Inside Rubicon, The Elite Russian Drone Unit Wreaking Havoc On Ukraine's Troops

Months after their surprise invasion of Kursk in August 2024, Ukrainian forces were struggling to hold their lines in the Russian border region, facing intensifying pressure from a combination of Russian regular units and North Korean troops.

Then, a newly formed, little-known elite Russian drone unit turned up the pressure in a major way.

Part of a secretive, larger organization called Rubicon, the unit worked methodically, hammering the lines that supplied Ukrainian positions in the village of Sudzha, and making their holdout untenable.

Finally, in March, Ukraine pulled out of Kursk.

Ukrainian soldiers fly a drone near the front line in the southern Zaporizhzhya region. (file photo)

Nearly 44 months into Russia’s all-out invasion, Ukraine has relied on ingenuity and speed to devise new weapons and tactics to counter Russia’s bigger military. Moscow has responded in kind, slowly changing its tactics and ramping up its own technology.

Rubicon is causing major problems across the 1,100-kilometer front line, and Ukraine is struggling to find ways to counter it. New findings from RFE/RL’s Russian Service now shed more light on the unit and how it could be structured.

“Russia had several strong strike [drone] units in Kursk, but Rubicon was the main one there. Because of this, Ukraine was unable to supply its troops normally,” said Rob Lee, a former US Marine officer who is now a military analyst with the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

"They were a key reason why Russia was able to take back essentially all of Kursk Oblast in February and March,” he told RFE/RL’s Russian Service.

Rubicon has become “Russia's best technological unit,” said Maria Berlinska, head of the Ukrainian Aerial Reconnaissance Support Center, a nongovernment group that assists the military.

“Rubicon has brilliant management, works systematically, selects the best personnel, provides training, and supplies all necessary resources. They pour money into it,” Berlinska said in a Facebook post on August 21. “Everyone who knows how Rubicon works agrees on one thing: It is very effective. It is a system, while most of [Ukraine’s] front lines are still in a state of chaos.”

Rubicon, a secretive elite drone unit, was set up shortly after Andrei Belousov became Russia's defense minister. (file photo)

Who Commands Rubicon?

Established in the summer of 2024, possibly on the orders of newly appointed Defense Minister Andrei Belousov, the secretive unit is formally known as the Rubicon Center of Advanced Unmanned Systems, though it does not appear in Russian legal databases and its affiliation with the Defense Ministry is unclear.

Its commander, according to findings by RFE/RL’s Russian Service, appears to be Colonel Sergei Budnikov, a 37-year-old former artillery and marine infantry officer.
Budnikov appears in a video published in early February by Vladimir Solovyov, a Russian state TV host notorious for amplifying Kremlin propaganda and conspiracies.

A photograph from a now-deleted social media account of the wife of Colonel Sergei Budnikov, the commander of Russia's Rubicon drone organization.

Budnikov’s name also appears on two letters of gratitude published in July 2025 on the website of Brotherly Heart, a charitable organization that helps Russian veterans of the Ukraine war and whose board consists of former Russian intelligence officers.

Other photos of Budnikov appear on his wife’s now-deleted VK social media account.

A recruiter vetting Rubicon candidates told RFE/RL that signing bonuses for the unit were on par with bonuses paid by other military units in the Moscow region: up to 3 million rubles ($36,000).

Rubicon appears to be a hybrid organization that not only acquires and develops new drone technologies, but also tests new tactics and trains drone operators themselves. As of spring 2025, there were seven known Rubicon units, each with approximately 130-150 personnel, said Lee, who frequently travels to Ukraine’s front lines.

One of Rubicon’s main bases or training centers appears to be located at the Patriot Park Exhibition and Congress Center, according to the video published by Solovyov and other videos released by the Defense Ministry, including one featuring Belousov touring the center.

The sprawling facility on Moscow’s western suburbs, which has hosted major military exhibitions in the past, was hit by a Ukrainian attack drone on May 22; the scale of damage was unclear. Three days later, workers appeared to begin construction of a tower for a Pantsir air defense system.

Budnikov did not respond to e-mail inquiries from RFE/RL’s Russian Service.

Measure. Countermeasure. Counter-Countermeasure

Military analysts have closely scrutinized the evolution of warfare as both sides rush to pioneer new technologies and new systems. The dominance of drones has shifted battlefield tactics substantially, in some cases entirely away from traditional artillery.

Both sides have also rushed to develop countermeasures.

For example, a growing number of roads on Ukrainian-controlled territory are now lined with tunnels of netting, designed to thwart drones going after moving vehicles. Ukrainian drone operators have experimented with drones that drop nets from above, to entangle Russian drones.

Russian soldiers install netting on the faсade of a nursery in the Belgorod border region, to protect it from Ukrainian drone attacks. (file photo)

Ukraine and Russia have moved fast to build fleets of fiber-optic drones that spool out kilometers of filament as they fly, allowing drone operators to attack and surveil enemy locations without being electronically jammed.

“Ukraine had and still has an advantage in the development and high-quality use of unmanned technologies, but largely thanks to Rubicon, this gap has narrowed,” Lee said.

"What really surprised me was how the Russians improved, how they were employing their drones," Konrad Muzyka, a Polish-based military analyst, told RFE/RL after traveling to Ukrainian forward positions in July. "Rubicon is wreaking havoc on the Ukrainian second lines and the third lines [of defense] and they are just doing it in a very systematic, very methodical way."

Within Rubicon, each unit specializes in one aspect of Ukrainian drone warfare: some target first-person-view drones, others hunt reconnaissance drones, others focus on heavy-lift drones that might carry multiple explosives or small drones.

Rubicon also specializes in electronic-warfare and radio-signal reconnaissance, which helps to effectively locate Ukrainian drones and their operators.

Since February, Rubicon units have been systematically targeting Ukrainian drone operators who fly drones from positions far back behind the front lines. In one location, one Ukrainian brigade reported losing up to 70 percent of its drone operators in one week due to Rubicon targeting, Lee said.

As of September, according to statistics compiled by LostArmour, a pro-Kremlin open-source tracking site, more than 25 percent of all Rubicon strikes targeted drones, with another 15 percent targeting various radar, communications, and electronic warfare systems.

Lieutenant Colonel Kyrylo Veres, who commands a Ukrainian drone regiment, called Rubicon’s operations “top-notch.”

“The places where they’re operating, where they’re working; I don't envy [the Ukrainian] units,” Veres told Ukrayinska Pravda in July. “They are the best. Top guys. Let’s hope they don't scale up.”

Denys Mishchenko, a soldier with the Azov 12th Special Forces Brigade, said the Rubicon units “need to be studied, analyzed; countermeasures need to be found.”

“This is a very powerful enemy that needs to be given more attention,” he said in a post to X. “If you’ve met them, you’ll know what I’m talking about.”

Who Commands Rubicon?

Measure. Countermeasure. Counter-Countermeasure

With reporting by Current Time and Systema, RFE/RL’s Russia investigative unit