Pilots of the Armed Forces became targets for the elite "Rubicon" unit of the Russian Federation: what the Russians invented, — FT

During the two years of the Russian-Ukrainian war, drone crews of the Armed Forces of Ukraine worked freely on the front line, but recently everything has changed, according to an article in The Financila Times. The "Rubikon" unit of the Russian Armed Forces specializes in attacks specifically on Ukrainian operators, and now they themselves have become the "object of hunting".

The media wrote that the Ukrainians should create a new tactic of using drones to deal with threats from the Russian Rubicon. The FT spoke with several operators of the Air Defense Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine — Dmytro, "Zummer", Artem Karyakin. They told how they had to miraculously escape from enemy UAVs, while before they worked "like on a holiday". It turned out that the Russian infantry is successful because of the work of the elite unit of the Russian Armed Forces.

The article describes the systematic tactics of Rubicon. The center has a fleet of fighter UAVs that specialize in drone operators for the Armed Forces. Intelligence works separately — tracking logistics, signs of hiding places of Ukrainians. At the same time, EW systems are operating, which shoot down drones, as well as radio direction finding and signal interception. "Rubicon is our main problem. It's easy to replace a drone, but it's hard to replace a drone pilot.

It's more than just a unit; it's a center — a center for the development of all kinds of unmanned systems," Rob Lee, an analyst at the Philadelphia Institute for Foreign Policy Studies, told the media. Due to the orderly work of the "Rubicon" center, the Russians gained an advantage near Pokrovsk, the article explains.

Due to the problems of the Ukrainian operators, the units of the Russian Armed Forces have greater freedom of movement, and the Ukrainians are retreating due to a lack of personnel. The FT also made several suggestions as to how Ukraine can cope with the new tactics of the Russian Armed Forces. Among them are better camouflage, avoiding standard patterns of behavior, improving the operation of your own EW devices, creating your own units that will hunt down enemy operators.

"They have a lot of people, which means they can work 24 hours a day, seven days a week," the FT wrote, while noting that Dmytro's brigade has already created the appropriate secret units. Meanwhile, the Russian propaganda media "RIA Novosti" first wrote about the Rubicon center in October 2024. The journalists showed the visit of the head of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, Andriy Belousov, who said that at that time there were two combat groups.

The video shows examples of Rubicon strikes that were carried out on land and on water, using strike and reconnaissance drones. Focus wrote about the "Rubikon" unit of the Russian Armed Forces, which appeared in the Kursk area in February-March 2025. Forbes media reported that Russian operators began to destroy the crossings that would block the soldiers of the Armed Forces, and took all the logistics routes under fire control.

In the summer and autumn, it became known about attacks on Ukrainian positions on the eastern front, carried out by drones of the "Rubikon" center of the Russian Armed Forces. In August, a soldier of the Armed Forces with the call sign "Muchnoi" wrote that Russian drone operators had appeared in the Pokrovsky area, flying around the city and coordinating the work of the DRG in the middle of the city.