Alexey is a typical "new Russian" businessman with lavish life on Instagram (aleksei.aristov). He claim to be financial lawyer from St. Petersburg. Wife is an Instagram influencer with more than 700k followers (ananovaa). Gosh... the ban on Instagram must have been painful...
His partner has a similar profile. Alexandr (insta: aatamanov) is an entrepreneur fascinated by #drones. Owner of @HoversurfClub. Initial digging was done in July by @AbderRaoufAmir in this thread.
Company "Intelligent Machines" which "created" M-81 - an armed bionic robot dog, is owned by Alexey. Registered in April 2022 with a share capital of approx. 160 USD. Also, the company's office address is far from Instagram-worthy.
Looks like the relationship with Unitree Go1 started in February 2022 at @TechnoparkSk. Since then Alexandr was busy upgrading his creation with weapons.
Test runs were done frequently around Alexey's house in the posh Lahta neighborhood in St. Petersburg. That included promo shot for #ARMY2022 forum banner.👌 #opsec .
The first "promotional" video was launched on 31.07.
Worth noting that M-81 (or rather @UnitreeRobotics Go1) does not have thermal vision capacity. POV shots were probably done with Alexy's private FLIR camera that he use to play innocent games with his kids. Hence the same timer in the upper-left corner.
Besides thermal vision, M-81 also lacks @flipper_zero counter systems as shown by @d0tslash. Is it too early to send flippers to #Ukraine army?
To sum up - rich boys are playing with cool toys and banking on the ignorance of Russian society and the lack of tech knowledge in the Russian military. Good PR stunt, nothing else.
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First day of Russian forum #Army2022#Армия2022. What’s new in #UAV game? Not much so far. Two models of wannabe MQ-1 Predator - Orion-E with control station, and old Foton-601 construction developed by Ruskosmos with Samara University.
A little bit more in the copter sector. Rostec showed a new Russian-Belarusian unmanned system BAS-750 with a flight time up to 6 hours.
Also concept of cargo drone S700 with 16(!) engines and lift up to 200kg was displayed.
For the first time Kalashnikov showed serial model of (not very impressive) small recon quadrocopter Zala-421-24.
Author of source article is Michiel Willems. He has two Twitter accounts @michielwil@newsfrommichiel and works as digital editor at City AM.
City AM is free business oriented newspaper distributed among London commuters. It relies on advertisement and clicks on their website. Doesn’t mean it’s unreliable but it’s not exactly prime league of journalism.
🧵 on recently downed Russian Tachyon (Тахион) #UAV. It’s an old construction developed since 2012. Drone is mainly used for reconnaissance and fire guiding missions.
Drone entered service in 2014. It is used by ground forces of Eastern and Central Military District, as well as Navy. It was previously spotted (and downed) in Donbas area (2015).
UAV is made by Limited Liability Company "IZHMASH" - UNMANNED SYSTEMS" based in Izhevsk. Town famous in Russia for UAV development. By the way - love the vintage website look, very 2005. izh-bs.ru
Story of thwarted UAV attack on Transnistria looks strange. From media reporting seems that target was Grigoriopol Transmitter which was already severely damaged week ago. 1/3 pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2022/…
Drone itself is DIY cheap Aliexpress style frame. Judging from photos total weight was at least 12kg. Batteries on photos would give around 20 min flight (depends on wind). Target is approx. 4 km from the border. That’s a very close call for an operator. 2/3
There was dropping mechanism implemented suggesting that drone was not suicide UAV (8 km flight with this setup is a challenge). Also payload looks very homemade rather than military grade.