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Hindustan Times
30-07-2025
- Politics
- Hindustan Times
Can interceptor drones stop Russia's terror bombing?
RUSSIA'S GROUND offensive in Ukraine's east is making slow progress this summer, at huge cost. But its mounting drone campaign against the country's cities is arguably a more serious threat. Day after day, strikes against Ukraine's civil and military infrastructure, not to mention people's homes, are battering the country's economy and eating away at its morale. Finding ways to block more of them is an urgent priority. On July 9th over 700 drones, 60% of them carrying warheads and the rest cheap decoys, attacked Kyiv and other targets. That week alone, said Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine's president, Russia launched more than 1,800 drones and 83 missiles in a campaign of 'intensifying terror against our cities and communities'. Chart Swarms of Geran-2s, Russia's version of the Iranian Shahed kamikaze drone, are starting to overwhelm Ukraine's defences. Until March this year, only about 3-5% of the Gerans were getting through. Last month that rose to some 15% of a significantly higher number. In addition to killing people and destroying infrastructure, the attacks exert relentless psychological pressure. They often last through much of the night. The aim is 'to deepen the feeling that there is no safety and no confidence in the state or in the defence forces', Serhii Bratchuk, spokesperson for the Ukrainian Army's Southern Division, told the Kyiv Independent. Russia has improved both the quantity and quality of its drones. Since last summer it has raised monthly production of Gerans five-fold, according to Ukraine's military intelligence service. Increasing supplies of Chinese dual-use components have helped. In May about 2,700 Gerans and 2,500 Gerberas (a smaller drone usually used as a decoy) were produced at two factories, both nearly 1,500km east of the front line. The factories have been hit by Ukrainian drone strikes, but output has not been severely dented and is expected to rise further. Since June Russia has been using an upgraded Geran-2 equipped with video guidance systems, artificial intelligence and improved electronics to thwart jamming, according to Olena Kryzhanivska, a defence analyst. It can fly at altitudes of up to 4,000m, allowing it to increase its speed from 185kph to 400kph as it descends on the target. Earlier versions carried a 40kg warhead, but the payload on new variants can be as heavy as 90kg. A Geran-3 with a turbojet engine that can fly at up to 600kph has also entered service, but it has an estimated cost of $1.4m, compared with about $200,000 for the upgraded Geran-2. That poses a dilemma for Ukrainian defenders. Using million-dollar missiles such as the IRIS-T to shoot down drones that cost $200,000 or less can quickly exhaust high-end air defences, which are needed to stop ballistic and cruise missiles. Until recently a combination of electronic warfare (EW) and mobile firing groups with heavy machine guns and anti-aircraft artillery, such as the German Gepard, managed to destroy the vast majority of drones. But they are struggling against improved Gerans flying at high altitude on unpredictable flight paths. The most promising solution is cheap interceptor drones. At least four Ukrainian firms, including Wild Hornets and Besomar, are producing different models. So are Tytan, a Germany company, and Frankenberg, an Estonian one. General Oleksandr Syrskyi, Ukraine's commander-in-chief, says that interceptor drones have a success rate of 70% against Gerans. Last week Mr Zelensky ordered his defence ministry to rapidly sign large-scale contracts for the proven interceptors. On July 25th he urged drone companies to boost production to at least 1,000 interceptors per day. Doing so, the president said, entailed an 'urgent funding requirement' of $6bn. Unless Russia manages to raise its production of kamikaze drones significantly above the current 200 or so a day, that could tilt the advantage back to the defenders. Charitable organisations such as the Sternenko Community Foundation and Come Back Alive have helped finance the drones' development. Taras Tymochko, a drone expert at Come Back Alive, says each interceptor must cost no more than $5,000. They require a speed of around 300kph and must fly and loiter at altitudes of up to 5,000m. (That means fixed-wing drones, not quadcopters.) They must hit the Geran and explode on impact; getting close is not enough. The challenge now, says Mr Tymochko, is to award contracts, increase production and train operators—this last potentially a major bottleneck. Matching Russian production of Shaheds and Gerans is ambitious, but 'we are really close.' There are still technological hurdles, says Max Enders of Tytan Technologies. Drones need to be integrated with existing radar networks. They need advanced artificial intelligence to make them autonomous and resistant to jamming. He foresees an adaptation race, with each side constantly upgrading software in 15-to-20-day innovation cycles. At some point the Russians may be able to send swarms of drones that communicate with each other to get around defences. Interceptor drones are no silver bullet, says Ms Kryzhanivska. Short-range defence will still require gun systems such as Ukraine's Sky Sentinel, an autonomous turret equipped with a heavy machine gun, and Rheinmetall's Skynex, designed to combat swarm attacks. Neither is yet available in significant numbers. Ukraine is also developing Tryzub, a laser system that can supposedly down aerial targets at altitudes of 3,000m or above. For now interceptor drones are the best hope. But in the meantime, the Gerans keep coming.

Straits Times
21-07-2025
- Business
- Straits Times
Russia publishes rare footage of largest drone factory
Find out what's new on ST website and app. Ukrainian air defences deploy against Russian drones during a drone strike in Kyiv on July 18,. MOSCOW - Russia has showcased what it calls the biggest drone factory in the world, broadcasting rare footage from inside a plant assembling the deadly attack drones it fires at Ukraine on a daily basis. Moscow has launched record numbers of drones at Ukrainian cities in recent weeks, escalating aerial attacks as it ignores calls from US President Donald Trump to halt its offensives. The video, published Sunday by Zvezda, a TV channel owned by the Russian defence ministry, showed workers with their faces blurred assembling jet-black triangle-shaped attack drones. 'This is the world's largest factory producing unmanned combat aerial vehicles, and the most secretive one,' said Mr Timur Shagivaleev, plant director who has been sanctioned by the United States. The plant is near the town of Yelabuga in the central Russian region of Tatarstan, located in what was initially planned to be a special economic zone to boost science and business in the region. More than 1,000 kilometres from the Ukrainian border, it has now become a target for Kyiv's own long-range attacks. To support Russia's escalating aerial barrages, the factory – which employees teenage apprentices – is churning out nine times as many drones as was initially planned, Mr Shagivaleev said. Top stories Swipe. Select. Stay informed. Asia At least 19 killed as Bangladesh air force plane crashes into college campus Singapore Subsidies and grants for some 20,000 people miscalculated due to processing issue: MOH Singapore 2 workers stranded on gondola dangling outside Raffles City Tower rescued by SCDF Business Why Singapore and its businesses stand to lose with US tariffs on the region Singapore NTU introduces compulsory cadaver dissection classes for medical students from 2026 Singapore Fine, driving ban for bus driver who hit lorry in BKE crash, causing fractures to passenger Singapore Jail for man who conspired with another to bribe MOH agency employee with $18k Paris trip Singapore New research institute will grow S'pore's talent in nuclear energy, safety 'Hundreds of machines, thousands of workers, and everywhere you look, there are young people. Boys and girls work and also study at a college here,' the narrator of the 40-minute film said. Russia's Geran drones are based on Iranian Shahed drones, which Tehran has also supplied to Moscow to support its offensive. Above the entrance to the factory, a giant screen read, 'Kurchatov, Korolyov and Stalin are living in your DNA,' featuring portraits of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, Soviet nuclear physicist Igor Kurchatov and the father of the Soviet space programme Sergei Korolev. AFP
LeMonde
04-07-2025
- Politics
- LeMonde
Kyiv suffers sleepless night as Russia hits capital with record drone attack
The first alert sounded before nightfall, on Thursday, July 3, around 8 pm, just as Kyiv residents were returning from work. They encountered other city dwellers rushing into the metro's 52 stations, hoping to claim a place to lay out their mattresses for the night before the corridors and platforms filled up. Outside, the relentless mechanical buzzing of Iranian Shahed drones quickly saturated both the air and the ears. Just one day after US President Donald Trump announced that the US would suspend deliveries of Patriot anti-missile systems, the Ukrainian capital endured yet another massive assault of drones and missiles launched from Russia on Thursday night. At the Polytechnic Institute station, on the red line, there was no space left on the ground by 12:30 am. Women settled even on the steps of the stalled escalator, unpacking their bags. Water bottles, hamster cages, cat carriers, earbuds, headphones for music: Everyone in Kyiv has now gotten into the habit of preparing their belongings in anticipation of difficult nights. 'Air filled with toxic fumes' "I was playing tennis when I heard the first drone, around 8 pm," said Valentina, 27, lying on a yoga mat next to her roommate and her Jack Russell terrier. "Everything was ready." In her special metro kit – she was spending her 10 th night there since early June – she packed her ID, her carefully charged MacBook (she works freelance in IT) and, of course, her phone, an indispensable tool to follow the progress of the attacks in real time on Telegram channels like Aeris Rimor or Real Kyiv, and to read the reactions of Ukrainians, who are never slow to post a caustic comment on social media.
Business Times
02-07-2025
- Politics
- Business Times
The US' bombing of Iran was a win for ... Putin
THE consensus after Israel's 12-day war with Iran seems to be that it ended in humiliation – not just for the Islamic Republic, but also Russia, which failed to lift a finger for a loyal ally and lost a supplier of critical drones. But this profoundly misreads both Russian President Vladimir Putin's priorities and the timescale on which he conducts his foreign policy. There is no doubt that Putin's ambition to reassert Russia as a force in the Middle East has been set back. The fall of President Bashar Al-Assad in Syria was a significant loss. His failure to come to the aid of Iran, with whom he had just signed a 20-year strategic partnership, was embarrassing. A year ago, that would indeed have hurt Moscow's war effort in Ukraine, but Russia now makes its own version of the Iranian Shahed drones. It is more important to understand where all this fits into Putin's world view and priorities. Destroying the Ukrainian state ranks much higher for him than any other foreign-policy goal, whether in the Middle East or elsewhere. And on that score, the US-Israeli attack on Iran was a net positive. In a broad sense, the outbreak of another war in the Middle East has sucked attention, energy and resources away from Ukraine, leaving Putin with a free hand. Even at last week's Nato summit, the core deliverable of a pledge to boost defence spending – to levels justifiable only by the threat from Russia – was shunted to the corner. Nobody wanted to anger Donald Trump during his victory lap. More concretely, Israel was able to blunt the impact of the Islamic Republic's missile barrages only by consuming a significant part of its air-defence stockpiles, as well as some from the US, which lent a hand using shipborne air-defence systems. BT in your inbox Start and end each day with the latest news stories and analyses delivered straight to your inbox. Sign Up Sign Up Equally, the US could only involve itself once it was confident it had enough Patriot batteries in place to protect its military bases around the region. The threat may have receded for now, but planners at the Pentagon are obliged to assume the war restarts and more air defence will be needed, making less available for Ukraine. So the recent dramatic boost in Russian missile and drone strikes on Ukraine was well-timed. Overnight on Monday, Russia launched its biggest single barrage since the start of the war, including 477 drones and decoys, as well as 60 ballistic missiles that require high-level interceptors, such as Patriots. The fact that Ukraine lost an F-16 and its pilot trying to shoot down some of the barrage is a clear indication of the strain on the country's air-defence systems. The attacks in previous days had been only a little smaller, so there was an air of desperation around Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's request for more Patriot interceptors when he met his US counterpart at Nato. There was also truth to Trump's comments afterward; he said he had told Zelensky that he would see what the US could do, but that the Patriots were hard to get, because 'we need them too. We were supplying them to Israel'. This is what matters to Putin, far more than the optics abroad of his failure to come to Iran's aid. For this war will define a legacy that he sees in the context of the Russian empire's construction over centuries. Or as his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, reportedly quipped in 2022, his boss has just three advisers: 'Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great and Catherine the Great.' Nothing that has happened in the last three years has dented this vision of the great Russian restoration. To Putin, not only is the very existence of Ukraine an affront, but the reabsorption of its resources – human, economic and military – into mother Russia is the sine qua non for Moscow's ability to remain at the top of the multipolar world order he sees replacing Western dominance. This is the reason for which Ukraine's plan to sign a trade treaty with the European Union so enraged him in 2013; it meant Kyiv would not join his own rival group, the Eurasian Union. 'All of Ukraine is ours,' Putin told an enthusiastic domestic audience at the annual St Petersburg Economic Forum on Jun 20. He was not shy about adding a new city, Sumy, as a new public target for occupation, either. Make no mistake, Odesa and Kharkiv would be next on the list, whose extent and end will be determined solely by what the Kremlin deems possible at acceptable cost. Ukraine is at a critical juncture. Until Trump came to office, it was evenly balanced whether Putin would be able to continue to exchange swathes of his armed forces for small increments of Ukrainian land long enough for Kyiv's defences to collapse. With Trump's withdrawal of US military support, those calculations have shifted and the long-range missile and drone war forms an essential part of Russia's path to victory. From the moment Ukraine runs out of air-defence interceptors, Russia's air force –still menacing in its scale and capabilities – would for the first time be able to impose air superiority across the country. The impunity that Israeli jets enjoyed over Iran should serve as a timely reminder of exactly what this could mean for Ukraine: A catastrophic collapse of defensive lines as its troops were bombed into submission from the air. Trump has switched from the moral obscenity of blaming Ukraine for being invaded, to complaining about Putin's disinterest in peace talks. But he needs to do better than that. He needs to recognise, at least to himself, that Putin has played him. The intelligence operative running the Kremlin has leveraged Trump's desperation for a ceasefire to further Russia's war aims, and at a time when he too has growing vulnerabilities, including a looming credit crisis. It may be years before anyone can say with certainty that the US military intervention in Iran was a success or failure. But if there is one conclusion Trump can draw from its success in imposing a ceasefire on Israel and Iran, it is that for peace-through-strength to work, you need to first show the strength – and that is something he has woefully failed to do in his dealings with the Kremlin. BLOOMBERG


Economic Times
02-07-2025
- Politics
- Economic Times
View: Neither Israel, Iran nor the US won the Middle-East war; The real victor may be sitting in Moscow
TIL Creatives Representative AI Image The consensus after Israel's 12-day war with Iran seems to be that it ended in humiliation — not just for the Islamic Republic, but also Russia, which failed to lift a finger for a loyal ally and lost a supplier of critical drones. But that profoundly misreads both President Vladimir Putin's priorities and the timescale on which he conducts foreign no doubt that Putin's ambition to reassert Russia as a force in the Middle East has been set back. The fall of President Bashar Al-Assad in Syria was a significant loss. His failure to come to the aid of Iran, with whom he'd just signed a 20-year strategic partnership was embarrassing. A year ago, that would indeed have hurt Moscow's war effort in Ukraine, but Russia now makes its own version of the Iranian Shahed drones. Much more important is to understand where all this fits into Putin's worldview and priorities. Destroying the Ukrainian state ranks much higher for the Russian president than any other foreign policy goal, whether in the Middle East or elsewhere. And on that score, the US-Israeli attack on Iran was a net positive. In a broad sense, the outbreak of another war in the Middle East has sucked attention, energy and resources away from Ukraine, leaving Putin with a free hand. Even at last week's NATO summit, the core deliverable of a pledge to boost defense spending — to levels only justifiable by the threat from Russia — was shunted to the corner. Nobody wanted to anger Donald Trump during his victory lap. More concretely, Israel was able to blunt the impact of the Islamic Republic's missile barrages only by consuming a significant part of its air-defense stockpiles, as well as some from the US, which lent a hand using shipborne air defense systems. Equally, the US could only involve itself once it was confident it had enough Patriot batteries in place to protect its military bases around the region. The threat may have receded for now, but planners at the Pentagon are obliged to assume the war restarts and more air defense will be needed, making less available for Ukraine. So the recent dramatic boost in Russian missile and drone strikes on Ukraine was well timed. Overnight on Monday, Russia launched its biggest single barrage since the start of the war, including 477 drones and decoys, as well as 60 ballistic missiles that require high-level interceptors, such as Patriots. The fact that Ukraine lost an F-16 and its pilot trying to shoot down some of the barrage is a clear indication of the strain on the country's air defense attacks in previous days had been only a little smaller, so there was an air of desperation around President Volodymyr Zelenskiy's ask for more Patriot interceptors when he met with his US counterpart at NATO. There was also truth to Trump's comments afterward. He said he'd told Zelenskiy that he'd see what the US could do, but that the Patriots were hard to get, because: 'We need them too. We were supplying them to Israel.'This is what matters to Putin, far more than the optics abroad of his failure to come to Iran's aid. For this war will define a legacy that he sees in the context of the Russian Empire's construction over centuries. Or as his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, reportedly quipped in 2022, his boss has just three advisers: 'Ivan the Terrible. Peter the Great. And Catherine the Great.'Nothing that has happened in the last three years has dented this vision of Great Russian restoration. To Putin, not only is the very existence of Ukraine an affront, but the reabsorption of its resources — human, economic and military — into mother Russia is the sine qua non for Moscow's ability to remain at the top of the multipolar world order he sees replacing Western dominance. This is the reason for which Ukraine's plan to sign a trade treaty with the European Union so enraged him in 2013; it meant Kyiv would not join his own rival group, the Eurasian Union. 'All of Ukraine is ours,' Putin told an enthusiastic domestic audience at the annual St. Petersburg Economic Forum, on June 20. He wasn't shy about adding a new city, Sumy, as a new public target for occupation, either. Make no mistake, Odesa and Kharkiv would be next on the list, whose extent and end will be determined solely by what the Kremlin deems possible at acceptable cost. Ukraine is at a critical juncture. Until Trump came to office, it was evenly balanced as to whether Putin would be able to continue to exchange swathes of his armed forces for small increments of Ukrainian land long enough for Kyiv's defenses to collapse. With Trump's withdrawal of US military support, those calculations have shifted and the long-range missile and drone war forms an essential part of Russia's path to the moment Ukraine runs out of air defense interceptors, Russia's air force — still menacing in its scale and capabilities — would for the first time be able to impose air superiority across the country. The impunity that Israeli jets enjoyed over Iran should serve as a timely reminder of exactly what this could mean for Ukraine: A catastrophic collapse of defensive lines as its troops were bombed into submission from the has switched from the moral obscenity of blaming Ukraine for being invaded, to complaining about Putin's disinterest in peace talks. But he needs to do better than that. He needs to recognize, at least to himself, that Putin has played him. The intelligence operative running the Kremlin has leveraged Trump's desperation for a ceasefire to further Russia's war aims, and at a time when he too has growing vulnerabilities, including a looming credit may be years before anyone can say with certainty that the US military intervention in Iran was a success or failure. But if there is one conclusion Trump can draw from its success in imposing a ceasefire on Israel and Iran, it's that for peace-through-strength to work, you need to first show the strength. That's something he has woefully failed to do in his dealings with the Kremlin. (Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this column are that of the writer. The facts and opinions expressed here do not reflect the views of