Putin's troops have control of the airwaves

Spikes are sprouting from more and more Russian tanks: antennas that confuse approaching drones and take advantage of Ukraine's technical advantage.

Pervomaiske – A small mushroom sticks out of the tank turret, relatively inconspicuous; The little nub was still being celebrated in a big way in August last year, but the hype around it now seems to have died down again. The DefenseExpress magazine reports on Russian tanks with new anti-drone jammers, which seem to have already replaced the “Volnorez” jammers that were highly praised a few weeks ago. DefenseExpress shows pictures of tanks from near the small town of Pervomaiske in the Donetsk region with covered towers; Mounted on it are boxes from which antennas protrude. The construction looks like a somewhat unsuccessful, self-made television antenna.

The magazine first learned about this system called “Saniya” in October 2023: apparently built by the Russian company “3mx”, Saniya can detect drones from a distance of one and a half kilometers and disable them within a range of one kilometer. DefenseExpress assumes that the “Volnorets” jammer is history because Russia is aggressively presenting to the public the apparent effectiveness of the new system in the Ukraine war – “which expresses Russia’s disappointment with the previous model,” as DefenseExpress claims: “There is also indirect evidence that “Volnorets” showed low effectiveness on the battlefield in Ukraine, in particular, the Ukrainian Armed Forces managed to seize at least some systems for analysis and find gaps in the frequencies and angles of area coverage .” Vladimir Putin is increasingly focusing on cyber attacks.

Russia is catching up: the battle is raging in the air over Ukraine

While the soldiers on the ground are converting their trenches into winter quarters, the battle in the air still rages on. “Ukraine has become a drone power in recent years and especially since the beginning of the war,” said Ulrike Franke, from European Council on Foreign Relations compared to the ZDF. And she is pretty sure: “It is likely that Ukraine will emerge from this war as an important drone producing country.” Science fiction seems to be becoming more realistic every day.

Ukraine has been working on a “drone army” for a long time. Conventional warfare is simply unaffordable in the long term, and Ukraine is therefore forced to make progress. Furthermore, there is a stalemate on the ground. In the space of electromagnetic waves, Russia's army appears to be on the offensive and has an advantage: it dominates electronic warfare in the Ukraine war.

Ukraine conflict: race for technological progress

The magazine army recognition explains the “Volnorez” and related systems to the effect that the amplifier and the antenna on the potential target vehicle generate a kind of cheese dome made of electromagnetic radiation in the frequency band between 900 and 3,000 megahertz. This frequency range corresponds to the operating frequencies of most first-person view (FPV) drones currently in use. Activating the jammer interrupts the drone's communication with its control station, causing the drone to veer off course, lose contact and wander into nowhere. This allows the targeted vehicle to avoid being hit by the drone.

The emergence of new systems and the emphasis on the development and apparent field testing of electronic warfare assets underscores the importance and scope of these efforts by both sides. Both the Russian and Ukrainian sides in this war are racing to develop drone-based weapons and countermeasures. In the meantime, FPV drones are becoming more and more sophisticated and have now mastered “machine vision” for autonomous attacks; a development factor that makes countermeasures in the context of electronic warfare in the previous sense ineffective.

Modern war: Drones are becoming more independent every day

Drones are becoming more independent day by day. Using machine vision, drones detect and approach a specific target area or object by almost making their own decisions within a limited framework. If the camera is connected to the on-board flight control, they can also detect fixed obstacles or avoid other drones independently, which is why machine vision is used for collision protection or for independent target detection – this also makes flying in swarms possible Simultaneously flying to different targets from a compact swarm.

In doing so, you detach yourself from the controls to a certain extent and make jammers useless. The strategic advantage that Ukraine originally had in the area of ​​robotics, particularly in its drone operations, has now been significantly minimized by Russia's use of radio-jamming systems on the front lines. Ukraine is now said to have lost tens of thousands of drones.

Conflict in Warfare: Traditionalists versus Modernizers

These jammers have so far posed a direct threat to FPV drones, cutting off the vital communication link between operators and their explosive-laden drones, writes digital journalist Aamir Sheikh in the blog Cryptopolitan. Sheikh therefore predicts a conflict between traditional military strategies and modern artificial intelligence technologies – and thus a decisive moment in modernizing warfare: “In order to maintain their lead in drone warfare, the Ukrainian armed forces are examining the integration of AI into their operations. The favored AI system would learn to recognize targets via the drone’s camera, so that it can continue to steer the drone towards the target even if there is no radio connection.”

This would paralyze the current generation of jammers again. For both
opponents, drone defense is an undertaking with many unknowns – and will soon extend into the electronic circuits. Drone defense initially means making the smallest aircraft visible at all. For the eye or the radar. Because most of the current drones fly with parts from hardware stores, they are already very sensitive to radio interference and are therefore relatively easy to influence, says British defense specialist Steve Wright. This applies, for example, to the Shahed drone used on a massive scale by Russia.

Putin's strongest weapon: the smartphones of captured Ukrainians

According to Wright, defense strategies against drones are currently being worked on with high priority. Corresponding companies are springing up. Loud Fortune Business Insights The global market for military drones will grow from the current 13.3 billion euros to 33.4 billion euros in 2030.

Until now, Vladimir Putin's troops in Ukraine were considered to be inflexible and poorly led because they lacked digital communication. However, more recent studies paint a different picture. Accordingly, the Russian army has learned something new. The Ukrainian armed forces initially succeeded “in an unprecedented way” in condensing data from civil and military sources into current situation reports in order to then use them against the invaders from Russia, says Colonel Tim Zahn in the Bundeswehr podcast Inquired.

“Due to the amount of data, significant time savings were achieved, which always play an important role in a military context,” said the head of the Bundeswehr’s Center for Cyber ​​Security. That's why entire convoys initially came to a standstill; That's why the Russian artillery fired so little accurately. That's why Ukraine had the upper hand in the counteroffensive. The current problem: The Russians have now copied all of this from their opponents.