Built as a cheap Shahed lookalike, Russia’s Gerbera now flies with a 10-kg warhead and an incendiary bag
The bigger Gerbera-2 packs a separate soft tank of incendiary mixture behind its main charge, photos from a Ukrainian Telegram channel show.
Russia has begun equipping its Gerbera-2 drones with a 10-kg warhead and an incendiary package, according to Ukrainian military outlet Militarnyi on October 18th. The setup is intended to ignite fires upon impact, likely targeting critical infrastructure and warehouses. Russia manufactures around 3,000 jet-powered Geran-4 and Geran-5 drones each month, with Russian strikes having destroyed 2.1 million square meters of Ukraine's modern warehouse space since the invasion began.
The addition of a fire bag behind the warhead provides another threat to air defenses that have already allowed nearly half of Russia’s jet-powered Shaheds to pass through undetected. Photos posted by Ukrainian Telegram channel Polkovnyk HSh on October 17th show the incendiary mixture in a separate soft plastic tank behind the main 10-kg high-explosive fragmentation-incendiary warhead.
Gerbera-2 drones have been equipped with warheads ranging from 4 to 10 kg, depending on the range, while the original Gerbera carried up to 5 kg in its strike version. These larger Gerbera drones have been identified with a more robust piston engine, half the size of the Chinese DLE60 model-aircraft engine previously used. A recovered Gerbera-2 drone from September was found near Poland's Baltic coast, carrying a 4 kg high-explosive fragmentation warhead.
Written by urgent.news from Euromaidan Press's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
