A new bilateral security agreement puts Australia's support for Ukraine on a long-term footing, the Australian government said. The pact bundles fresh money for Kyiv, wider sanctions on Russia, and a new role for Australia in a multinational effort to rebuild Ukraine's Navy.

Australia sits half a world from the front, yet it wants what Ukraine has learned. The deal runs both ways—Australia sends money and equipment, and treats more than four years of Ukrainian war-fighting as a lesson for its own forces. One-off aid packages are giving way to long-term security pacts as Ukraine's partners lock in support—and, more and more, ask to learn from the force that has spent years fighting Russia.

A bigger package and new sanctions

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed the agreement on 24 September. Albanese pledged an additional A$60 million ($42 million) in support. It splits into A$45 million ($32 million) of Australian Defence Force equipment, A$10 million for Ukraine's Energy Support Fund, and A$5 million in humanitarian aid. That lifts Australia's total contribution to almost A$1.9 billion ($1.3 billion). Australia also widened its sanctions on Russia to almost 1,900 measures and listed nearly 300 shadow-fleet vessels—the aging tankers Moscow uses to move oil around Western price caps.

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Australia will also join the Maritime Capability Coalition for Ukraine, a UK- and Norway-led group building up Ukraine's Navy. The government cast the move as another two-way exchange: it helps Ukraine at sea while giving Australian planners insights into advanced maritime capabilities and their operational use.

Lessons that run both ways

The agreement frames the partnership as a trade in know-how, not just aid. Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles said that through deeper cooperation Australia could "lend our strengths and insights to help grow Ukraine's defence industrial base, and likewise learn from the hard-fought lessons of Ukraine's resistance in developing our future capabilities." Ukraine has shown what an innovative, agile force can do in a drone-heavy war, and Canberra wants the lessons. Australia has already supplied 49 retired M1A1 Abrams tanks and 120 Bushmaster protected vehicles, hardware Ukrainian crews took straight into frontline use. Two Australian companies are also developing Arrow interceptor drones for delivery to Ukraine.

For the first time, two unmanned boats have fought a battle at sea, and the Ukrainian one sank its Russian rival. The Ukrainian Defense Intelligence has spotted a Russian drone in the Black Sea, and a Sargan-3000 naval drone armed with a remote-controlled machine-gun turret opened fire and destroyed it, the Ukrainian Navy said on Telegram, calling it "the first-ever naval battle between unmanned boats."

Drone-versus-drone combat has moved from the sky to the sea. Ukraine has already rewritten naval warfare with uncrewed boats, sinking warships and pushing much of Russia's Black Sea Fleet back to port without a navy of its own to speak of.

Now it has fought and won the first duel between two robot vessels, a glimpse of automated sea combat. The claim is the Navy's. It released a video of the encounter but did not provide a date, an exact location, or the type of Russian craft, and it has not been independently verified.

A gun turret decides the duel

The Russian vessel was detected by units of the Ukrainian Defense Intelligence, the Navy said, before the Sargan-3000 closed in.

The Ukrainian drone carried an automated 12.7mm Protector remote weapon station, a turret of the same type mounted on some NATO warships, and used it to sink the Russian boat.

The published footage shows the two drones engaging and the Russian craft going under.

The Sargan-3000 reaches far

The Sargan-3000 is a Ukrainian multi-purpose strike drone that passed combat testing in April. It has a combat radius of up to 1,600 kilometers, runs at 40 to 55 knots, and carries up to 450 kilograms of payload, according to Militarnyi.

It is the same class of boat that sank the Russian border patrol ship Izumrud near Novorossiysk in July.

Ukraine keeps rewriting naval war

The battle fits a campaign that has reshaped the Black Sea. Ukrainian sea drones have sunk the corvette Ivanovets (link) and the landing ship Caesar Kunikov (link), in 2025, even shot down a Russian Su-30 fighter jet (link), and in the last ten weeks alone struck 285 vessels of Russia's shadow fleet (link).

Russia is now racing to build its own uncrewed fleet, and satellite imagery suggests it is constructing a dedicated naval-drone port in occupied Crimea, a sign that the sea, like the sky, is filling with machines that fight each other (link).