Ukraine is scaling up interceptor drones

THEY CAN hardly believe it themselves. At a secret training range north of Kyiv, a group of volunteers are learning the basics of drone shootdowns. The experiment attempts to revive the improvisational spirit of the war’s first weeks. The part-time unit, which includes graphic designers, actors, lawyers and a neurologist, feels more Dad’s Army than praetorian guard. But they feel they have a duty to defend their homes. “We’re preparing while we can,” says new recruit Oleksandra Azarkina, a former deputy minister for infrastructure. “We don’t know what tomorrow brings.”

Ukraine’s defence against Shahed drones is a key front line of the war. Originally Iranian, the modernised drones offer Russia a cheap, accurate substitute for missiles. Together with the lighter Gerbera, often used as decoys or for reconnaissance, they form the backbone of Russia’s campaign against Ukraine’s economy and power grid. For a long time Ukraine struggled to find countermeasures. Now that is changing, with interceptor drones emerging as a cost-efficient defence.

The drone the volunteers are test-driving, Skyfall’s P1-SUN, is one of the three most popular models. It is somewhere between a quadcopter and a mini-missile. Once a target is identified, the pilot takes off vertically, then pitches forward 90 degrees so the drone’s bullet-shaped nose leads. It can reach speeds of 350kph, fast enough for Russia’s propeller-driven drones. A small charge is packed into the tip, but ramming is often sufficient. They work well provided it is not too windy or wet, and the skies are free of jamming.

More advanced interceptors are semi-autonomous. The Merops drone, produced by a company founded by Eric Schmidt, Google’s former boss, needs only to be guided into visual range before engaging automatically. Crews rate it highly, despite problems scaling up. The front-runner is now the locally developed Sting (pictured), which at $2,000 costs less than half as much. Availability and cost remain the key questions, says Lieutenant Colonel Pavlo Verkhovod of the 25th Airborne Brigade: “There is little point in shooting down 100% of the drones if the interceptor costs more than the target.”

Commanders say the cat-and-mouse game has produced capabilities that would overwhelm most Western armed forces. The Russians rework drones and tactics every few months. When Russian operators realised that Merops drones attacked from below, using the sky to outline their targets, the Shaheds flew lower. Later they introduced manoeuvres every couple of minutes to trick algorithms. Engineers who study downed craft say the drones used Ukraine’s own cell-phone and WiFi networks for navigation, using inertial systems to hop between nodes when jammed. Ukraine has had some success disrupting this, and Russia’s recent effort to shift to Starlink devices may have been a response.

Even before Elon Musk cut Russian access to his satellites in early February, Ukraine was turning a corner. In January, a year after interceptor drones were launched, it destroyed a record 1,704 Shaheds—half of those launched. Some 70% of the interceptions used drones. The rest were downed by a more expensive mix of fighter jets, helicopters and missiles. The 412th Unmanned Systems Brigade, aka “Nemesis”, accounted for a sixth of the shootdowns. Operating outside the military bureaucracy, Nemesis has automated processes, from combat to paperwork. “We work as a startup,” says Lieutenant Colonel Artem Bielienkov, the unit’s chief of staff and a former financial analyst. “Fail fast, build new prototypes, test and scale—or put it in the box and move on.”

Ukraine’s new defence-ministry team, led by a 35-year-old tech prodigy, Mykhailo Fedorov, is trying to extend that kind of model across the armed forces. At a press briefing on February 23rd, the minister presented a three-part vision of how Ukraine might regain the battleground initiative. “Closing the skies” was his first priority. The other pillars—raising Russia’s rate of attrition and squeezing its economy—are designed to make Vladimir Putin’s war more obviously pointless.

Ukraine’s commanders are confident they can deal with this generation of Russian drones. “The main issue is scaling,” says Colonel Bielienkov. Yet few expect the enemy to stand still. The armed forces have already faced the first experimental jet-powered drones, which at 400–500kph fly faster than the current interceptors. There are cases of Russian drones operating in small swarms. If these projects are scaled up, they will demand new answers.

Oleksiy Honcharuk, a former prime minister and chair of Nemesis’s expert council, says drone power is growing exponentially. “Every year a drone halves in size or price, or doubles in range,” he says. Soon Shahed-type drones may not be weapons, but platforms from which to catapult smaller drones into cities. Russia already uses Shaheds to launch FPV (first-person view) drones near the front line. That will eventually require new defences, Mr Honcharuk believes: walls of interceptor drones launching automatically on detection, bypassing the need for teams of pilots. “It might sound like science fiction, but we are getting ready for it,” he says. “Europeans should be asking themselves if they are too.”■