How Ukraine's air defence warriors take aim at Putin's drone swarms

Times

3 days ago

Russian jets were flying fast towards the Ukrainian anti-aircraft battery. Lightning flashed and thunder roared in the night sky above, sending rain lashing against the branches concealing its position.
'They might launch KABs [glide bombs],' said 'Kingston', 30, as he watched a pair of red markers move across his radar screen in the battery control cabin. Eleven screens fed information from the skies and the battlefield to six soldiers hunched over them. 'That's a Su-34 with a Su-35 behind covering it. If anyone launches at the Su-34, the Su-35 will engage the battery that fired at his wingman.'
The command vehicle is a tangle of wires fusing Soviet engineering to cutting-edge technology that the crew of Squadron Interception Unit, Third Army Corps, are testing on the battlefield for a US arms enterprise, looking to undermine President Putin's new weapon of choice.
The jets closed to 110 kilometres, only 40 kilometres shy of bombing range. A third Sukhoi jet appeared. 'They're too far out for us to go to the bomb shelter — and if they launch anti-radar missiles, we won't have time anyway,' Kingston said with a wry grin.
'Don't rush, our radar is off,' said a voice over the radio. Kingston's display shows the scanner from another, more powerful radar, further from the front. The jets cannot hunt Kingston and his comrades with their battery's radar down. Instead, they veer south, releasing their bombs at a less fortunate group of Ukrainians.
Nor was the Ukrainian battery hunting the Russian jets. They were focused on another prey. 'No Shaheds yet,' the voice on the radio signed off.
Putin is gambling that the long-range Shahed suicide drone could prove to be the decisive weapon of this war. Russian troops are launching hundreds of them a night, terrorising cities in an effort to finally break the will of the Ukrainian people after more than three years of fighting.
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Moscow believes the Iranian design, complemented by cheap Chinese components, can force Kyiv's capitulation. Last month the Kremlin showcased its enormous Shahed production facility at Alabuga on state TV. Production is being ramped up of the weapons, which can now travel up to 1,600 miles with an explosive payload of up to 90kg. Other variants can travel further still.
On Thursday the UN said Russia had launched ten times more missile and loitering munition attacks in June this year than the same month last year, killing 232 civilians and injuring 1,343. That was the highest monthly toll in three years, according to the UN.
In the latest massive combined missile and drone attack on Kyiv on Wednesday 31 people were killed, including a two-year-old and four other children, and another 159 wounded, according to the Ukrainian authorities. Enormous waves of Shaheds are saturating Ukraine's air defences, forcing them to expend expensive missiles made in far smaller numbers on western production lines.
'By winter we'll be seeing thousands of Shaheds per day, and our government is only now starting to look for solutions,' said Odesit, the battery commander. 'Those solutions were needed yesterday.'
The Third Army Corps, under the command of Colonel Andriy Biletsky, has decided not to wait for the slow wheels of Ukraine's government procurement to turn. Instead, it has thrown open its sector of the front to western arms companies for testing, research and development.
The interception unit is pioneering the use of technology from an American start-up in the hope it can be scaled up to save Ukraine's cities. Outside the control cabin, stacks of small, fast interceptors wait to be launched, shielded from the rain under sheets of tarpaulin. Sleek and grey like missiles but with wings and miniature propellers, these semi-autonomous drones fly much faster than the Shaheds, homing in on their thermal signatures in order to strike them and explode.
'In a month and half, we downed 60 to 70 Shaheds,' said Odesit. 'We were already trying to hit them even when we just had first-person-view drones. But when we finally got a system that could technically do it, it was euphoria.'
The Russians soon realised they had a problem in the battery's area of operation.
'A couple of weeks ago they made a major improvement to the Shahed. It senses something is coming for it,' said Odesit. 'They dodge now. Just before impact, they start manoeuvring. We were the first to encounter it because we downed so many. They tested this on us. It's a new problem we are trying to solve.'
The interceptor manufacturer had already sent new equipment to counter the manoeuvres, the men of Third Army Corps said.
While the battery waited for another wave of Shaheds, the crew played back video of their most recent successful shoot-down. Their equipment's sensors track heat and movement far further than the human eye can see.
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A pilot guides the interceptor towards the Shahed at high speed using a controller taken from a popular games console. He locks on to the target. The thermal imaging camera relays each detail of the Shahed's engine back to the battery as the interceptor closes on its target, then strikes.
These interceptors are the most effective his unit has tried, Odesit said, although arms companies are racing to provide the best solution to the Shahed attacks. 'We've identified two more interesting types of fixed-wing drones — and people went to train on them. They'll come back and we'll test them in combat conditions,' he said. 'Everything that's advertised as interceptors is mostly hype. The truly effective ones are very few.'
The new technology does not always work smoothly. The soldiers have to contact a remote tech support to overcome error messages flashing on screen among lines of code and English-language prompts. Computers, routers and controls are restarted in sequences. 'It's endless,' said Odesit. 'The more complex the technology, the more problems.'
The men have had to become rudimentary electricians, fixing cables and testing connections.
Their battlefield tests were designed to eliminate these 'bugs', Odesit stressed, praising the manufacturer for providing 24-hour tech support. The soldiers' frontline feedback is vital to improving the system, which they believe is on track to solving the Shahed problem for the entire country.
Meanwhile, the radar screens are alight with activity. A wave of Shaheds is attacking Odesa across the sea from Crimea. A Ukrainian helicopter marked blue is engaging a Shahed marked red with a machine gun over the Donbas. A Ukrainian equivalent to the Shahed, Liutiy long-range kamikaze drones, are descending on Russia's Millerovo air base.
Millerovo is the primary launch site for drones crossing the battery's operational area and it was hit hard the night before, the crew said. So they settled in for a quiet night, sipping energy drinks to stay focused until their shift finished.
The Times departed shortly beforehand for the nearby town of Izyum only to discover that, after seeing their aircraft shot down en masse at night, the Russian Shahed operators here had changed tactics.
It was already broad daylight on a weekday morning when the distinctive whine of a Shahed engine finally appeared above the town, growing ever louder as it flew closer. Humming harder as it descended, it skimmed ten metres above the building accommodating The Times, before crashing into a warehouse some 500 metres away. A second followed, sending a grey smoke plume into the air.
It is not only the technology that can change and surprise, the Russians have proven. 'The enemy quickly finds countermeasures,' said Odesit. 'Then we find counter-countermeasures. It's constant competition. Whoever's a step ahead gets results.'