warplanes and warships.

The propeller-driven FP-1 travels as far as 1,000 miles with a warhead weighing up to 250 pounds, likely making it significantly more powerful than the roughly similar, but years older, UkrSpecSystems PD-1. The latter ranges maybe 600 miles, presumably with a lighter payload.

Ukrainian-Czech UAC tweaked a number of small things to extend the FP-1’s range and carrying capacity compared to older types. The main refinement is the landing gear: the FP-1 doesn’t have any. Instead of taking off on its own wheels like the PD-1 does, the FP-1 blasts off from an angled ramp. A fuselage-mounted rocket gives it a payload-increasing boost.

The new drone made its official public debut at a May exhibition in Kyiv. But production actually began in 2024—and the type has already seen action. FP-1s may have carried out the hit on the Optical Fiber Systems factory in Saransk, Mordovia, on April 4. The factory produces the thin optical fibers for Russia’s best unjammable first-person-view drones.

30,000 attack drones

Ukraine operates a wide array of domestically produced strike drones, and has bombarded targets such as factories, air bases and oil refineries hundreds of miles inside Russia.

The deepest strikes are the hardest, of course, and are often conducted by the small number of Aeroprakt A-22 sport planes that the Ukrainians have converted into far-flying attack drones—by replacing the human pilot with remote and autonomous control.

But the A-22s, each costing $80,000 or more before the addition of remote controls and warheads, are an imperfect solution to Ukraine’s long-range strike problem. They’re manned planes that Ukrainian industry converted into unmanned planes—and retain their voluminous cockpits.

They are, in other words, inefficient for unmanned strikes. That might explain why an A-22 or similar sport-plane drone evidently ranges just 800 miles or so with a 220-pound warhead.

The FP-1, which might cost more than $100,000, should travel farther with a similar payload. It helps that UAC omitted the landing gear, which on most manned planes accounts for up to 5% of the overall weight. If the gear folds into the fuselage for better aerodynamic efficiency, it also consumes a lot of internal volume.

It’s not for no reason that, when American firm Kratos developed a landing-gear variant of its ramp-launched Valkyrie fighter drone, it also reduced the drone’s payload from four bombs (weighing 1,000 pounds in total) to just two bombs (weighing 500 pounds in total).

There’s an even better way to launch a drone: mount it on a wheeled trolley that the drone jettisons on takeoff. That way, it can build up a high takeoff speed on a runway—and omit the rear-mounted rocket—without also having to lug around heavy landing gear.

This only works for reusable drones if they also have internal parachutes they can pop in order to float back down to their bases. The FP-1 is a one-way attack drone that slams into its target and explodes; it’s not expected to return.

More attacks like that on the Cheboksary factory are coming. In December, Ukrainian Pres. Volodymyr Zelensky called on Ukrainian industry to deliver 30,000 long-range drones this year. It’s possible thousands of them are FP-1s.

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