An experimental Russian Merlin-VR UAV was shot down by an anti-aircraft missile drone

Soldiers of the 1129th anti-aircraft missile regiment shot down the enemy's newest reconnaissance UAV "Merlin-VR". As reported by Censor.NET, it was hit by an anti-aircraft drone, after which it opened its parachute and fell.

Merlin-VR (Russian: Медлин-ВР) is a Russian experimental unmanned aerial vehicle. It is designed for reconnaissance of the area in automatic and semi-automatic modes. The developer is the Research Institute of Modern Telecommunication Technologies (NII STT, JSC), the city of Smolensk. On September 28, 2021, an experimental model of the "Merlin-VR" was presented. There is no information about the tests, much less about serial production. The developer stated that the device has a hybrid engine, which gives "low acoustic signature". But in the device shot down in early June 2022 by the Ukrainian Armed Forces during the Russian aggression against Ukraine, no hybrid technologies were found in the drone, only a conventional engine. Also, the device was equipped with thermal imaging optics of French manufacture Lynred (Ulis) PICO1024 with a resolution of 1024 * 768 and a regular plastic canister with a handle was installed as a fuel tank.