Ukraine’s most feared kamikaze drone just showed up at UK arms fair—carrying missiles instead of being one

Ukraine's An-196 "Liutyi"—the long-range drone behind hundreds of strikes on Russian oil refineries—appeared at the Farnborough International Airshow in the United Kingdom armed with four small air-to-surface missiles, Oboronka reported. The configuration marks a departure from the drone's defining role. Until now, the Liutyi has been a one-way weapon: it flies into its target and is destroyed on impact. Armed with launchable munitions, the same airframe becomes something else—a platform that launches weapons and returns.

What changed on the airframe

The Liutyi is a propeller-driven, satellite-guided drone with a claimed range of about 2,000 km, carrying a 50-to-75 kg warhead and using inertial navigation with satellite correction. In its standard form, it is a flying bomb—Ukraine has used it to hit refineries as deep as 1,700 km inside Russia, near the Urals, and Germany is financing 500 more at roughly $100 million.

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The Farnborough version carries four compact air-to-surface missiles under its wings. That transforms the payload logic entirely: instead of delivering a single warhead to a single target and ceasing to exist, the drone can engage multiple targets at a distance and preserve its airframe. For a weapon Ukraine builds in volume, reusability multiplies the value of every unit produced.

Why show it at Farnborough

Farnborough is one of the two largest arms and aerospace trade fairs in the world, alongside the Paris Air Show. Displaying an armed, reusable Liutyi is a commercial statement as much as a military one.

Ukraine's defense industry has spent 2026 moving from wartime improvisation toward export positioning —presenting naval drones, interceptors, and strike systems at international expos in Paris, Kyiv, and now the UK. A drone with a combat record measured in hundreds of deep strikes on Russian territory is, for a foreign buyer, a rare thing: a system proven in the most demanding air-defense environment on earth.