Yuriy Kasyanov: our volunteer long-range UAV unit – creator of strikes on Moscow – has been disbanded; crews reassigned, mission ended, future uncertain.
Yuriy Kasyanov on disband of his drone unit.
The end of the story. A week ago a decision was made to disband our company of long-range strike UAVs attached to the 10th Mobile Detachment of the State Border Guard Service (SBGS).
Tomorrow I must arrive at the new place of service. What I will do, what position I will hold — unknown. Definitely not the long-range UAVs I have worked with for the last three years.
In February 2024 the head of the SBGS, Serhiy Deineka, personally in his office invited me, my son Maksym, and the strike UAV company we had created to join the SBGS from the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU). Back then he was thrilled with our successes; now the company has been disbanded, and Maksym and I are being sent to different detachments.
I am an engineer, a UAV designer; since 2014 more than 20 types of UAVs have been developed under my leadership. What I will be doing now — I still don’t know. Something important.
Maksym and I have been at war since April 2014. Maksym — still a student then — was a fighter in the first volunteer battalion of General Kulchytskyi; I was a volunteer.
Then we became among the very first UAV operators in the war. Maksym passed a tough selection and fought as part of Special Forces Brigade 3018 (“Rubezh”) — also as a UAV operator. Maksym is a talented commander, the organizer of dozens of successful long-range strikes. Mission planning, execution, reconnaissance, analytics. Now he will have to retrain.
Since the start of the full-scale war Maksym and I have fought together, watching each other’s backs. Now we have been separated. It’s sad.
All our long-range crews, specialists in long-range drones, will now be learning other professions. It’s a real shame that the specialists who came to us voluntarily are now being sent to serve in other SBGS detachments and do different work.
The long-range strike UAV project — one of the first in Ukraine, built from scratch by volunteers in 2022, which struck Moscow, the Kremlin, and inflicted hundreds of millions of dollars in damage on the enemy — no longer exists.
The end of the story. Or only the beginning?..
Goodbye, for now.
Tags: drone unit kasyanov zelenskyy
