As Russia hits Kharkiv with fiber-optic FPV, local authorities plan to cover city’s northern highway with anti-drone nets  

UKRAINE, KHARKIV, Jul. 3 — About 12:00 p.m., Russia hit Kharkiv with a fiber-optic first-person view drone, targeting a residential apartment building in the Saltivskyi district of the city, reported the Kharkiv regional Prosecutor’s office. No casualties have been reported from the impact site. 

Oleh Syniehubov, the governor of Kharkiv oblast, said in today’s briefing that there’s still no decision regarding covering the entire city with anti-drone nets. Instead, he said, for now local authorities plan to cover the Kharkivske highway (connects Kharkiv to Belgorod), located in the northern part of Shevchenkivskyi district, with anti-drone, and part of Northern Saltivka (a district that’s often reached by FPV drones and other Russian munitions). 

First reports of Russian troops attacking Kharkiv, a city that’s located about 19 miles from the Russian border, with fiber-optic FPV drones came up in February 2026. 

On Jul. 2, Gwara’s journalists reported on Russia attacking a gas station in the Kyivskyi district of Kharkiv with a fiber-optic drone; that attack injured three people. 

Today, after the attack on the residential building, Russia launched an FPV drone at the Kyivskyi district of the city again, with three injured people in the aftermath and a damaged car. Then, another Russian FPV hit a gas station nearby with a double-tap attack. 

The second attack, according to the governor of the region Oleh Syniehubov, injured two men, 58 and 63, who were hospitalized with blast injuries. A woman, 58, got an acute stress reaction in the aftermath of the explosion. 

There’s no official information on whether Russia used fiber-optic technology for today’s attacks on the Kyivskyi district. 

Like the usual first-person view drones, optic-fiber FPVs transmit images or video back to the “base” but use a thin optic wire connected to an operator’s controller to do so, making electronic warfare (EW) inefficient. 

Various reports say Russia started using such drones in the east of Ukraine either in the summer or spring of 2024, responding to the rise in electronic warfare used by the Ukrainian Armed Forces. 

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