Jens Asbjørn Bøgen
“The shadow fleet has left the chat,” the commander of Ukraine’s drone forces said on social media.
Russia’s so-called shadow fleet continues to roam the global seas, funding Putin’s war effort in Ukraine.
Many of the fleet’s vessels have been hit with sanctions by the US and the European Union, but the tankers are still sailing.
Well, some of them are.
A massive wave of Ukrainian drones swarmed the Sea of Azov on July 7, targeting Russia’s secretive maritime supply lines. The attack focused heavily on the shadow fleet, which bypasses international trade restrictions to keep the Russian war machine fueled.
According to Robert Brovdi, the commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, the results were devastating. Drone pilots managed to track down and set ablaze eight separate fuel tankers in a single night.
“The shadow fleet has left the chat,” Brovdi wrote on social media while describing the operation. He explained that the targeted vessels were large, internationally sanctioned ships built between 2006 and 2012.
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An industrial battle
The strike was carried out by the Kairos unit of the 414th Brigade, a group widely known as Madyar’s Birds. They did not stop at the fuel supply. The aerial assault also damaged a dry cargo ship and a transport ferry.
Brovdi called the mission an “air-sea battle” that has now reached an “industrial level.” He noted that the burning ships were a direct consequence of Ukrainian ingenuity.
“The fuel tankers are badly damaged and burning; sanctions from the sky by the freedom-loving Ukrainian bird of the Unmanned Systems Forces are in action,” Brovdi said. The identified ships included the Venera-3, Sanar-1, Sanar-17, Klimena, Teti, Aleksey Savrasov, and Penelopa. Crews are still identifying an eighth vessel.
Blinded and burning
The fiery maritime assault was only one part of a much larger offensive. Ukrainian drone units successfully hit 58 other military targets across Russian-occupied territories during the same night.
The strike team also knocked out key parts of the energy network in Crimea, hitting crucial logistics nodes. Brovdi noted that the peninsula’s electrical grid flickered throughout the night. “Details on that operation later,” he added.
This massive raid reflects a broader, relentless drone campaign. According to Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, drone operations since the start of 2026 have hit more than 800,000 Russian military targets and taken out an estimated 167,000 troops.
