Ukraine Now Using Drone Boats for Riverine Strikes
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Rivers are systems. Whoever learns them faster tends to win.
This has been true for thousands of years. The Nile made Egypt a civilization instead of a collection of villages. The Danube anchored empires and broke them when control slipped. The Mississippi shaped the American Civil War not with one battle, but by strangling logistics until resistance collapsed.
In Vietnam, rivers became something darker. They were highways that bit back.
That lesson never really left military history. It just went dormant until Ukraine woke it up again.
Years ago, I watched a friend of mine restore a Vietnam-era Patrol Boat River, a Mark II PBR, in a cold Michigan boatyard.
He was an Afghanistan veteran, an infantryman, and stubborn in the way only ground troops can be when they decide something matters.
He did not want a museum prop. He wanted a working boat, built correctly, engines rebuilt to spec, layout faithful to the war it came from.
Vietnam veterans showed up almost immediately. They were cautious at first. Too many people had turned their war into mythology or kitsch. That changed when they realized this was real.
They talked about rivers the way only people who fought on them do. Not poetically, but practically.
Rivers were unpredictable. Rivers hid enemies. Rivers punished complacency. You did not own a river because you had boats. You survived a river because you understood it better than the other guy.
Ukraine understands that too.
The expansion of Ukraine’s uncrewed surface vessel operations into the Dnipro River marks a quiet but significant evolution in the war.
Ukraine did not beat the Black Sea Fleet by building a navy. It beat the Black Sea Fleet by turning the sea into a minefield that thinks, films, and chooses its own angle for the kill shot.
Sea Baby and Magura are disposable strike aircraft that happen to float, and they have forced Russia to relearn naval warfare the hard way.
The most visible successes are the confirmed hits on high-value hulls.
In early 2024, Ukraine’s military intelligence said it sank the Russian landing ship Caesar Kunikov with Magura V5 sea drones near Crimea. That matters because Ropucha-class style landing ships are logistics muscle.
They move vehicles, ammunition, and people, and they do it without needing a friendly port every twenty miles. Taking one off the board is not a morale stunt. It is a direct reduction in Russia’s ability to sustain forces along the littoral and in occupied Crimea.
Around the same period, Ukraine also claimed the destruction of the patrol ship Sergey Kotov with the same Magura family of drones.
