Bayraktar UAV Records a Vertical Cigar-Shaped UAP, Central Ukraine (2023)

The full-scale war between Russia and Ukraine filled the sky with machines. Drones. Balloons. Decoys. Ukrainian forces watch that sky with visual, thermal, acoustic and radar sensors. Every object they track gets sorted. A drone. A balloon. A natural phenomenon. Only when no explanation can be found does it earn another label. UAP.

One of those cases came from a Bayraktar, the Turkish medium-altitude drone flown by the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

February 15, 2023. Central Ukraine. A Bayraktar was in the air on a combat or reconnaissance sortie. Its thermal imaging camera recorded something crossing the field of view.

A single object. Shaped like a cigar. Oriented vertically.

It did not glow or flash. It appeared as a heat signature on the thermal feed. And it was fast. Analysts later estimated its speed at about 250 metres per second, around 900 kilometres per hour. It held a straight path at a low altitude of 200 to 300 metres. Its size was put at 0.3 to 0.5 metres. Less than a metre from end to end. The crew who flew the drone have never been named.

The case reached the public through two researchers. Dr. Artem Bilyk and Dr. Kyrylo Nikolaiev are associate professors at a defence-intelligence research institute in Kyiv. Both also sit on the board of ZOND, a civilian Ukrainian UFO research society.

In Spring 2026 they published "Ukrainian Military Observations and Analysis of Aerospace Objects and Phenomena during Defense against the Russian Federation" in a special issue of CTX, a journal of the Naval Postgraduate School devoted to Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena. The Bayraktar object appears as Figure 9(b). Bilyk and Nikolaiev classified it as a UAP for its small size, its unusual shape and spatial orientation, its very high velocity, its straight path and its low altitude. They made no claim that it came from beyond Earth. It simply stayed unidentified.

The same paper notes that most Ukrainian cases do get resolved. Drones, balloons and clouds. Russian countermeasures such as decoys, radar-absorbing coatings and heat traps. The authors also flag the risks such objects can pose, from collisions with aircraft to effects on electronics. The Bayraktar object was presented as one that did not fit any of those categories.

The thermal clip itself has not been released. No outside analyst has been able to examine it. No published critique of this specific case has appeared.

In May 2026, Serhii "Flash" Beskrestnov, an adviser to the Ministry of Defence, said the Armed Forces hold a classified document on responding to such sightings, reportedly approved by Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi. Since the war began, he said, studying UFOs "became more of a military task than a civilian one." He warned that "what might look like a UFO might well be a hidden new weapons of our enemy." His remarks did not refer to the Bayraktar case.

The object sits beside other cases in the same paper. Five spheres in a wedge in 2024. Four spheres in a line on March 28, 2024, shown in the same figure. A stationary object some 26 to 32 metres across, filmed by a Mavic 3T on February 24, 2024. Of the cases with figures attached, the Bayraktar cigar is the smallest and the fastest. It remains unidentified.