An air chase of a kind you would not expect in 2026 played out over the Odesa region. A Ukrainian training aircraft tried to intercept a Russian drone, and the drone - instead of continuing straight towards its target the way unmanned aircraft do - began banking sharply and manoeuvring until it got away. The footage was published by Russian sources, who claim the Ukrainian crew ultimately failed to bring it down.

The aircraft is a Yak-52: a two-seat piston-engined plane, built to teach pilots how to fly. In this war it has been handed an entirely new job. Ukrainian forces have for some time been using these old Soviet trainers as a cheap platform for hunting relatively slow drones, especially away from the immediate front line.

Dogfights out of the last century

In recent months, footage has appeared of a crew member in the rear seat of a Yak-52 firing at Russian drones at close range with a light infantry weapon. In July, footage from the Odesa region itself showed Ukrainian crews downing Russian drones by exactly that method.

At first glance it resembles the dogfights of the first half of the twentieth century more than modern warfare. But this is not nostalgia. It is arithmetic: sending an expensive fighter jet and an anti-aircraft missile after every single slower drone costs far more than an old trainer and a man with a rifle. When your opponent attacks you with a mass of cheap aircraft, the biggest problem is not whether you can shoot them down - it is at what price.

This time the target fought back

That is what makes this footage different. The drone operator reportedly reacted to the appearance of the Ukrainian aircraft and began making sharp turns, trying to spoil the Yak-52's approach and prevent the crew from taking up a favourable firing position. Instead of a classic interception of a slow target flying a preset line, what developed in the sky was effectively a chase between a crewed aircraft and an unmanned one.

According to Russian sources, this was a "Gerbera-2" - an enlarged and modified version from the "Gerbera" drone family.

From decoy to genuine threat

The "Gerbera" has appeared in Russian attacks since 2024. The first versions were significantly cheaper than the "Geran-2" and were often used as decoys, to overload Ukrainian air defences - unmanned aircraft whose only job was to make somebody spend a missile on them. Reconnaissance and strike variants exist too.

During 2026 the larger version appeared. According to available data, it has a stronger engine, a bigger fuel tank and a modified structure, and there are also claims of a significantly larger warhead than the original model. Ukrainian military intelligence assesses that Russia is rapidly ramping up production of the entire family.

So: the decoy has grown, got a bigger engine and learned to run. That is the short history of this war in a single object.

Which is why scenes like the one over the Odesa region will probably become more frequent: one side trying to stop a huge mass of drones with cheap aircraft, while the other rolls out ever faster machines that are ever harder to catch in the sky. And this is technology that does not stay in one country - the cheap aircraft learning today to outrun a plane will be standard equipment tomorrow, and not only on military fronts.