Latest news with #FedericoBorsari
Irish Independent
7 days ago
- Politics
- Irish Independent
‘Putin wants us to panic.' How Russia has stepped up attacks on Ukraine
Russian president Vladimir Putin's forces have launched 5,402 drones and missiles against Ukraine so far this month, with the pace of attacks surging sharply in recent weeks, according to figures from Ukraine's air force. The deadliest single day came on July 9, when Moscow fired 741 drones and missiles. This was followed by other intense barrages, including 623 on July 12 and 550 on July 4. While the number of strikes dipped mid-month with just 35 reported on July 18 and 64 on July 17, the pace has picked up again over the past week, with 330 weapons fired on Saturday and a further 450 on Sunday. In June alone, there were five instances where Russia sent over 400 drones and missiles in a night. Federico Borsari, a Fellow with the Transatlantic Defence and Security Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), has said that the Russian army is likely to have been planning an increase in strikes for at least a year. 'There were already signs that Russia was trying to increase its output in terms of assets and platforms that they could launch against Ukraine in 2024,' he said, adding that the increase in drones is an attempt to make air raids more effective. 'Russia is trying to diversify its strike packages to make them more cost-effective and achieve a scale of destruction sufficient to destroy key military targets such as airfields.' He added that, for more than three years, Russia was not 'very effective' when it came to 'diminishing the production capacity of Ukraine at the industrial level'. The Russian army had also failed to 'create a sense of panic and fear among the population in order to discredit the government and create the conditions for less efficacy on the front line,' he said. Mr Borsari continued that Russia had been forced to be more tactical in its aims to increase damage against critical Ukrainian infrastructure. 'Russia is now also trying to focus on more strategic targets such as military enlistment offices,' he said. 'The attempt here is not just to destroy energy plants or other infrastructure, but also to create a sense of panic among the population. ADVERTISEMENT 'So, increasing the psychological effects of this war on the Ukrainian population and at the same time discouraging people from basically going to enlistment offices.' He said the psychological effects of the strikes could 'diminish the ability of the Ukrainian forces to recruit'. Earlier this month, the city of Lutsk, in Ukraine's north west, was hit by a Russian drone strike. Lutsk is home to airfields used by the Ukrainian army, with cargo planes and fighter jets routinely flying over it. Analysis shows that while Moscow is increasing its drone output and ramping up the intensity of its attacks, it does not follow a consistent pattern. On July 8, Russia fired 52 drones at Ukraine, followed by a record 550 the day after. The following day, it fired 322. Marcel Plichta, a former US Department of Defense analyst, suggested that Russia was staggering its large attacks with an 'on and off days' approach. 'The on day you would have a really big and increasingly a record-breaking attack and then on the off day you would have... like 100 drones or 61 drones,' he explained. 'The benefit to the large attack is, in addition to the fact that it grabs headlines, it's more likely to overwhelm Ukrainian air defence and damage the morale of the Ukrainian population. 'It's worse to try and shoot down 500 drones at once than it is 200 drones over two nights because you suddenly have to prioritise. You have to figure out where they all are and you need to respond to them. That's a much more challenging situation.' Both analysts added that the escalating aerial strikes indicated a ceasefire wasn't on the cards anytime soon, three years after Mr Putin launched his brutal invasion of the country. 'Russia has demonstrated that they're all in on the Shahed as a platform. Fundamentally they are all in on this idea of mass drone attacks to accompany their missiles,' Mr Plichta said. 'Basically from now until the end of the conflict, you're going to see a growth in the number of Shaheds being used'. He added: 'Ultimately the thing that stops Shaheds is a political end to the conflict, not necessarily a magic weapon that can shoot down interception rate.' Mr Borsari added: 'It's clear that Russia is not interested in achieving a ceasefire, at least based on the conditions that the US and Ukraine were hoping for.'
Yahoo
12-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Ukraine, NATO eye tech trials for intercepting Russia's cabled drones
MILAN — NATO and Ukrainian officials are slated to stage a trial of unmanned aerial vehicle technologies aimed at addressing a dogged threat: Russian first-person-view drones with fiber-optic cables that cannot be brought down with electronic interference. An event organized by the NATO-Ukraine Joint Analysis, Training, and Education Center and NATO's Allied Command Transformation will be held on June 20 in Tallinn, Estonia, to demonstrate new countermeasures that have been percolating among defense firms. The envisioned countermeasures are required to have a detection range of at least 500 meters, be able to operate during the day and at night, weigh under 100 kilograms, and not exceed an overall cost of $100,000. FPV drones operating via fiber-optic cables are a new military challenge globally, as they are largely immune to jamming and interception attempts. These cheap and small weapons relay signals through a thin cable, which makes them resistant to eletro-magnetic interference. Drones were a key part of Ukraine's largest long-range attack since the onset of the war carried out on June 1, where the smuggled weapons were used to target and strike Russian warplanes and strategic sites. The appearance of command-wire drones has opened yet another chapter in the cat-and-mouse game of innovations and countermeasures in drone warfare on both sides, said Federico Borsari, resident fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis. 'From a technical standpoint, Russia and Ukraine are now trying to push the limits of the usual tradeoff between range, speed, payload and endurance by introducing more powerful batteries to increase their capabilities and longer fiber-optic spools,' he said. He added that longer cables are useful in carrying out attacks and ambush tactics against enemy logistics where the FPVs lie dormant near roads and are activated by an operator when a convoy passes nearby. Ukrainian troops have so far favored an FPV-tracking tactic by spotting the reflective fibers spooling out behind the drones, which were easiest to find in bright sunlight, and then tracing them back to Russian operators. In one documented instance, one of the drone units of the Ukrainian National Guard Kara Dag Brigade struck a Russian base during the winter months by following a maze of fibre optics back to the hideout. However, as the use of fiber-optic FPVs has exploded, old cables are now littering parts of the battlefield, creating mazes that are almost impossible trace to their launch points. Borsari said Ukraine has also experimented with active countermeasures, including using drone interceptors and quadcopters to destroy FPVs mid-flight or when they are on the ground by dropping small bomblets on them. 'Currently, the best defense relies on a combination of passive and active countermeasures and should also incorporate robust signal intelligence and other forms of intel-gathering techniques to intercept Russian communications and locate their drone teams,' he said.
Business Insider
28-04-2025
- Politics
- Business Insider
NATO can't ignore the Russian military's faster, more dangerous kill chain
Russia's kill chain, or how quickly the army moves from finding a target to firing on it, is now far more responsive and precise than it was at the start of the war in Ukraine. Federico Borsari, a resident fellow researching war technology and innovation at the Center for European Policy Analysis, told Business Insider that "the Russians are adapting, and this is definitely something that NATO is noticing." Russia is outpacing the West in artillery production, raising the prospect that NATO must deter an adversary with more battlefield firepower and the fleets of reconnaissance drones that guide it. Russia's rough start to the war One of the more serious problems for Russia early in the conflict was that the time between finding a target and firing on it was far too slow. It took hours for indirect fires like artillery and mortars, and even longer for cruise missiles. Borsari wrote in a report published in early April that Russian strikes were sometimes delayed by up to four hours, making them ineffective against Ukrainian units that had long since moved on to a new position. "In the case of the tactical ballistic missile, this was very much the case," he told BI. "Sometimes, it took even longer." Researchers at the London-based Royal United Services Institute think tank wrote in November 2022 that Russian forces "have missed targets because of self-imposed frictions in their kill chains, usually striking too late rather than not at all." A challenge is that Russia's reconnaissance strike complex was ineffective, dependent on aging satellites and a smattering of drones that couldn't keep up with the pace of the fighting. Russia used surveillance drones like the Orlan-10 and Forpost early in its invasion, as evidenced by Oryx's open-source records showing several were destroyed in the spring of 2022. But there were too few of these intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) assets to be effective. Target selection suffered. Sometimes, the invading Russians would waste tactical missiles on small groups of Ukrainian infantry while peppering vast airfields with a handful of cruise missiles. Another issue was that Russia's early command and control systems were too rigid, outdated, and confused, carrying the top-down hallmarks of the Soviet command structure. After collecting timely intelligence, troops on the ground had to wait for strikes to get approved through different rungs of command. And confusion only slowed that down. Many Russian soldiers and officers were also often unclear on their responsibility areas, problems that were exacerbated by communication and tech issues. For example, in the early war, many Russian units didn't have the Strelets laptops that allowed them to target Ukrainian forces effectively, RUSI researchers wrote in May 2023. The software consolidates intelligence data from drones and recon units, displaying it on a live map for commanders. Yet Russian units that did have the computers, the researchers wrote, often left them sitting in baggage or didn't know how to set them up. How Russia fixed its kill chain Now, Russia uses a wide range of tactical drones to acquire targets in Ukraine, flooding the airspace with hundreds of observer systems at different altitudes and depths. Sometimes, these ISR platforms can work together to feed Russian commanders different visual angles of the same target. As the Kremlin started to surge drone production, what was a scarce resource in the early invasion soon became the backbone of Russia's reconnaissance. In 2023, Moscow's state media outlet TASS reported that Russia had increased its supply of the Orlan drone by more than 50 times. Insufficient Ukrainian air defenses have also given Russia more freedom of maneuverability with its bigger recon drones, allowing it to collect intelligence on Ukrainian operations in the rear and conduct effective strikes reminiscent of the HIMARS strikes that proved tremendously effective against the Russians. With the drones providing Russia a better view of the battlespace, it's been increasingly using short-range ballistic missiles like the Iskander-M and its devastating glide bombs to hit high-value targets in the Ukrainian rear more precisely. A temporary dearth in artillery ammunition in 2023 also meant Russia had to learn to switch from mass bombardments — a bread-and-butter tactic — to precision strikes. Additionally, Russia's command structure has evolved since the early days of the war. RUSI land warfare researchers Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds wrote in a 2023 report on Russian battlefield tactics that "Russian artillery has begun to significantly refine the Reconnaissance Strike Complex" after watching the Ukrainians devastate their ammunition stores and their command and control centers with HIMARS strikes. "This has resulted in much closer integration of multiple UAVs directly supporting commanders authorised to apply fires," they said, noting that "Russian artillery has also improved its ability to fire from multiple positions and to fire and move." And Russia began better employing the Strelets system for greater coherence in combat. Other technology has also played a part. Like Ukraine, Russian troops have been integrating civilian tech into their operations, such as smartphones and satellite communications terminals. That approach has made Russian units at the lower level more cohesive and able to merge intelligence and strike command in a single picture. In October, for example, Russian troops were widely seen using the video gaming messaging app Discord to relay real-time information about the battlefield and coordinate strikes. While these systems are easier to use, there are notable drawbacks. For instance, smartphone use on the battlefield has resulted in strikes on the user's position, intel leaks, and other problems. Military leaders, from Russia to the US, caution against this behavior. NATO needs to pay attention Russia's faster, improved kill chain means that Western forces bracing for the possibility of a great-power conflict should focus even more on training troops to fight while moving quickly and in small formations to reduce exposure to strikes, Borsari said. "Since the full-scale invasion started, there has been an incredibly higher emphasis on the need for more dispersed and disaggregate forces on the part of NATO," he said. Disaggregation has been increasingly recognized as a necessity on the modern battlefield. It's a driving factor behind Western training activities like highway operations for combat aircraft, but there's more work to be done. Sam Cranny-Evans, the director of the UK consultancy Calibre Defence, wrote in January for the Centre for Historical Analysis and Conflict Research that NATO should expect a more experienced Russia ready to fight with precision. "This is important for the British Army and its allies," he wrote, "as the available evidence indicates that Russia has moved away from the Soviet roots that informed its counter-battery doctrine, toward one that is precise, lethal, and operable at scale." Borsari said a more immediate action the US and Europe can take is targeting Russia's manufacturing for high-tech drones and precision munitions, which often rely on parts from overseas. "Western sanctions have, in a way, slowed down the procurement of components for that production. That would affect Russia's ability to deploy at scale and sustainably," he said.
