Russia’s elite drone unit says it used 1 million FPV drones

Russia's Rubicon Center claims it employed more than one million first-person-view drones and struck over 280,000 targets between January 2025 and August 2026. The specialized unit says it has accumulated more than 45,000 strike videos and expanded from an estimated 1,450 personnel in 2025 to roughly 5,000 in 2026, with fiber-optic-controlled drones forming part of its arsenal. The figures illustrate the scale Moscow attributes to concentrated drone operations, but they are Russian claims that have not been independently verified and do not establish how many attacks caused damage or hit unique targets.