Serhii Sternenko

Serhii Sternenko is a Ukrainian activist, lawyer and blogger who became one of the country’s largest private funders of drones for the front. His Telegram channel (@ssternenko, about 882,000 subscribers in October 2026) and his YouTube channel, with more than two million subscribers, mix war news with a running appeal: footage of strikes by drones his readers paid for, followed by a call to donate to “Rusoriz”, the foundation’s main FPV fund.

From Odesa activism to drones. Born in 1995 near Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi, Sternenko took part in the 2014 Euromaidan in Odesa and in March 2014 became head of the regional branch of Right Sector. He also led the local NGO Nebaiduzhi. He was attacked several times in 2018. In one of those attacks an assailant died, and that led to a long criminal case against him, described below. After Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 he joined a Special Operations Forces unit, according to Wikipedia. He then began raising money for first-person-view (FPV) drones with a team of five volunteers. The foundation’s own report says the group delivered more than 250,000 drones to the military between 2022 and 2024.

The foundation. The work was registered on 15 January 2025 as the Sternenko Community Charitable Foundation (БФ «Спільнота Стерненка»). Its first annual report says it raised more than UAH 3.1 billion and bought and delivered more than 118,000 drones in 2025. Its running count of FPV drones purchased has climbed through 2026: 273,971 by 28 April, 286,566 by 15 July and 291,502 by mid-August (as reported by Euromaidan Press), and 296,255 by 14 October on its own site. That page also claims cooperation with more than 550 units. Sternenko says roughly 80% of income comes through Telegram, and that office costs and salaries are paid from a separate budget funded by businesses and subscribers, so donations for drones go entirely to drones. In September 2025 it signed a cooperation memorandum with the Defence Ministry. Partners named on its site include the ministry, monobank and PrivatBank. In 2025 the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office transferred it UAH 44 million from plea-bargain payments to buy drones.

What it buys. Procurement is driven by requests from operators rather than the General Staff, Sternenko said in a September 2026 interview. New products go through combat testing before purchase, and the foundation works with about 20 long-term manufacturers at a time. It keeps contact with more than 500 operators through an analytics team that includes veteran FPV pilots. Its main lines are strike FPVs (Rusoriz), interceptors against Russian reconnaissance drones (“Sky Rusoriz”), and interceptors against Shahed and Gerbera drones (“Shahedoriz”), which the site credits with 14,604 aerial targets downed. It also buys fibre-optic drones, thermal-camera drones and mid-range strike drones, and runs an R&D workshop, ReDrone, for modifications requested by operators. Its best-known interceptor is the STING from Wild Hornets, built to the foundation’s order. To help the maker scale, the foundation committed to buying its output with three months of full prepayment, and in March 2026 it funded the Hornet Vision Ctrl system for flying Stings remotely. Units his posts name as recipients include the Perun unit of the 42nd Mechanised Brigade, Signum of the 59th Assault Brigade, Triarium of the 3rd Special Operations Forces Regiment, and the 36th Marine Brigade.

Adviser to the defence minister. On 22 January 2026 Mykhailo Fedorov, a week into his term as defence minister, appointed Sternenko his adviser on increasing the use of drones at the front. Fedorov named two priorities: basic supply for drone units, and analytics and training. His reasoning was that about 50 of some 400 drone units were delivering up to 70% of all strikes. Two months earlier Sternenko had written that Ukraine’s defence was “falling apart”. Euromaidan Press reported that during his term he helped unify ground stations for fibre-optic drones and helped several brigades rise in the effectiveness rankings. In a later post he said the ground-station standard was drafted in spring 2026 with the ministry, the military and manufacturers, and was then combat-tested and bought. When Fedorov was dismissed in July 2026, Sternenko resigned around 15 July. He wrote that new tender requirements for FPV procurement had been nearly finished and that reforms had been held up by bureaucratic obstacles and by people opposed to change. The radio engineer Serhii “Flash” Beskrestnov, Fedorov’s adviser on defence technology, stepped down at the same time. In August Sternenko congratulated the new minister, Yevhenii Khmara, and offered his team’s help on FPV matters.

On drones. His public commentary centres on supply and on what Russia fields next. In September 2026 he called the STING the interceptor that had downed the most Shaheds and Gerberas and expected serial interceptors for jet Shaheds by the end of the year. Weeks later he wrote that no serial, effective interceptor against jet Shaheds yet existed, only prototypes with mixed results. He warned that small Russian cruise missiles such as the Banderol could multiply, that interceptor drones would not stop them, and that Ukraine needed cheap short-range guided missiles.

Controversies. Sternenko’s past is contested. In 2018 he fought off an attack in Odesa in which one of the two attackers was killed; he was later charged with premeditated murder, although the senior prosecutor on the case refused to sign the charges, calling the case biased. Separately, in February 2021 an Odesa court convicted him of the 2015 kidnapping and robbery of a local councillor and of illegal possession of a weapon, and sentenced him to seven years and three months. He denied involvement and called the verdict political, and up to 2,000 people protested outside the President’s Office that evening. In May 2021 the appeal court upheld only the kidnapping charge and released him from punishment because the limitation period had expired. In May 2025 he was shot and wounded in what he and the Security Service of Ukraine described as a Russian-organised assassination attempt; a suspect was detained. In August 2026, while commenting on street protests after Fedorov’s dismissal, he said he and the foundation were the target of a media campaign. The same month the human-rights lawyer Masi Nayyem left the foundation’s supervisory board over a disagreement about legal work his firm was doing for a former deputy head of the President’s Office.