Behemoth

Behemoth is a medium-range strike drone jointly developed by Culver Aviation and GLEFA, two Ukrainian firms, unveiled publicly in May 2026 at the Wild Drones exhibition. The system was already in serial production and had seen combat use by the time it was presented, according to its developers in an interview with Militarnyi. It sits in what Ukrainian industry has begun calling the “middle strike” class — airframes designed to reach beyond the immediate front line without crossing into the deep-strike category occupied by larger platforms. The developers quote a combat range of up to 300 kilometres and a payload of up to 75 kilograms.

The airframe is compact for the class: a wingspan of 2.28 metres, a length of 2.2 metres, and a height of half a metre. Its distinguishing feature, as described by the two companies, is a tandem warhead configuration. Militarnyi reports a 40 kg high-explosive fragmentation charge in the nose paired with a 35 kg thermobaric warhead behind it; Defender Media’s account describes the forward element as a shaped charge rather than fragmentation. The developers highlight low-altitude flight as the main survivability measure against Russian air defences — a profile that trades endurance against detection probability. Behemoth supports three control modes: FPV, semi-autonomous waypoint navigation, and fully autonomous mission execution. Command links and telemetry are routed over Starlink, which has become the default satellite backbone for Ukrainian long-range unmanned platforms. The developers have not disclosed the onboard compute, flight stack, seeker or guidance package, and no teardown material has reached open sources at the time of writing.

The only confirmed operator is Ukraine’s Defence Forces. Deployment numbers have not been released, and no specific target, strike claim, or combat footage has been publicly attributed to the system. A longer-ranged “deepstrike” variant has been mentioned by the developers but is otherwise undocumented — no range, payload or configuration data has been published for it.

Culver Aviation’s broader portfolio includes the Skif reconnaissance drone and aerial-imaging work for Ukrainian forces. In April 2026 the company signed a cooperation agreement with the German defence-tech firm Helsing to jointly develop and manufacture systems at a facility in Germany, with production of deep-strike drones expected to be financed by the German government. The partnership places Behemoth’s manufacturer inside the small group of Ukrainian UAV companies now attached to a Western defence-tech unicorn, and signals that the airframes emerging from Kyiv’s middle-strike cohort are increasingly expected to scale on European industrial capacity rather than Ukrainian workshops alone.