Images And Videos Offer Insight Into Nature Of The Turbojet-Powered "Geran-3"

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Note: The following text was originally posted on my X/Twitter account.

This video is said to capture a Geran-3—a turbojet-powered version of the ordinarily propeller-driven Shahed-136/Geran-2/Garpiya strike drone—in flight over Kyiv on 28 August. There are also images of debris reportedly captured in Kyiv. There are no publicly available images of the Geran-3 at this time. The only unambiguous indication of its existence beyond the comments of Ukrainian officials is a picture of debris from a wing stabilizer (image 4) bearing the markings Герань-3 and У-36, with У being a new code for a new production run.

While Russia is understood to have received and employed at least one Iranian-built turbojet-powered Shahed-238 specimen, the Geran-3 may be a distinctively Russian branch of a cropped delta wing strike drone evolutionary tree that originated in Iran. Supposing that fragmentary Ukrainian commentary is accurate, there may be more than one turbojet-powered Shahed-136/Geran-2/Garpiya. In a separate X/Twitter post, I examined an undated winter video recording of the launch of a Shahed-136/Geran-2 that was very likely to have been rather crudely modified in Russia to use a small turbojet engine.

An expanded and more detailed analysis can be found in an earlier post: