AINEWS
The MICH 2000 is a reverse engineered Ukrainian clone of a Chinese flying wing drone. After two years of test failures, 6,000 airframes a year now fly for the SBU.
A Russian Tu-95MS strategic bomber sat on the tarmac at Engels-2 air base when a $48,000 Ukrainian flying-wing drone closed the distance and destroyed it. The cost-versus-target gap is sub-$50,000 against a multi-million-dollar Soviet-era long-range bomber. The procurement loop behind the kill is the part that does not fit on a wire.
The drone is the MICH 2000, built exclusively for Ukraine's SBU Alpha special operations center by an unnamed domestic manufacturer. Per the manufacturer, via the Ukrainian defense outlet Oboronka, the airframe is a reverse-engineered clone of the ZTK-150, a Chinese flying-wing drone (a tailless design that lifts the whole body for long, fuel-efficient flight). Almost nothing of the original ZTK-150 remains in the current production version beyond the outline. Base price is about $48,000, roughly $2,000 less than the ZTK-150 catalog price. Stated performance is 2,000 km range and a warhead up to 60 kg.
In late 2023, the ZTK-150's Chinese manufacturer declined to sell the production technology to Ukraine. A team member told Oboronka the unit had "photographed everything that was there" during a pilot-training visit offered as an alternative. Eight airframes came home. The summer 2023 backdrop is the Chinese export curbs on civilian drones that followed earlier Ukrainian conversions of Mugin-5 PRO airframes into deep-strike munitions. The factory-level refusal, not Chinese state policy, is what the source packet supports.
The first prototype crashed one kilometer into its maiden flight in summer 2024. Russian electronic warfare (jamming and spoofing of GPS and control links) downed the third test aircraft. The first combat sortie in October saw two of three drones fall roughly ten meters short of the target; one was shot down. SBU Alpha ordered production anyway, per the Oboronka report as relayed by Tom's Hardware.
Two years of work with dozens of Ukrainian suppliers pushed domestic content to about 85% of drone value, the manufacturer told Oboronka. Output is now roughly 6,000 MICH 2000 airframes a year. Re-reports from United24 Media, Defence Blog, and Militarnyi track the same numbers without adding primary facts. The open-source defense research site Drone Warfare catalogs the program separately.
The remaining foreign dependency is the one that matters. A jam-resistant CRPA (Controlled Reception Pattern Antenna) navigation module costs $20,000 to $25,000 per drone, and only a handful of companies worldwide build them. Fitting one drops domestic content to 55% and makes the antenna the chokepoint on the next production step. Ukraine has been chasing that capability, and the cost arithmetic is now the binding constraint on the MICH 2000's next phase.
The Engels-2 strike is independently corroborated. An SBU official statement confirmed the strategic-bomber kill, and Kyiv Post's General Staff reporting tracked the operational picture. Identifying the MICH 2000 specifically as the strike munition is Oboronka's analysis rather than independently proven attribution, and the Chinese government's role is described only at the factory level in the underlying reporting. The Tu-95MS kill is the confirmed event; the cost and production figures come from the manufacturer, pre-cleared by SBU, and are reported rather than independently verified.
A buyer that absorbs iterated failure, sustains a 6,000-per-year line, and pushes 85% of value through domestic suppliers turns a refused foreign design into a mass strike inventory. The next bottleneck is not the airframe. It is the navigation antenna, and the price of buying the jamming resistance from the few suppliers who still make it.