The Invisible Russia-Ukraine War | THE WIRE

The Russian systems “were not very mobile, not very distributed,” Clark tells WIRED. Their very few machines, Clark says, “were not necessary for the war.”

The Moscow strategy assumed that there would be a static battlefield. Before them, they were carrying Infaunaa heavily armed vehicle targeting radio stations. Further, about 15 miles from the front line, they send Practice-3a six-wheeled vehicle capable of jamming mobile networks and blocking communications and even send SMS to local phones. Further on, from about 180 kilometers away, a fire truck–its size Krasukha-4 they can interfere with space sensors.

“The closer you get to the front, the more electric you get,” says Clark. “Your GPS doesn’t work, your phone doesn’t work, your Starlink doesn’t work.”

An electromagnetic no-man’s-land is what happens when you “hit,” Clark explains. But there is a big trade-off, he says. Jumping through a scene requires a lot of energy, as does jamming in a large area. The more powerful the system, the bigger it should be. So you can disrupt any connection you want, or some connection – but not both.

Go Fast and Jam Things

The Russian army was hampered, early in the war, by bad communications, bad planning, and general laziness in getting used to it. Even then, he had a great start. “Unfortunately, the adversary has a lot of physical and strategic advantage,” a representative of UP Innovations, a Ukrainian defense technology startup, tells WIRED in a written statement.

So Ukraine developed two additional strategies: to produce many cheap EW systems, and to make them repeatable and flexible.

Ukraine’s Bukovel-AD anti-drone system, for example, fits neatly into the back of a pickup truck. The Ether system, the size of a suitcase, can detect intercepted signals from Russian EW systems — allowing Ukraine to target them with weapons. Ukrainian military electronic warfare company Kvertus is now developing 15 anti-drone weapons – from drone-jamming bags to immobile devices that can be mounted on radio towers to intercept incoming UAVs.

When the big war started in 2022, Kvertus had one thing: a shoulder-mounted anti-drone gun, like the EDM4S. “In 2022, (we were making) tens of devices,” Yaroslav Filimonov, CEO of Kvertus told me when we sat in his Kyiv offices in March. “In 2023 it was hundreds. Now? It’s thousands.”