Exploding goggles delivered to Russian soldiers in suspected sabotage

Skyzone Cobra X v4 headsets were delivered to Russian soldiers with plastic explosives inside. Photo / Screen shot

• Exploding goggles were delivered to Russian soldiers in a suspected act of sabotage, according to Russia’s state media.
• The goggles, used for flying FPV drones, were rigged to detonate when turned on.
• Ukraine has previously used booby-trapped devices in attacks on Russian targets, though it hasn’t commented on this incident.

Exploding goggles were delivered to Russian soldiers in a suspected act of sabotage, the Kremlin’s state media reported.

The Skyzone Cobra X v4 headsets – used to fly deadly FPV drones – were rigged to detonate when turned on, according to Igor Potapov, a spokesman for JSC NPP, a firm supplying electronic warfare equipment to the Russian military.

“When the batch was opened, packaged plastic explosives were found in all of these products,” he told the Tass state news agency.

He said the goggles had been donated as part of a humanitarian aid package by a person known as “Roman”.

Military units from both the Russian and Ukrainian armies have relied on the goodwill of donations to maintain their fight.

Appeals for hardware, such as drones, are often made over social media channels, easily accessible to the public. This means intelligence agencies could in theory attempt to infiltrate the supply chain to deliver booby-trapped goods to enemy units.

Israeli intelligence carried out a similar attack on Hezbollah fighters after it discovered that the Shia terror group had been buying pagers from a single Taiwanese company.

Agents were then able to remotely detonate explosives packed in thousands of rigged devices.

Skyzone, the company that produced the drone goggles, supplies firms across multiple countries, including Russia and Ukraine.

The Telegraph cannot independently verify the Russian claims, and Ukraine has not commented on the allegations.

However, Kyiv’s intelligence agencies have used booby-trapped devices in the past to carry out attacks on Russian targets.

Ukraine said it killed a senior Russian general, Igor Kirillov, the head of Russia’s nuclear and chemical weapons forces, last December when a bomb hidden inside an electric scooter exploded outside his apartment building.

The country’s SBU security services eventually claimed responsibility for what was one of the most high-profile assassinations since the start of the Russian invasion almost three years ago.

Ukrainian assassination targets are usually high-value rather than low-ranking individual military units.

FPV drones are small, commercially produced quad-copters hooked up to VR goggles that allow the “pilot” to see exactly where it is going. They have become a battlefield-defining scourge of the war in Ukraine.