A drone that destroyed a Tupolev Tu-95MS strategic bomber at Russia's Engels-2 air base last month turns out to be a MICH 2000, a reverse-engineered copy of a Chinese aircraft Beijing refused to sell to Ukraine, according to a factory report from defense outlet Oboronka. Built by an unnamed manufacturer exclusively for the SBU's 'Alpha' special operations center, the flying-wing drone carries up to a 60 kg warhead as far as 2,000 km and costs $48,000 in its base configuration, $2,000 less than the Chinese ZTK-150 it was copied from. It’s understood that Ukrainian developers covertly photographed the Chinese production line while attending pilot training there in late 2023.
China restricted exports of civilian drones in the summer of 2023 after Ukrainian units converted airframes like the Mugin-5 PRO into deep-strike munitions. A Ukrainian development team traveled to a Chinese factory late that year, found ZTK-150s in production, and negotiated to buy the manufacturing technology, but the factory's management blocked the sale.
