Cosmos floated his quadcopter over the ruined warehouse, guiding it through a corner of the roof where shattered metal sheets had collapsed to form a hole.
The drone pilot’s unit, the Wild Division, suspected that the building was a logistics hub for Russian soldiers, roughly 15 km, or about 9 miles, from the line of contact in southern Ukraine. These hidden locations often held ordnance or fuel stockpiles, and Cosmos’ fiber-optic drone was armed with explosives to destroy them.
Yet inside, the drone rotated its camera to reveal what looked more like a farmer’s garage: Four civilian cars, a pair of motorcycles, and two bridled horses.
“We had not expected to see this. It was unusual,” Cosmos told Business Insider, speaking on condition that he be identified only by his call sign.
“We were expecting to find some armored vehicles,” he added.
Video of the discovery went viral last week in Ukraine, as the war has increasingly seen Russian soldiers using unconventional transport tools, such as pack animals and bicycles, to conduct assaults or logistics missions. Cosmos said his drone mission was conducted in early February.
The smaller profile of a horse or civilian car might be harder for a drone to spot, though Russia’s repeated use of them has also raised questions about the viability of its tactics and whether it’s been producing enough military equipment to sustain its invasion.
Cosmos’ squad mates and officers at the Wild Division, a first-person-view drone company in the 82nd Air Assault Brigade, had seen clips of Russian soldiers riding on horses to attack Ukrainian positions before.
One famous example they remember was in Zaporizhzhia, when a Ukrainian drone crew attacked Russian infantry crossing the front lines on horseback last month.
Cosmos, who’s been piloting drones for a year, said it was the first time he’d personally seen the animals on the front lines.
He flew his explosive-laden drone straight into the back of one of the cars, and said his crew later struck several other vehicles inside. When Russian troops moved their transport assets, the Wild Division found the next warehouse and attacked that one, too, Cosmos said.
“The enemy usually lives in hiding close to these places,” Cosmos said of the warehouse. “It’s common for us to check all targets. Sometimes we can see the enemy infantry, or you can see their vehicles.”
Russia calculates war differently
The Wild Division declined to say where exactly the warehouse was located, but its brigade is generally deployed in the Donbas.
The commander of Cosmos’ battalion told Business Insider that the discovery of the horses surprised him, too.
“I thought it had been a location for transport vehicles, sort of a transfer hub,” said the major, whose call sign is Fizruk.
Fizruk said the appearance of horses and cars in his area of the front line could be a sign that Russian forces are running low on standard resources, but also reflects Moscow’s attritional nature of fighting.
The cars discovered by Cosmos appear to be Nivas, inexpensive civilian off-road vehicles from the Russian Lada car brand.
“They treat these like they will be losses anyway, that they will be destroyed anyway,” he said. “Look, a Niva costs, let’s say, $2,000. A Hummer, which the Armed Forces of Ukraine uses in many places, costs $20,000, maybe more.”
“Since they lose their equipment in assaults, from that point of view, why pay $20,000 for one vehicle if you can buy 10 Nivas for $20,000?” Fizruk added.
The Kremlin is known to pressure the front line with repeated ground assaults, sending small groups of infantry to approach Ukrainian positions on foot or in cheap vehicles. The strategy has been costly, with NATO now saying that up to 25,000 Russian troops are dying each month.
Sustaining that style of war has pushed Moscow to informal means of recruitment and weapons procurement, including hiring troops from overseas and receiving ammunition from North Korea.
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Russia’s state-owned Roszarubezhneft says its Venezuelan oil assets belong to the Russian state.
Roszarubezhneft holds stakes in oil joint ventures with Venezuela’s state-owned PDVSA energy giant.
President Trump has talked about US control and investment after the January 3 military operation.
Russia’s state-owned oil company Roszarubezhneft sought to draw a line around its oil holdings in Venezuela after a US military operation on January 3 reshaped the South American country’s political landscape.
“All assets of Roszarubezhneft JSC in Venezuela are owned by the Russian state,” the company said in a statement carried by Russian news agency TASS on Tuesday.
Roszarubezhneft took over Rosneft’s Venezuelan holdings in 2020 after US sanctions forced the oil giant to exit. It now holds stakes in five joint ventures with Venezuela’s state oil company PDVSA.
The company — owned by a unit of the Russian Ministry of Economic Development — said on Tuesday that the assets were acquired at full market value and approved by Venezuelan regulators.
Roszarubezhneft’s statement came as Venezuela’s oil sector faces fresh uncertainty after the recent US raid that resulted in the capture of deposed Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
After the operation, President Donald Trump said the US could run Venezuela and touted plans for American oil companies to invest in the South American country’s vast but rundown oil sector.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has not commented publicly on the operation in Venezuela. Moscow’s relationship with Caracas includes deep energy ties — a key pillar of Russia’s economy — alongside defense and diplomatic cooperation.
The Russian foreign ministry has called for Maduro’s release and for dialoguebetween the US and Venezuela.
Investors are watching whether the tensions spill over into energy flows.
Global oil prices have been weighed down in recent years by ample supply and slowing demand growth.
But analysts say geopolitical risks are rising, with Venezuela and renewed tensions involving Iran back in focus.
Some analysts warn that the risk of an oil price shock — a sudden surge in prices that can ripple through markets and the global economy — is increasing as geopolitical conflicts intensify.
In less than 10 seconds, Kelluu’s silver airships can soar from the ground to high above eastern Finland’s treelines, their motors puttering and their noses pointed skyward.
Gas blimps were first invented in the 19th century, but the Scandinavian startup is betting on a modern version of the old concept to help the West guard its territory.
Kelluu, a Finnish company located about 50 miles from the Russian border, is launching small, propeller-driven airships filled with hydrogen, which it believes can fill a gap in battlefield and border surveillance.
The startup is already finding success with NATO, being the first to secure a deal with a Western nation through a new innovators’ program run by the alliance.
Militaries or law enforcement agencies could equip a fleet of such remotely piloted airships with cameras and sensors, rotating them to monitor regions around the clock. Kelluu said its airships can be automated, meaning a human operator only has to set a target destination.
Airships won’t be easily survivable on an immediate frontline, but can surveil rear areas or combat zones near the fighting for long periods.
Small drones, meanwhile, typically can only fly for a few hours, while spy planes are often expensive, scarce, and need an onboard crew. Satellites have to wait to pass over a specific region to gather intelligence.
Niko Kuikka, the startup’s head of engineering, told Business Insider at Kelluu’s workshop in Finland that its airships can fly for half a day.
“Our customers don’t care so much what we are flying with, but they pay us to stay up in the air for 12 hours. That’s our specialty,” said Kuikka.
About as long as a city bus and six-and-a-half feet wide, Kelluu’s airships are tiny compared to the Zeppelins of World War I. The ship carries fuel, a propeller, and an onboard computer, and can be configured to transport an additional payload of up to 11 pounds for other gear such as sensors. Altitude can allow high-definition cameras or radar to survey a wider area.
Kuikka said a smaller size can be an advantage for Kelluu’s airships, which are designed to fly at top speeds of 33 mph.
Kelluu’s airships are designed to fit into regular shipping containers and are lightweight enough for one person to launch.
Matthew Loh for Business Insider
They’re cheaper and easier to mass-manufacture, so a customer wouldn’t have to worry that losing a few airships might disable an entire fleet, he said.
Kelluu declined to disclose its pricing, but said its airships are meant to be low-cost.
“Having a kind of sitting duck in the air that costs a vast amount of money isn’t going to make sense,” Kuikka said.
‘Free interference’ from Russia
At Kelluu’s workshop, employees perform the final assembly of the airship and fill it with hydrogen, a lighter-than-air gas that serves to both lift its frame and power its propeller. In the upstairs attic, a team of about 10 computer engineers finetunes in-house software and a user interface for monitoring the airships.
Kelluu has a small team working on software in a room above its assembly workshop.
Kelluu
The main team is based in Joensuu, a small city of 78,000 people just west of Russian Karelia.
That location is a key advantage for the airship company, Kuikka said.
Because Joensuu is so close to the border, it has to deal with frequent jamming from both Russia and Finland, or as Kuikka and his team call it: “free interference.”
While other firms may have to pay for tests, Kelluu’s airships must be resistant to electronic warfare to work in the first place, he said.
“We get all sorts of jamming and spoofing from the other side of the border, and also from this side of the border, so we have been proven to be pretty resilient against this sort of GSS denial,” he said.
Kelluu is also about 340 miles south of the Arctic Circle, so its team had to build its airships to withstand icy winds and temperatures that dropped in January to -15°F.
Kelluu’s airships are being tested in the Finnish winter, which the company says makes it ideal for Arctic conditions.
Kelluu
As such, the startup is positioning its airship as a particularly useful means of monitoring future Arctic bases or territories. The theory goes that the longer its fleet can stay aloft in rough conditions, the fewer people are needed on the ground to maintain and operate the airships.
“We are hoping to soon have an asset that can run multi-day missions, so you need even fewer persons working out there,” Kuikka said.
Catching NATO’s eye
Joensuu once heavily relied on Russian tourism, an income flow sapped dry in 2022 after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine prompted Finland to stop issuing tourist visas to Russians. The following year, Finnish authorities closed the country’s 833-mile land border with Russia.
Helsinki, like much of European NATO, is now grappling with the question of how to guard its eastern borders. The Finnish government is already raising concerns about illegal immigration, which it says Moscow is intentionally orchestrating as a gray warfare tactic.
Kelluu was founded in 2018, well before these issues drew public concern. It began by building airships for civilian use, such as monitoring power lines.
Kelluu provides a digital user interface for monitoring airship fleets.
Kelluu
Now, the war is turning it into a rising star in Europe’s defense industry.
Kelluu was one of 14 firms picked by NATO’s Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic, or DIANA, to enter the second phase of the alliance’s 2025 program.
The accelerator program is trying to connect allies with startups and defense contractors, pushing governments to adopt new tech into their militaries within two years. Roughly 2,600 companies or parties initially submitted proposals to DIANA this year.
After several showcases, Kelluu was the program’s first company to land a deal with an allied country under a new “Rapid Adoption Service” to conduct national trials, a program spokesperson told Business Insider.
Neither NATO nor Kelluu named the member state, but Fabrizio Berizzi, challenge manager at DIANA, praised Kelluu’s airships as “strongly versatile in terms of maneuvering and endurance” and useful for 24/7 surveillance.
“The airship solution proposed by Kelluu fills the gaps on aerial platforms operating in altitudes in between the typical UAS and aircraft airspaces,” he told Business Insider in a statement, referring to uncrewed aerial systems.
A Kelluu airship can immediately point its nose upward after launch and climb quickly into the sky.
Screenshot/Kelluu
Berizzi highlighted the airships’ jamming-resistant capabilities, saying that they can operate in “electromagnetic contested and congested environments.”
Each airship is also “difficult to detect from radar due to its low radar cross section, or radar reflectivity,” he said.
Building thousands of airships
The material of the airship’s metallic, mirror-like skin is a company secret, the firm said. When asked if it helps avoid radar detection, the company declined to answer.
But Kuikka said the core feature of Kelluu airships is that their structure allows them to be filled safely with hydrogen, which is flammable and more dangerous than helium but provides better lift; it is also lower cost than helium.
These airships are built with a semi-rigid frame, meaning they have some structural integrity but primarily derive their shape from the gas within. Zeppelins, by contrast, had fully rigid frames, while other airships like the $21 million Goodyear blimp would collapse if they were deflated.
Janne Hietala, Kelluu’s CEO, said that lighter-than-air technology is often overlooked in the defense industry, especially with disaster stories like the Hindenburg marring its history.
Other militaries have also deployed airships, though they are typically much larger. Israel, for example, deployed a large airship in 2024 that it said was later hit by Hezbollah.
Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
NATO evaluators were surprised, he said, when they assessed the company’s airships during trials, which included naval showcases in the Atlantic.
“Nobody kind of believed us,” Hietala said. “When they looked at the specs, they were like: ‘Well, the wind is going to blow it away.’ But when we actually deploy, they’re like: ‘Oh, it actually works and makes sense.'”
Kelluu now maintains a small active fleet of just under 20 airships, but Hietala said it’s focused in the near future on scaling up mass production capacity.
Some of its airships are already being deployed in other countries, such as Latvia, for testing or client use. Kelluu now manages and operates the fleet for its clients, but is discussing the possibility that some militaries may want to operate their own airships.
“Our intention in Europe is to manufacture more than 500 for the Western world, and we expect to eventually have 3,500,” Hietala said.
