Russians Develop KVS FPV Drone with Ring-Shaped Wing Design

Russia has publicly unveiled the KVS fiber-optic FPV drone for the first time, featuring a ring-shaped wing design.

Images of the drone were released by Oleksandr Chadaiev, CEO of the Ushkuynyk research and production company.

A similar drone had been spotted as early as October 2025, but no details were available at the time.

‘KVS’ likely stands for ‘Knyaz Vladimir Svyatoslavich.’ The drone uses a 10-inch frame and is designed for medium-range missions.

While not officially specified, its range is estimated at up to about 50 kilometers. Its payload is comparable to the Knyaz Vandal Novgorodsky drone, with a warhead weighing up to 3 kilograms.

The key feature of the platform is its ring-shaped (closed-loop) wing design: the ends of the wing panels are connected to each other (top to top and bottom to bottom), eliminating traditional wingtips.

This configuration reduces the intensity of wingtip vortices and, accordingly, improves aerodynamic efficiency.

Additional lift is generated by the effect of directing airflow downward as it passes through the closed wing loop. This effect becomes stronger as the angle of attack increases.

Meanwhile, airflow separation occurs when, with an increasing angle of attack, the air no longer flows smoothly over the upper surface of the wing and instead detaches, forming vortices.

In such a case, lift drops sharply, which can lead to a loss of control of the aircraft.

As Militarnyi noted back in October, the emergence of such a design may indicate attempts by the Russian side to explore alternative aerodynamic configurations to improve the effectiveness of strike UAVs – particularly by increasing payload capacity and operational range.