MOSCOW, July 29. /TASS/. Photos of the wreckage of a drone that fell in Minsk on Tuesday indicate that it is a device with a range of 800 to 1,600 km, was assembled in Ukraine using commercially available parts, and wound up in Belarus due to a navigation error, said Dmitry Kuzyakin, an unmanned aviation expert and chief designer of the Center for Integrated Unmanned Solutions.
"Judging by the photos, a Ukrainian long-range helicopter with a two-stroke twin-cylinder engine crashed in Minsk. Such devices have a flight range from 800 to 1,600 kilometers and can carry a payload of 50 to 100 kg. The more weight, the shorter the distance and vice versa. This long-range helicopter was assembled in Ukraine from spare parts available on the international market, suitable for assembly in a backyard," he told TASS.
According to him, the drone is a typical representative of a simplest technology. "There is reason to believe that the specific product that fell in Minsk was produced by a joint Ukrainian-Czech enterprise. This is not a cruise missile and is assembled in much simpler factories. The special feature of the third technological league is that cheap and accessible technologies can be used to make a product that safely reaches Belarus," Kuzyakin said.
According to the expert, the UAV crashed in Minsk due to a possible error. "Considering that it was a single vehicle, it is most likely that it is just a Ukrainian drone that got lost and crashed in the Minsk area. It happens, they often go off the trajectory. In an amicable way, if the device is made wisely, by qualified specialists, it should self-destruct under such circumstances. Here, the device may have got lost and flew to the capital of Belarus. It was hardly purposeful, because if the enemy really wanted to cause damage, he would have launched a large enough group of UAVs to overload the republic's air defense targets," Kuzyakin said.
The expert also stated that when launching the drone, Ukraine either "made a mistake in programming the flight task, or there was a malfunction in flight and the device went away."
The Investigative Committee of Belarus has distributed a video footage with inscriptions in Ukrainian, which were found on the wreckage of the device.