National guardsmen of the 32nd Battalion shoot down a Geran-5 with a Ukrainian STING interceptor

Drone operators of the 32nd Volyn Separate Battalion of Ukraine's National Guard have shot down a Russian jet-powered Geran-5 drone. They used a STING drone developed by the Wild Hornets team for the interception. The drone was destroyed in the air after a hit to its body.

The footage of the interception was released by Wild Hornets. They noted that targets like this had been shot down before with the new STING S interceptors.

STING S is a modification the company created for high-speed targets: jet-powered and small-sized ones. According to the Ukrainian outlet dev.ua, STING took first place in September in the ranking of interceptors against jet versions of the Shaheds, and it has topped the overall ranking of interceptors for Shaheds, Gerans and Gerberas for the 12th month in a row.

Wild Hornets itself claims that over the year Ukrainian troops used STING to destroy more than 15500 Russian drones.

According to dev.ua, pilots in three of the four most effective combat units fly STING interceptors remotely. The same outlet claims that over the year Ukrainian troops inflicted hundreds of millions of dollars in damage on the Russian side thanks to this development. These are Ukrainian estimates and have not been independently verified.

A Wild Hornets representative said the company plans to at least triple its business over the next year. He also said that in drone production the real planning horizon is now no more than six months, because everything changes quickly.

STING is not the only such interceptor: according to the Ukrainian outlet nmiu.com.ua, the Geran-5 was also shot down by the P1-SUN JetKiller interceptor from SkyFall.

Ukraine's Main Intelligence Directorate said on 11 January that Russia had used the new Geran-5 attack drone against Ukraine for the first time. According to the Ukrainian outlet nfront.org.ua, like the earlier models in the series it is not an original design but bears structural and technological similarities to the Iranian Karrar UAV.

For Belarus the subject is not an abstract one: threat alerts name the flight direction of such drones as toward Brest and cite a risk of them falling and detonating.

Air Command West reported the destruction of about two dozen Geran-4 and Geran-5 jet-powered attack drones over western regions of Ukraine, including over the Rivne region. According to it, civilian facilities in the Rivne region were damaged by Russian strikes this weekend.

In September 2026, the 1020th Anti-Aircraft Missile and Artillery Regiment of Ukraine's Air Force published a video in which a STING S destroys a Geran-5. The stated maximum speed of this drone is 450–600 km/h, and its flight altitude is up to 6000 metres.