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Ukraine Presents New Generation of Sea Baby Naval Drones to Sustain Pressure in the Black Sea.
Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) introduced a new generation of Sea Baby unmanned surface vessels on October 22, featuring longer range, heavier payloads, and greater mission versatility. The upgrade reflects Kyiv’s ongoing strategy to maintain asymmetric naval pressure on Russian forces and infrastructure in the Black Sea.
On October 22, 2025, Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) unveiled a new generation of its Sea Baby unmanned surface vessels, marking a significant advancement in the country’s maritime drone capabilities. According to the SBU, the upgraded Sea Baby platforms feature enhanced range, increased payload capacity, and improved mission flexibility, attributes refined through extensive operational deployment in the Black Sea. This development underscores Ukraine’s strategic intent to sustain and escalate stand-off pressure on Russian naval assets and maritime infrastructure, reinforcing its asymmetric approach to naval warfare amid ongoing hostilities.
Two new armament variants highlight the Sea Baby’s modular design. One mounts a stabilized remote machine gun for point defense, while the other carries a ten-tube Grad-class rocket launcher for shore fire support and deception missions (Picture Source: SBU)
The Sea Baby is a low-observable, high-speed USV conceived by the SBU as a modular strike and multi-mission platform. Unveiled by the Security Service of Ukraine on 22 October 2025, the latest iteration is presented as reusable rather than single-use and controlled from a mobile command node, underscoring a shift toward longer-endurance, repeatable missions. According to official messaging, the craft can travel more than 1,500 km and carry up to 2,000 kg, enabled by reinforced engines and a modernized navigation suite. That combination expands both feasible launch arcs around Ukraine’s littoral and the range of kinetic and non-kinetic payloads the craft can deliver. Part of this development cycle was financed through the UNITED24 public fundraising platform, reflecting a distributed civil-military approach to wartime prototyping and production.
This modernization builds on a documented operational history. Ukrainian officials link Sea Baby to the third strike against the Crimean Bridge on 3 June 2025, describing a mission profile in which unmanned surface craft delivered charges against structural supports. More broadly, the SBU credits its USV campaign with contributing to Russia’s decision to reposition major surface units from Sevastopol to the Novorossiysk area, a posture change that reduced immediate pressure on commercial routes commonly referred to as the grain corridor. Ukrainian authorities and international coverage have repeatedly asserted that sea-drone attacks have damaged or destroyed multiple Russian vessels; wire reports put the cumulative figure at around 11 ships over the course of the campaign.
Two new armament fits were shown to illustrate the platform’s modularity. One variant mounts a gyro-stabilized remote machine-gun installation with automatic target acquisition and recognition, intended to enable point defense against small craft and low, slow aerial threats and to provide suppressive fire during approach or egress. The second variant carries a ten-tube Grad-class rocket launcher, offering area-effect fires from a sea platform for shore suppression, deception, or illumination tasks. While the SBU presentation does not brand the gun mount, Ukrainian industry literature on the Tavria-14.5 remote weapon station, fielded on land platforms, describes stabilization and tracking features consistent with what the SBU showcased.
Beyond weapons, SBU officials highlighted several survivability and integration features. The upgraded Sea Baby incorporates AI-assisted friend-or-foe targeting aids, the ability to launch small aerial drones for reconnaissance and battle-damage assessment, and layered self-destruct options to prevent capture, all of which point to a maturing digital backbone and mission-system architecture. Together with GNSS/inertial navigation improvements implied by stable gunnery from a moving sea platform, these additions support more complex missions at extended ranges.
Taken together, the engineering choices emphasize endurance, payload flexibility, and reusability. Extended range and higher payload margins allow Sea Baby to be launched from dispersed coastal nodes, complicating adversary counter-reconnaissance and pre-emption. Payload modularity permits rapid role switching, from one-way strike to reusable multi-mission, improving cost-effectiveness in a spiral-upgrade model. In aggregate, these attributes enable multi-vector pressure: compelling the adversary to defend fixed infrastructure, naval units at sea, and logistics nodes ashore simultaneously at relatively low cost per sortie. Strategically, the normalization of long-range USVs in the semi-closed Black Sea has already altered fleet posture and is accelerating investments in counter-USV defenses, layered coastal radars, EO/IR pickets, acoustic tripwires, rapid-fire guns, electronic warfare, and hard-kill interceptors for port protection.
The SBU’s presentation highlights extended range, higher payload margins, and modular weapons as the principal attributes of the new Sea Baby family, with partial public funding through UNITED24. Within the boundaries of the official material, these capabilities are framed as tools to prolong Ukraine’s capacity for sea denial and infrastructure interdiction at a distance in the Black Sea theater.
Written by Teoman S. Nicanci – Defense Analyst, Army Recognition Group
Teoman S. Nicanci holds degrees in Political Science, Comparative and International Politics, and International Relations and Diplomacy from leading Belgian universities, with research focused on Russian strategic behavior, defense technology, and modern warfare. He is a defense analyst at Army Recognition, specializing in the global defense industry, military armament, and emerging defense technologies.