Nyan

Nyan is a one-way effector built by Callen-Lenz, a FalconWorks company under BAE Systems. The British Army first revealed the aircraft during a demonstration in Estonia in May 2026, and it entered Royal Regiment of Artillery service the same year. Callen-Lenz CEO Matt Foster has said that, beyond those systems delivered to the Royal Artillery, “thousands” of Nyans have been fielded with an undisclosed other customer — widely believed to be Ukraine, where the drone had been in combat use before the British announcement.

The airframe is a 2.9 m-wingspan microturbine-powered design, launched via a trailer-mounted pneumatic catapult and cruising at around 120 knots. Payload sits under 20 kg, which Callen-Lenz has typically configured in the loitering-munition role. The manufacturer rates the Nyan at 250 km or more, qualifying the figure by fuel load and mission profile and publishing no maximum. Per reporting by drone-warfare.com, the unit cost is around £100,000 or less. Beyond the catapult-launched configuration, the Royal Navy has fired a Nyan from a ship at sea — described by the service as the first time it had launched a strike drone from a vessel. Callen-Lenz has not disclosed the aircraft’s onboard compute or guidance software, and public reporting has not described its flight stack.

Combat use outside the British inventory has drawn most of the public attention. British reporting has linked UK-supplied one-way effectors to Russian refinery strikes at Volgograd, Moscow and Yaroslavl — targets between roughly 340 km and 706 km from the nearest Ukrainian-held crossing — though the specific aircraft was not always named. The Nyan has been identified only in connection with one target set, Belgorod, which lies some 42 km from Ukrainian-held ground; the same reporting attributes the deeper strikes to a second, unidentified British system credited with range beyond 950 km.

The disclosure escalated into a state-level exchange within two days. The UK Ministry of Defence responded to Moscow on 17 August 2026, Prime Minister Andy Burnham answered again on 18 August, and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov replied the same day that Russia reserved the right to treat British involvement in strikes on its territory as participation in the war — the first time an individual Russian official has been named in that dispute.

The Nyan sits at the lower end of the jet-powered deep-strike class — slower and shorter-ranged than Ukraine’s own long-range systems, but produced at volume, catapult-launched, and credited by its builder with sustained operational use.