This Is What Laser Warfare Looks Like
Russia's response to a Ukrainian drone attack offers a glimpse at the current state of the Laser Wars.
The footage is 40 seconds long and, depending on your expectations, either mundane or extraordinary.
Shot from the deck of a vessel in the harbor of the Russian port city of Novorossiysk on the night of May 22-23 and published to social media by conflict tracker Exilenova Plus on May 28, a Ukrainian attack drone flies low across the fog-shrouded Black Sea toward a Russian warship. The footage shows Russian forces move to intercept the incoming threat: the harbor lights shimmer in the water as tracer fire arcs through the overcast sky. Suddenly, vivid blue beams of light slice across the frame and sweep toward the incoming drone. Bright enough to reflect off the water’s surface, they look like something out of a science fiction movie. The drone hits its target anyway.
The details of the remarkable attack are unclear. Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces (USF) stated on May 23 that the strike, part of a broader assault on Novorossiysk that also targeted oil storage facilities, had damaged the Russian frigate Admiral Essen, but the military’s General Staff claimed the next day that the drone had actually struck the patrol ship Pytlivyi. What’s not in dispute is what the footage shows: Russian forces deployed low-power laser dazzlers against an incoming Ukrainian drone. And, more importantly, they didn’t work.
Watch the full footage of the engagement from Exilenova Plus:
When the footage of the Novorossiysk assault went viral last week, an open-source intelligence analyst quickly identified the likely source of those vivid blue beams as a 445nm gallium nitride (GaN) laser, a commercially available, relatively inexpensive blue laser that was, in all likelihood, specifically chosen to exploit a vulnerability in drone cameras.
Here’s the technical logic, as far as I understand it1: a majority of first-person view (FPV) and maritime attack drones rely on silicon-based Charge-Coupled Device (CCD) or Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor (CMOS) imaging sensors for their cameras. Back-illuminated CCD sensors, which are widely used for their superior low-light performance (the kind of conditions you’d encounter in, say, a foggy harbor at night) are highly sensitive to light in the 400-500nm wavelength range due to their quantum efficiency. Point a blue laser at a drone’s camera with enough power and you can wash out the image entirely with a flood of photons, leaving an operator flying blind.
The blue laser dazzler presents a cheap and appealing counter-drone option. The 445nm Nichia NUBM44 diode, one of the most powerful commercially available blue laser components, is widely available through commercial channels, and scaling a number of units up into a multi-emitter array could produce a capable dazzler for a fraction of the cost of a kinetic interceptor. Russian forces appear to have been employing these systems in Novorossiysk since at least November 2025, suggesting this tactic has months of operational history behind it. (To be clear: no open-source report has definitively confirmed that the beams in the Novorossiysk footage are specifically 445nm GaN lasers.)
The employment of dazzlers for port security fits neatly with Russia’s ongoing push for counter-drone laser capabilities. The Russian military has been documented deploying its Chinese-made 30 kilowatt Silent Hunter laser weapon since at least May 2025, according to footage circulated on Russian Telegram channels. Russia’s own domestically-developed LazerBuzz system has reportedly intercepted FPV drones at ranges exceeding a kilometer (although those claims originate with the manufacturer and haven’t been independently verified). And as recently as early May, state-run TASS reported that Moscow had issued a formal decree listing counter-drone laser weapons among the systems on active duty protecting the country’s airspace borders.
So what went wrong with the Novorossiysk laser defense? Based on the footage released by the USF showing the attack from the perspective of the drone — described as an FP-1/2, so likely produced by Ukrainian defense tech company Fire Point — indicates the system was likely relying on thermal imaging on its terminal approach. Indeed, the footage has the characteristic black-and-white rendering of an infrared seeker, with the target ship’s superstructure and machinery glowing with heat against the cooler water and dock.
This is probably why the dazzlers failed: a blue laser (or any visible-spectrum laser, for that matter) cannot physically saturate a thermal imaging sensor. The two systems operate in different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, with entirely different detector materials and physics.
The challenges for dazzlers in this scenario go beyond just sensor mismatch. Fire Point drones navigate primarily via inertial systems augmented by satellite guidance with anti-jamming features. Against a fixed, moored target like a warship in harbor, the most likely attack profile is autonomous — the drone flies to a GPS coordinate and hits whatever is there, no live camera feed required. This makes blinding an operator irrelevant.
There’s also the matter of environmental conditions. Novorossiysk harbor at night, in overcast weather, is exactly the kind of atmosphere that degrades laser performance. Fog, sea spray, and maritime humidity scatter and attenuate laser beams so that even a well-aimed dazzler loses punch through moist air — a well-documented challenge that the US Defense Department has spent considerable time and money trying to solve with its own shipboard laser efforts.
And finally, there’s the geometry of the terminal attack run itself. An FPV drone closing on a target at speed offers a laser operator a rapidly shrinking window to acquire, track, and illuminate the system’s camera. Even vehicle-mounted systems face significant physics challenges here, which is why so many defense contractors are actively pursuing AI-assisted targeting to ensure operators can make the most of every second during a fast-moving engagement.
Dazzlers are not a new concept. As Laser Wars previously noted, the idea of using intense light to disrupt airborne threats dates back to World War II, and naval forces have long used high-intensity searchlights to disorient adversaries at sea. During the 1982 Falklands War, the UK Royal Navy deployed a shipboard laser dazzler designed to defend surface warships against attack runs by Argentine aircraft, although that system was never actually fired in combat.
The Novorossiysk footage reinforces just how quickly and broadly laser dazzlers are proliferating across the world’s militaries in response to the ever-expanding threat of low-cost weaponized drones. The US Navy has now fielded eight Optical Dazzling Interdictor, Navy (ODIN) systems across its Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer fleet to blind the sensors of hostile drones and surveillance platforms; indeed, an ODIN system was visible in photos of the destroyer USS Spruance launching Tomahawk cruise missiles at Iran during Operation Epic Fury in February, although whether the warship actually fired its dazzler in anger is a question the Navy won’t yet answer.2 In recent years, Chinese warships have used lasers to harass adversary military aircraft over the Red Sea and warships in the South China Sea, while a Russian spy ship directed lasers at UK Royal Air Force pilots off the coast of Scotland last November 2025. The UK Ministry of Defense is even reportedly exploring a domestic laser dazzler network to protect military installations from drone incursions.
It’s also worth noting that a growing number of militaries today are also pursuing man-portable laser weapons, often described as “laser rifles,” as an increasingly appealing countermeasure against asymmetric threats. In recent years, Navy sailors have used handheld dazzlers to ward off hostile Iranian watercraft in the Strait of Hormuz and watch over major naval assets like aircraft carriers and submarines during port calls or while traversing busy waterways. France, Russia, South Korea, Indonesia, and Belarus have all developed or fielded handheld laser dazzler systems in the past year, as has at least one American defense contractor. (Phasers, unfortunately, they are not.)
This is the current face of the Laser Wars: not the missile-killing death rays that Pentagon officials have promised for decades (not yet, at least), but brilliant dazzlers sweeping across the sky like the searchlights of old. But the Novorossiysk footage is also a reminder that dazzlers are not a perfect solution — and that, as drone developers increasingly design their systems to account for the specific threats they face on the battlefield, these countermeasures must continue to evolve as well.
Still, when coastal defenders faced with a cheap attack drone reach for a laser during a firefight — even if it’s a low-power dazzler — then the nature of warfare has fundamentally shifted. They’re not quite C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate, but they’re close enough.
Did I misunderstand something? Is this analysis completely off? Shoot me a note!
When reached by Laser Wars for comment, the Navy referred questions to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, which declined to provide additional details.