Armed AI: Ukraine Deploys Autonomous Turret to Hunt Down Russian Drones
Ukraine has developed and successfully tested the Sky Sentinel – an AI-powered, fully automated turret designed to shoot down Russian drones and missiles.
According to developers cited by United24 media, the system is capable of operating without human involvement.
“There’s no need for a soldier to manually operate the turret,” the team said. “Deploy Sky Sentinel in a combat position, feed it radar data – and it does the rest: detects, tracks, calculates the trajectory, and fires. All autonomously.”
Equipped with a high-power .50-caliber M2 Browning machine gun and an advanced sensor array, the turret can engage moderately fast, low-flying targets moving at speeds of up to 800 km/h (220 m/s; 430 knots) – enough to intercept Shahed drones, which operate at less than 200 km/h, or other small targets.
Ukraine’s Sky Sentinel air defense turret. Photo: UNITED24 Media
While the exact operational range of Sky Sentinel remains classified, the M2 is known to have an effective range of 1.5 kilometers against airborne threats.
Each unit costs approximately $150,000. Developers estimate that protecting a city would require 10 to 30 turrets – still significantly cheaper than a single interceptor missile from conventional air defense systems.
Given that each Iranian-made Shahed-136 drone used by Russia costs around $100,000, Sky Sentinel offers a scalable and cost-effective solution to a persistent and deadly threat.
Although warfighters don’t calculate costs of weapons used against the target destroyed in dollar value, this relative cost relates to scaleability as it compares how many drones (at $100k/drone, one-time use) might be sent to saturate defensive guns (at $150k/Sky Sentinal system, usable night-after-night).
So, this is not simply an accounting spreadsheet or balance sheet ledger comparison. With these considerations in mind, the new Ukrainian system seems to offer a lot of protection against cheap drones with an inexpensive, yet effective and autonomous hard-kill device.
Russia continues to upgrade its Shahed-136 drones, adding 4G modems and video cameras, but recent claims that the drones are now guided by AI and controlled via Telegram bots have drawn sharp skepticism from Ukrainian officials and experts.
The Economist recently cited unnamed sources claiming the latest Shahed models no longer rely on GPS and are guided by AI using Ukraine’s mobile networks. The report even suggested a Russian engineer left a note inside a drone alleging Telegram was used to control it and stream live video.
Ukrainian military figures have dismissed the claims as implausible. Officials from Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation and the 24th Aidar Assault Battalion ridiculed the idea, calling it a fantasy. Defense Express reported that combining AI, 4G, Telegram, and video transmission into a coherent system exceeds the current technical limits of the Shahed platform.
Military electronics specialist Serhii Beskrestnov, known as “Flash,” confirmed that Shaheds still rely on satellite navigation and remain vulnerable to electronic warfare.
While some drones do include SIM cards that transmit telemetry data via Telegram bots, he explained that this does not allow for real-time flight control or guidance.
He also added that Ukraine blocks Shaheds from operating through local mobile networks.
Source: Christopher Stewart