Russia's "Rubicon Center" Uses Multirotor Drones To Attack Ukrainian Natural Gas Compressor Station

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The Russian military’s “Rubicon Center” has released a video compilation of armed “FPV” multirotor drone attacks targeting a Ukrainian natural gas compressor station that is located some 19 kilometers northwest of the Ukrainian city of Sumy and around 16 kilometers from the international border. While largely dormant following the withdrawal of Russian forces from northern Ukraine by April 2022, this section of the international border was reactivated following Ukraine’s August 2024 Kursk offensive. Having ejected Ukrainian forces from Russia’s Kursk province, the Russian military currently controls a small area of territory on the Ukrainian side of the international border as a buffer zone of sorts, and Russian armed “FPV” multirotor drone teams are not only active in this sector but regularly attack targets at a depth of some 20-30 kilometers from the frontlines/international border. It is worth noting that the center of Sumy is located around 25 kilometers from the frontlines.

The targeted natural gas compressor station is well within the range of Russia’s armed “FPV” multirotor drones and its armed “FPV” fixed-wing drones. Notably, all of the dozen or so documented attacks featured in the video compilation appear to have been undertaken using armed drones equipped with a radio frequency communication uplink/downlink, which is attested by the loss of the line-of-sight radio frequency communication uplinks/downlinks as the armed drones descended in altitude. While the video compilation indicates that at least two armed drones were used simultaneously, the remote human operators/pilots would have had no way to control the armed “FPV” multirotor drones of the radio frequency uplink/downlink variety as the descending drones went beyond the line-of-sight of the ground-based uplink/downlink antenna(s). Most of the documented attacks are, as such, likely to have been quite inaccurate and resulted in very limited damage, given the very modest destructive radius of munitions that are equipped with a warhead weighing just several kilograms. It is unclear why the Russian military did not employ armed “FPV” multirotor drones of the fiber-optic communication uplink/downlink variety, given how these can be used to undertake the highly surgical micro-level targeting of discrete objects. That said, the Russian military could have used a guided glide bomb or a Shahed-136/Geran-2/Garpiya strike drone if it really wanted to render wholly unusable—destroy, not damage—this natural gas compressor station.

While the Russian military’s “Rubicon Center,” which primarily operates armed "FPV” multirotor drones but appears to be branching out into several new areas, has rapidly risen in prominence, it is difficult to say whether the (documented) repeated targeting of such a politically sensitive and rather “strategic” target reflects a directive from Moscow or the local initiative of drone operators/pilots operating in the Sumy sector. Much the same can be said about other publicly known documented cases in which Russian armed “FPV” multirotor drones have been used to undertake the highly surgical micro-level targeting of energy infrastructure elsewhere in Ukraine. There have been several very prominent documented attacks of this type in the Kherson metropolitan area, which I covered in a recent post.