Latest news with #Shaheds
Yahoo
a day ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Ukraine is using an AI-powered, automated turret to shoot down Russia's devastating Shahed drones
Ukraine has deployed an AI-powered turret that can down Shahed drones, a Ukrainian officer told BI. He said one of the guns had been used in combat six times and destroyed six drones as of last week. It appears to be the first confirmation that a Sky Sentinel had so many confirmed kills. Ukraine has deployed an AI-powered turret that has already shot down at least six of Russia's devastating Shahed drones, a military officer told Business Insider. Yuriy, the commander of Ukraine's air defense group, told BI last week that the system, called the Sky Sentinel, has "already been deployed in real combat, demonstrating high effectiveness." He said one prototype shot down six Shaheds in as many operational uses. This appears to be the first confirmation that one of the Sky Sentinels had downed up to six exploding drones. Ukraine previously said that the turret had been successfully tested, including on the front lines. United24, a Ukrainian government initiative that raises funds to purchase weaponry for the military, said last week that a Sky Sentinel prototype was used at the front, where it successfully shot down four Shahed drones. The Sky Sentinel can also take down cruise missiles that are within its effective range, United24 said, but added that many details regarding the system couldn't be revealed due to security concerns. In remarks to BI, Yuriy, who went by only his first name, a standard practice in the Ukrainian military, described the Sky Sentinel as "a cost-effective and scalable solution for defending both cities and frontline regions from Shaheds, reconnaissance drones, and even cruise missiles." Its deployment comes at a critical moment for Ukraine. Russia has been pounding its neighbor with unrelenting drone and missile bombardments. Over the weekend, Moscow launched 472 attack and decoy drones — its biggest air attack with drones to date. The Sky Sentinel system is designed to require almost no human involvement. This could be key for Ukraine as it tries to stop Russia's aerial attacks amid concerns about dwindling stockpiles of Western air defenses. Yuriy said that the weapon is "powered by AI and designed for autonomous operation." He told BI that when a turret is in a combat position and synced up with radar data, "it independently scans the airspace, identifies threats, locks onto aerial targets, calculates their speed and trajectory, and determines the exact firing point." An operator does not manually select targets, he added. "Instead, the system's sensors and software do it autonomously." Sky Sentinel does the "target detection, tracking, and automatic aiming" itself, Yuriy said, but it still needs human authorization before it fires. "This approach reduces the chance of error while still maintaining human oversight." He said the weapon has successfully identified targets: "Its AI can distinguish between birds and drones, and only engages when the threat is clearly identified. It also factors in environmental variables like wind speed." Sky Sentinel can spin 360 degrees and is equipped with a machine gun. United24 said the turret can strike "small, fast-moving targets" that are travelling up to almost 500 miles an hour. Its range is classified. The weapon is also precise enough to hit much smaller targets, per United24, which said that the system successfully hit targets five times smaller than Shaheds in field tests. It is unclear how many have been made to date. United24, which has a crowdfunding campaign for 10 of the turrets, said the system's development team was focused on trying to deliver dozens every month. The Sky Sentinel could be key to protecting Ukraine's cities. Russia can fire hundreds of drones in a single night, and Ukraine has struggled with having enough air defenses since Russia's full-scale invasion began in February 2022. Its attacks often use Shaheds, Iran-designed drones that Russia fires en masse to try to overwhelm Ukraine's defenses. The attacks leave Ukraine with a major problem: Many of the missiles it has that can potentially stop Russia's attacks cost far more than the Russian drones they target. That's another way the Sky Sentinel could be particularly useful. Each Sky Sentinel unit costs around $150,000. Meanwhile, missiles for the US-made Patriot air defense system, which Ukraine has a few of in its cities, cost around $4 million each, and the Patriot system itself costs about $1.1 billion. Even if the Sky Sentinel is less capable than the Patriot, which can stop faster ballistic missiles, having it shoot down cheaper targets would be a big boost to Ukraine. According to United24, the developers believe that 10 to 30 Sky Sentinels would be needed to protect a city. The cost of even 30 systems would be less than many single air defense missiles, United24 said. And Kyiv needs more systems to protect its cities. It says, for example, that it needs dozens more Patriot systems than it has. United24 added that Sky Sentinel can also be used in dangerous frontline areas, and other variants are being designed for different types of missions. The new system was entirely designed and tested in Ukraine and uses software designed by Ukrainian engineers, per United24. However, it does rely on some foreign-made parts that have no Ukrainian equivalent. United24 did not name its developer, something that is common as Ukraine seeks to protect its weapons makers. It's another example of Ukraine's growing defense industry, which is supplying an increasing part of Ukraine's arsenal, especially amid questions over the future of US security assistance. Ukraine has increasingly been investing in AI-powered and robotic technology, including ground robots. Oleksandr Yabchanka, the head of robotic systems for Ukraine's Da Vinci Wolves Battalion, told BI that Ukraine is also using robots that fire at Russian troops and targets, while allowing its soldiers to stay safe from return fire. Read the original article on Business Insider
Business Insider
a day ago
- Business Insider
Ukraine is using an AI-powered, automated turret to shoot down Russia's devastating Shahed drones
Ukraine has deployed an AI-powered turret that has already shot down at least six of Russia's devastating Shahed drones, a military official told Business Insider. Yuriy, the commander of Ukraine's air defense group, told BI last week that the system, called the Sky Sentinel, has "already been deployed in real combat, demonstrating high effectiveness." He said one prototype shot down six Shaheds in as many operational uses. This appears to be the first confirmation that one of the Sky Sentinels had downed up to six exploding drones. Ukraine previously said that the turret had been successfully tested, including on the front lines. United24, a Ukrainian government initiative that raises funds to purchase weaponry for the military, said last week that a Sky Sentinel prototype was used at the front, where it successfully shot down four Shahed drones. The Sky Sentinel can also take down cruise missiles that are within its effective range, United24 said, but added that many details regarding the system couldn't be revealed due to security concerns. In remarks to BI, Yuriy, who went by only his first name, a standard practice in the Ukrainian military, described the Sky Sentinel as "a cost-effective and scalable solution for defending both cities and frontline regions from Shaheds, reconnaissance drones, and even cruise missiles." Its deployment comes at a critical moment for Ukraine. Russia has been pounding its neighbor with unrelenting drone and missile bombardments. Over the weekend, Moscow launched 472 attack and decoy drones — its biggest air attack with drones to date. Little human involvement The Sky Sentinel system is designed to require almost no human involvement. This could be key for Ukraine as it tries to stop Russia's aerial attacks amid concerns about dwindling stockpiles of Western air defenses. Yuriy said that the weapon is "powered by AI and designed for autonomous operation." He told BI that when a turret is in a combat position and synced up with radar data, "it independently scans the airspace, identifies threats, locks onto aerial targets, calculates their speed and trajectory, and determines the exact firing point." An operator does not manually select targets, he added. "Instead, the system's sensors and software do it autonomously." Sky Sentinel does the "target detection, tracking, and automatic aiming" itself, Yuriy said, but it still needs human authorization before it fires. "This approach reduces the chance of error while still maintaining human oversight." He said the weapon has successfully identified targets: "Its AI can distinguish between birds and drones, and only engages when the threat is clearly identified. It also factors in environmental variables like wind speed." Sky Sentinel can spin 360 degrees and is equipped with a machine gun. United24 said the turret can strike "small, fast-moving targets" that are travelling up to almost 500 miles an hour. Its range is classified. The weapon is also precise enough to hit much smaller targets, per United24, which said that the system successfully hit targets five times smaller than Shaheds in field tests. It is unclear how many have been made to date. United24, which has a crowdfunding campaign for 10 of the turrets, said the system's development team was focused on trying to deliver dozens every month. Needed by Ukraine The Sky Sentinel could be key to protecting Ukraine's cities. Russia can fire hundreds of drones in a single night, and Ukraine has struggled with having enough air defenses since Russia's full-scale invasion began in February 2022. Its attacks often use Shaheds, Iran-designed drones that Russia fires en masse to try to overwhelm Ukraine's defenses. The attacks leave Ukraine with a major problem: Many of the missiles it has that can potentially stop Russia's attacks cost far more than the Russian drones they target. That's another way the Sky Sentinel could be particularly useful. Each Sky Sentinel unit costs around $150,000. Meanwhile, missiles for the US-made Patriot air defense system, which Ukraine has a few of in its cities, cost around $4 million each, and the Patriot system itself costs about $1.1 billion. Even if the Sky Sentinel is less capable than the Patriot, which can stop faster ballistic missiles, having it shoot down cheaper targets would be a big boost to Ukraine. According to United24, the developers believe that 10 to 30 Sky Sentinels would be needed to protect a city. The cost of even 30 systems would be less than many single air defense missiles, United24 said. And Kyiv needs more systems to protect its cities. It says, for example, that it needs dozens more Patriot systems than it has. United24 added that Sky Sentinel can also be used in dangerous frontline areas, and other variants are being designed for different types of missions. Ukrainian designed The new system was entirely designed and tested in Ukraine and uses software designed by Ukrainian engineers, per United24. However, it does rely on some foreign-made parts that have no Ukrainian equivalent. United24 did not name its developer, something that is common as Ukraine seeks to protect its weapons makers. It's another example of Ukraine's growing defense industry, which is supplying an increasing part of Ukraine's arsenal, especially amid questions over the future of US security assistance. Ukraine has increasingly been investing in AI-powered and robotic technology, including ground robots. Oleksandr Yabchanka, the head of robotic systems for Ukraine's Da Vinci Wolves Battalion, told BI that Ukraine is also using robots that fire at Russian troops and targets, while allowing its soldiers to stay safe from return fire.
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
How much does a Russian drone attack on Ukraine cost? The question is more complicated than it sounds
Beginning overnight on Saturday, May 24, Russia rained down nearly a thousand drones and missiles on villages and cities across Ukraine in three nights of large-scale aerial attacks, as civilians spent hours sheltering underground. Russia's bombardment killed more than a dozen people and injured dozens more, in one of the largest coordinated attacks since the start of the war. Such deadly storms of drones and missiles are not cheap to carry out, but the costs of these weapons are sensitive military information that Russia keeps classified. Experts and media outlets have estimated that attacks like the one this past weekend cost Russia hundreds of thousands of dollars in weaponry. The estimated figures vary significantly, however, and that's before adding in other costs beyond their price tag, like the price of a flight that launches a missile, or storage costs before weapons are used. "The cost of these large strikes is quite difficult to estimate in the open-source because Russia goes to great lengths to obfuscate the cost of the missiles and drones," said Angelica Evans, a Russia analyst with the Institute for the Study of War (ISW). "Particularly with the onset of western sanctions and Russia's many sanctions evasion schemes, it's difficult to know how much all of the various components in the projectiles really cost, let alone the cost of production itself." According to Ukraine's Air Force, the weekend attack used Shahed drones, decoy drones, three types of cruise missiles, and Iskander-M and KN-23 ballistic missiles. Most of the 995 weapons — 903 of them — were Shahed kamikaze drones or decoy drones meant to mimic the behavior of Shaheds and overwhelm air defense systems. Russia also launched 69 cruise missiles: 64 of the Kh-101 variety, 4 Kh-59/69 missiles, and one Kh-22 missile. The remaining 23 weapons were Iskander-M ballistic missiles or similar North Korean KN-23 ballistic missiles. Some experts have tried to come up with price tags for different weapons systems using open-source information, including examining the components of downed weaponry, comparing missiles to similar weapons in the West, and analyzing hacked procurement contract data. While these methods can give a better sense of how much Russia is paying to carry out its aerial attacks, they result in a range rather than a hard figure. Take the Shahed, for example. One commonly cited figure is $50,000 per Shahed drone produced in Russia. Others have said the scaling of production in the past year within Russia has lowered the cost, potentially as low as $20,000. Hacked documents between Russia and Iran, meanwhile, show that Russia negotiated prices for Iranian-made Shaheds earlier in the war in the range of $193,000 to $290,000 per unit, depending on the number ordered. To save money on drones, Russia is increasingly producing them at home. Satellite imagery has detected the expansion of the facilities where Shahed drones are manufactured in Russia. The cost of a Shahed used by Russia therefore heavily depends on when it was acquired and whether you're calculating its replacement cost or its original purchase or production price. Nor do these estimates account for modifications made to the drones by Russians in the field or at the unit level. Another consideration is whether to include the cost of paying the soldiers who deploy the weapon. "Recent reporting estimates Russia can produce roughly 100 Shaheds per day." The uncertainty is multiplied hundreds of times over for each drone in a major attack. But the use of decoy drones provides another complication in calculating the cost of the recent Russian attack: How many of the 903 drones were Shaheds, and how many were the much cheaper decoy drones? Ukraine's Defense Intelligence Service believes the most expensive part of the decoy drones is their engine, which can be bought online for around $350–$500. A complete decoy is likely to cost in the low thousands range. Yurii Ihnat, a Ukrainian Air Force spokesperson, has stated that almost half of the deployed drones may be decoys. And these are only considerations for pricing a drone. Missiles have a heftier price tag — from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars per missile — and can also come with a wider price range. Most ballpark estimates would put a dollar price tag in the high six figures for the recent three-day aerial attack, but the usefulness of such a metric is limited by how much variability there is. A more helpful metric, said Evans of ISW, would be looking at how many weapons are being launched compared to how many weapons Russia can produce. Last month, Russian President Vladimir Putin pledged to continue scaling up production of weapons, and drones in particular, calling them a major factor in combat successes. "We have seen recent reporting that Russia has been increasing its ability to produce Shahed drones and decoy variants for many months, and recent reporting estimates Russia can produce roughly 100 Shaheds per day," Evans said. This suggests that the drones used in the past weekend's attack could be replenished in just over a week. "Russian missile production capabilities are much more limited, particularly of Iskander ballistic missiles, and the Russians may be trying to stockpile cruise missiles so they can conduct rarer but more intense strike series like we saw over the weekend," Evans added. Hi, this is Andrea. Thanks for reading my article. At the Kyiv Independent, we work hard to inform the world about what's happening in Ukraine. To fund our reporting, we rely on our community of over 19,000 members from around the world, most of whom give just $5 a month. We're aiming to reach 20,000 soon — join our community and help us reach this goal. Read also: How Russia's Shahed drones are getting more deadly — and what Ukraine is doing about it We've been working hard to bring you independent, locally-sourced news from Ukraine. Consider supporting the Kyiv Independent.
Business Insider
7 days ago
- Politics
- Business Insider
Russia has a new drone tactic: dive-bombing with Iranian-designed Shaheds from on high to avoid small arms fire
Russia's growing reliance on mass attacks with Iranian Shaheds has given way to a new tactic, where Moscow sends the exploding drones hurtling down from high altitudes. "The current Russian tactic boils down to constantly changing UAV routes and trying to launch them at high altitudes — over 2 kilometers above the ground," Yurii Ihnat, the lead spokesperson for Ukraine's air force, told local media outlet RBC Ukraine in an article published on Tuesday. "Then they dive straight down at the target," Ihnat added. While Ihnat didn't specifically name the Shahed, the Iranian-designed munition has been Russia's main drone for bombarding Ukrainian cities from afar. The spokesperson said high-altitude maneuvers mean the drones are more easily detected on radars but fly out of range of small arms fire. That's a problem for part of Ukraine's air defenses, which deploy mobile fire groups with vehicle-mounted heavy machine guns to shoot down Shaheds as they approach. Ukrainian units now say the one-way drones are flying higher and faster, making them far harder to hit. Some reported modifications to the Shahed have increased its known top speed from 115 to 180 miles per hour. As a result, one mobile fire group team leader told Business Insider's Jake Epstein last week, Ukrainians must start relying more on shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles, also known as MANPADS. It's all part of Russia's strategy to use Shaheds to exhaust Ukraine's air defenses, including Ukrainian electronic warfare and surface-to-air missiles. Launches of the Shahed have risen sharply over the last year, with Russia often sending hundreds at a target in one night to overwhelm Ukrainian air defenses. They're combined with waves of long-range missile strikes, making the night attacks even deadlier and more difficult to mitigate. Some of the launched Shaheds are cheaper versions without warheads that serve as decoys. Ihnat estimated to RBC Ukraine that for every 100 drones sent to Ukraine, about 40 are usually decoys. Shaheds are slower and typically less powerful than cruise or ballistic missiles, but they cost less, at about $20,000 to $50,000 per drone. Even lower-end air defense missiles, like the medium-range interceptor fired from the Soviet Buk-M1, can cost about $300,000 each. The US-made Patriot missile system, of which Ukraine is believed to have about six to eight, fires interceptors that can cost up to $4 million each. That cost disparity has fueled Moscow's push to build Shaheds locally and send them in waves, often at civilian infrastructure. Analysts from the Center for Strategic & International Studies reported that the number of Shahed launches rose from an average of 130 a week in September to 1,100 weekly launches this spring. Meanwhile, Ukrainian intelligence said in February that Russia has begun developing a new version of the Shahed that can fly at speeds of up to 372 miles per hour and has a range of 1,550 miles. The Ukrainian and Russian defense ministries did not respond to requests for comment sent outside regular business hours by BI.
Time of India
27-05-2025
- Politics
- Time of India
Russia drones: Thought U.S. and EU drones were superior? Russia unleashes drones that fly higher and faster — here's all about them
Russia Using Modified Drones Drones Flying in Higher Altitudes, Bigger Challenge For Ukraine MANPADS: The Weapon Ukraine Needs ADVERTISEMENT FAQs Russia has recently changed its drone strategy, by operating it at higher altitudes and using modified drones that fly faster, and only higher-reaching weapons can be used to beat them, as per a drone used by Russia to attack Ukraine is the Shahed-136, which is an Iranian-designed weapon that Moscow now also produces in its own country, according to Business Insider. While, traditionally the Shahed-136, which is a one-way attack drone, could fly at speeds of over 115 mph with a 90-pound explosive warhead, reported Business Insider. But now, Russia has started using a modified version of the drone with an engine that lets it travel at speeds of more than 180 mph, as per the previously, Russia would launch its Shaheds at low altitudes to avoid radar detection, but now, the country is flying the drones higher, at more than 8,000 feet, which is beyond the reach of the machine guns that the Ukrainian mobile air defence unit uses to defend, according to Business who is the deputy commander of an air defence unit with Ukraine's Territorial Defense Forces, said that the newer tactic "makes the Shaheds inaccessible to mobile fire groups", all they can do is "observe them and report back," as reported by Business commander pointed out that, "To overcome this altitude barrier and stably engage drones with firepower, mobile groups need to use additional weapons, like shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles, or Man-Portable Air Defense Systems (MANPADS)," as quoted in the also added that, "If our unit were additionally equipped with a manual MANPADS, the effectiveness of destroying air targets would increase by twofold," quoted Business a one-way attack drone originally designed in Iran and now built in Russia, used for long-range newer, modified versions can reach speeds over 180 mph, much faster than earlier models.
