Wild Drones Race In Truskavets Rewards Ukraine’s Slowest Pilot

A Ukrainian sergeant won his country’s “Wild Drones” military flying competition by piloting as slowly and carefully as possible, taking 11 minutes to finish a course built for a five-minute sprint while faster rivals collided and crashed around him. Sgt. Zakhar Korol, 37, of the 47th Separate Mechanized Brigade “Magura,” outlasted the field at a theme park in Truskavets, western Ukraine, over May 19 and 20, 2026, earning his unit three Vampire heavy bomber drones from the event’s main sponsor.

The fourth edition of the contest gathered 19 teams from Ukrainian brigades and the National Guard, plus four operator training centers in a separate category, racing light FPV quadcopters and heavy bombers for speed and accuracy against aerial targets. The announcer nicknamed Korol “Mr. Speed” as he crept through his run. “My tactics probably seem strange,” Korol said.

Held hundreds of kilometers from the front, the event felt like a festival, with families and children among the colorful tents. Barbecue smoke drifted over the food stands as a jumbo screen showed the drone’s-eye view of each race. Soldiers toasted victories with juice rather than alcohol before heading back to their positions.

Skyfall’s Vampire Bomber Anchors The Truskavets Prize Pool

The prizes at Truskavets came from Skyfall, the secretive Ukrainian manufacturer that was the competition’s general partner and builds the Vampire heavy bomber, a six-rotor aircraft so feared on the front that Russian troops gave it the folkloric nickname Baba Yaga. Korol’s win sent three Vampire systems, plus batteries and accessories, to his brigade.

Per the event organizers’ tally published by Censor.NET, second place went to the 71st Separate Jaeger Brigade, which received two Vampire systems, and whose pilot with the call sign “Monk” clocked the fastest individual time of the meet. Third place and one Vampire went to the 4th Separate Heavy Mechanized Brigade.

The Vampire can carry up to 15 kilograms (33 pounds) of payload, a figure the New York Times rendered as about 30 pounds. Crews use it to bomb fortified positions and to haul water and ammunition into the kill zone, where sending people forward by vehicle means near-certain casualties. Skyfall told Militarnyi that the Vampire flew more than 2.5 million combat missions and was named the most effective strike platform of 2025 at Ukraine’s Army of Drones awards. These are the heavy bombers DroneXL covered as Ukraine’s low-cost night hunters.

Skyfall keeps a low profile by design, fearing Russian strikes on its factories, a posture its representatives described to Breaking Defense at the Dubai Airshow. In an interview with the Oboronka project at the World Defence Show 2026, a company representative using the alias Nirmata said the firm now employs roughly 4,000 people, produces 100,000 Vampires a year, and has cut the drone’s price from up to $20,000 at launch to $8,500. It also makes the Shrike FPV family and the P1-SUN interceptor, a bullet-shaped drone priced near $1,000 that dives on incoming Russian Shahed attack drones.

Slow Flying Beat Faster Drones That Crashed On Course

Korol won the FPV crew category through control rather than speed, nursing his aircraft through a clean run while rivals who flew flat-out clipped obstacles and crashed, a tortoise-beats-the-hares result that mirrors the hardest lesson combat pilots learn about keeping a drone alive long enough to reach its target. The point that the fastest flier crashed first was not lost on the manufacturers watching.

Korol saw his pregnant wife and 10-year-old son for two hours before returning to the front. At the event he also connected with a drone maker that equips its aircraft with Starlink for greater range, a company that withholds its name out of fear of factory strikes. “Even other companies come up and ask, ‘Man, how did you fix up this Starlink thing?'” said a representative who gave only the first name Andriy. Starlink did not respond to a request for comment.

Other soldiers used the break to decompress. A 24-year-old sergeant with the call sign “Zippo,” a spotter for a drone pilot in the Khartia brigade near Kharkiv, had spent five weeks on positions and slept most of the day in a green wooden sleigh painted with snowflakes. “Of course, for me this is first and foremost a break,” he said. Mykola, 26, a private with the call sign “Dobry” from the 93rd Mechanized Brigade, wore a camouflage magician’s hat. “My comrade and I found a magician’s hat and decided we had to buy it because we are magicians. We make Russians disappear,” he said, before preparing to return to the front the next morning.

Ukraine’s Hardest-Fighting Brigades Sent Their Best Crews

The units that traveled to Truskavets read like a roster of Ukraine’s most battle-tested formations, headlined by the 47th Magura that won the FPV crew category and rounded out by air assault and mechanized brigades whose crews came straight off front-line positions for a rare weekend away from the fighting. Korol’s 47th began the war as the 47th Assault Battalion before growing into a brigade equipped with American M2 Bradley fighting vehicles and M1 Abrams tanks.

The 71st Jaeger Brigade, an air assault unit redesignated as an airmobile brigade in January 2026, took second. The 93rd Mechanized Brigade “Kholodnyi Yar,” whose Black Raven drone battalion helped organize the event, fielded crews alongside the 13th Khartiia Operational Brigade of the National Guard, the Kharkiv-region unit that ran the first fully robotic ground assault in late 2024. Wives of two pilots from the 71st Brigade, Alina Arsenenko, 24, and Nika Poluliakh, ran into a tent to hug their husbands after a flight and rode on land drones operated by soldiers, including one used to evacuate wounded troops. “They are the top pilots,” Arsenenko said.

Starlink Gives Ukrainian Drones Reach Russia Struggles To Match

The Starlink conversation at Truskavets reflects one of the war’s running technical contests, where a satellite internet link can stretch a drone’s control range far past what jam-prone radio allows, letting pilots fly from rear positions while keeping a stable feed to aircraft operating deep over contested ground. Ukrainian heavy bomber units pioneered mounting Starlink terminals on their airframes for control at ranges approaching 64 kilometers (40 miles), an approach DroneXL documented inside the Lasar’s Group command center.

That same capability cut both ways in early 2026, when Russia mounted Starlink terminals on its strike drones and SpaceX responded with a speed-based cutoff and a whitelist that knocked unauthorized terminals offline across the front. The episode showed how dependent both armies have become on a single commercial network, and why a manufacturer that has solved Starlink integration draws crowds of curious competitors at a place like Truskavets.

Drone Competitions Feed Ukraine’s Manufacturing Feedback Loop

Events like Wild Drones exist to do more than hand out hardware, organizers say, since they pull weapons designers into the same tents as the combat pilots who fly their products every day and can explain in plain terms which features keep a crew alive and which get people killed. Almost a dozen and a half weapons makers set up stands at the venue, including producers of UAVs, unmanned ground vehicles, and mid-range and deep-strike systems.

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022, only a few hobbyists pushed the idea of arming FPV drones. Ukraine now produces interceptors, heavy bombers, water drones, and unmanned ground vehicles at industrial scale, and aerial drones inflict the vast majority of casualties on both sides. The military has gamified the fight through a points system that lets units redeem verified kills for new gear on the Brave1 Market. Dozens of these competitions run each year, building a culture of militarized communities far from the trenches. As reported by the New York Times, the day ended with land drone operators using their machines to help clear barbecue equipment from the park.

DroneXL’s Take

I have covered Ukraine’s drone war since the first improvised quadcopters in 2023, through the gamified Army of Drones points economy and the rise of cheap interceptors that the Gulf and the Pentagon now want to buy. The Truskavets meet is the social layer of that same machine. The reason a slow-flying sergeant matters is that this competition is a procurement instrument dressed as a festival, and the lesson it broadcasts to designers is that survivability outscores raw speed on a course built around real combat tasks.

The industry delta here is the tightness of the feedback loop. Skyfall did not reach 100,000 Vampires a year and a price cut from $20,000 to $8,500 by guessing. It got there by listening to the crews in tents like these, the same dynamic that produced Ukraine’s winged FPV drones reaching past 100 kilometers (62 miles) and its ground robots running 9,000 missions a month. Western primes that take years to field a single variant should study how a feedback cycle measured in weeks compounds over four years of war.

Two open questions are worth watching. Organizers say two more Wild Drones competitions are planned this year, so watch whether the prize hardware shifts from Vampire bombers toward the interceptors and ground robots Kyiv is now pitching for export under the “Drone Deals” framework President Zelenskyy approved on April 28, 2026. And the Starlink question the unnamed manufacturer would not fully answer still hangs over the industry: whether a commercial satellite link controlled by one company can stay the backbone of Ukrainian drone range is not a prediction anyone should make, but the answer will shape how far these aircraft can reach.

Source: The New York Times, reporting by Maria Varenikova with photography by Brendan Hoffman.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.