How a Chinese UAV has become a Ukrainian long-range weapon: the story of the mysterious MICH 2000 drone
In early August, Ukrainian forces hit the cargo ship Nadezhda near the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiysk.
Footage of the strike soon circulated across social media and Telegram channels. Yet the drone at the centre of it looked nothing like a Liutyi or an FP-1, two systems widely used by the Ukrainian military in long-range strikes on Russia. Instead, it bore a striking resemblance to the Iranian-designed Shahed, leaving analysts scratching their heads over what, exactly, they were looking at.
This was not the first time Shahed-like drones had been used in attacks on targets inside Russia. Among the possible candidates were the Egyptian-made Jabbar-150, Türkiye's Troy T20 Block 20 and China's ZTK-150.
The drone in question is, in fact, the Ukrainian MICH-2000. But those who thought footage of the strikes showed Chinese-made ZTK-150s were not entirely wrong either.
This drone's story began thousands of kilometres from the front line – not in a Ukrainian garage or design office, but at a factory in China. In late 2023, Ukrainian UAV developers travelled there to acquire ready-made civilian UAVs for military use. Nobody at the time could have known that the mission would lay the groundwork for a Ukrainian long-range drone – the kind of system the military, engineers and politicians in Ukraine commonly call a "deep-strike" UAV.
Today, the MICH is no longer simply a Chinese-made drone, but a system operated exclusively by the Security Service of Ukraine's Special Operations Centre Alpha. Capable of flying up to 2,000 km and carrying as much as 60 kg of explosives, it is building an ever-longer record of targets struck inside Russia.
Ukrainska Pravda has visited the factory producing the MICH-2000 to tell, for the first time, the story of how a trip in search of Chinese-made drones tick-started the production of a Ukrainian long-range drone for the Alpha.