On the night of 1 February 2024, six Magura V5 drone boats ran at the Russian missile corvette Ivanovets near Lake Donuzlav in occupied Crimea. The ship went down. Its crew was reported at around 40.
Thirteen days later the large landing ship Tsezar Kunikov was sunk near Alupka. On 5 March the patrol ship Sergey Kotov followed, near the Kerch Strait. Ukrainian intelligence attributes all three kills to Group 13, a unit of the Main Directorate of Intelligence, known as HUR, flying Magura V5s.
From fishing boat to production line
The Magura started small. In early summer 2022, Ukraine’s security service told four engineers to “do something with enemy fleet,” and they built the first boat from a 6 meter fishing-boat hull, cut down and fitted with an outboard motor. A second version swapped in jet-ski propulsion. The third, operational by October 2022, carried a warhead of roughly 150 kg buried in the hull and could be assembled in scattered workshops.
The V5 reached public attention at a Turkish defense exhibition in July 2023. It is a 5.5 meter planing hull that sits about half a meter above the waterline, driven by a waterjet, with the warhead inside the bow. Satellite and inertial systems guide the transit, and electro-optical and night-vision gear handle the final run. Video and telemetry move over mesh radio and satellite links, and the answer to jamming is having several channels rather than one hardened one.
The larger V7 weighs about three and a half times as much and runs on a 270 horsepower diesel. Its endurance is 48 hours, stretching to seven days with a generator powering the electronics. A V7 can carry 650 kg, enough for a warhead plus a weapon station, or drones instead of a warhead. A V5 carrying 320 kg hauls a warhead and nothing else, so every V5 mission ends with the boat.
How the attacks worked
The Group 13 commander has described the method. The first drone in is the “hooligan,” and its job is to hit the target wherever it can. “The first drone must reach the target because after that, we have an algorithm,” he said. The opening blast scrambles the crew’s coordination, and later drones strike with precision, in the reported Ivanovets attack going for the breach the one before had opened.
A 250 kg warhead will not sink a compartmentalized warship alone. Six of them arriving in sequence against a vessel of roughly 550 tonnes caused flooding and internal detonation. The tactic needs numbers, which is why a cheap hull matters.
The Sergey Kotov showed the limit. It survived earlier attacks, and the commander credited its crew: “Sergey Kotov’s team was working well together. Each of them knew what to do.” Neither side says how many drones were spent on attempts that failed.
After the relocation
Russia moved naval assets east from Sevastopol to Novorossiysk and other mainland ports from 2023 onward, a shift of roughly 300 km that put them behind harbor defenses. No Russian warship has been publicly confirmed sunk by a Magura since March 2024. Analyst David Axe wrote that “there were zero hard kills against Russian warships between late 2024 and late 2025,” and called uncrewed surface vessels “weapons of desperation. Or, at best, expedients.”
The mission did not end, though. On 30 May 2024, Magura V5s destroyed two KS-701 Tunets patrol boats off north-western Crimea, despite Russian fighters, helicopters and 30 mm cannon fire. Newer Ukrainian naval drones, among them the Sargan, have since taken part in attacks on Novorossiysk, and the Magura was not named in the 12 August 2026 operation.
