Downing Russian Drones: “The U.S. and Europe Should Learn From Us”

Looking back, it was a prescient warning. Just the day before the Kremlin sent 19 unmanned aerial vehicles deep into Polish territory, prompting NATO to scramble its most advanced fighter jets and anti-missile air defenses, I met with the commander of a Ukrainian air defense unit protecting the city of Sloviansk from Russian drones. We sat outdoors in a quiet courtyard near the city center, just 15 miles from the front line. The officer, who goes by the name Fin—he worked in the financial sector, running a grain export company, before volunteering for combat duty in 2022—explained how his team of advanced IT technicians and other specialists uses signals intelligence (SIGINT) to intercept incoming Russian drones.

A tall, well-built man with a graying beard, Fin took out his phone to show me a video of a typical intercept. The unit had hacked into the frequencies the targeted Russian drone was using to send video images back to its pilot behind the front line, letting us see the battlefield through enemy eyes. Ukrainian forests and fields floated by, bracketed by the drone’s spinning rotors on the edges of the frame. Then it all went gray. The SIGINT unit, code-named Specter, had used the device’s own navigational signals to bring it down, crashing to earth far short of its target.

“Fin,” the commander. (Courtesy of the Specter Battalion)

“We do this for a fraction of what it would cost Europe and the U.S.,” Fin explained. “No jets, no million-dollar weaponry. And we intercept a large number of drones.” Just the night before, he told me, a routine evening in Sloviansk, the unit brought down 198 enemy UAVs. “Europe and the U.S. should start learning from us before it’s too late,” he warned. “They’ll either learn from our experience, or they’ll learn on their own—the hard way.”

Fin’s unit, a battalion of the armed forces’ 54th Separate Mechanized Brigade, isn’t unique. Electronic warfare is ubiquitous in Ukraine. Virtually every unit, Ukrainian and Russian, uses radio frequencies to jam and spoof the other side’s incoming missiles and drones, and a growing number can also hack into the enemy’s video streams to see what it sees or bring its devices down. But Fin says Specter is one of the most experienced units in the area.

“We jam everything that’s incoming,” he explained, “whatever its task. Without us, no other operations—offense, defense, logistics, infantry, evacuations—are possible.” His broader goals: to protect Ukrainian troops and civilians in Sloviansk, as well as the roads leading into and out of the city. “Other units are the sword,” Fin says. “We are the shield.”

So far this year, Specter has destroyed or disabled 8,000 incoming drones. Although recent months have seen a marked uptick in Russian aerial activity in Sloviansk—more drones and more huge, powerful glide bombs, including on the road that connects the strategically important logistics hub to western Ukraine—the city is still relatively livable.

Russian drone downed by Ukrainian forces (Courtesy of the Specter Battalion)

Specter’s control centers dot the region—in civilian homes near the city center, farmhouses in outlying villages, and even trenches less than two miles from enemy positions. I visit one on the city’s outskirts—a small house, its living room now lined with giant screens. A smaller room nearby—for what the unit calls “research”—features a collection of mangled enemy drones that the team has managed to retrieve and demine. “We take them apart,” explains one man, who, like the others, declines to give his name, “to decipher how they’re built and what frequencies they use.”

Back in the main room, three techs scan the big screens, toggling between images. “We do many things,” says one soldier, “including reconnaissance and research. But our main task is to prevent anything from reaching our guys.” Once operators have intercepted the signals of a Russian drone and can see through its eyes, they work to determine its location. Expensive software would do this electronically, but the unit has a simpler way—comparing the intercepted Russian video to their own satellite image of the area. “It’s coming in over a ravine, see?” one man points out. “That’s this ravine here—the same one in our image.”

This time, the intercept is slower. Instead of crashing immediately, the UAV careens wildly right and left as if it were drunk—we know because we’re watching through its eyes—before the screen goes gray. A few minutes later, another feed shows a grainy image of a Russian pilot’s hands and face—he has turned on his video feed prematurely, before launching his drone. According to one operator, Specter can jam nearly three-quarters of enemy incoming headed for Sloviansk.

A Russian glide bomb damaged a Ukrainian building. (Courtesy of the author)

Drone warfare is constantly evolving and is different today than just a few months ago. The unit works hard to stay ahead. Among this year’s most significant developments has been the proliferation of UAVs controlled by fiber optic cable rather than radio waves. Ukrainian fighters can’t jam them as they jam ordinary first-person view drones, but they have other tools. “You can shoot the cable with a rifle,” one soldier tells me, “or use a drone of your own fitted with a net to capture the device.” Fin’s goal, which he says is not far away, is to jam the signal coming through the cable, downing the device electronically.

He is also looking for ways to counter AI-enabled drones. While Fin experiments with more sophisticated methods, his preferred tactic today is to intercept and down the device before its AI-powered target recognition kicks in, locking on its quarry. Alternatively, he tries to hack into the algorithm propelling the UAV and predict its course.

Other developments in the pipeline include hacking into the enemy’s most sophisticated UAVs—Orlan reconnaissance drones and Lancet loitering munitions, known for their high-precision pinpoint strikes. Specter can already suppress both devices’ navigational systems, but can’t yet override them. Still another ambitious goal: jamming the satellite signals that direct Russia’s much-feared glide bombs, each capable of destroying the better part of a city block.

The next frontier, the most menacing development Fin sees on the horizon: Russia has started to mix and match drone components, combining the most powerful elements from various systems to create more dangerous, hybrid devices. Ordinary first-person view UAVs, for example, now cheap and plentiful, buzzing everywhere on both sides of the front line, can be equipped with navigational components from more sophisticated Lancet drones, rendering them far more accurate and lethal.

The Ukrainian commander is eager to see more cooperation with the West—for both sides’ sakes. As he sees it, Europe and the U.S. have much to learn from Ukraine’s battlefield experience, particularly with low-cost jamming and interception, while Ukraine could benefit from access to sophisticated Western reconnaissance tools, particularly SIGINT software. Specter is already cooperating with Finland and several Baltic states, and Fin expects that collaboration to expand in the coming months. But he complains that the U.S. lags far behind. “The Americans seem much less interested in low-cost jamming,” he laments, and although the Defense Department is sharing a free demo version of one advanced software tool, it has declined to provide the full package.

When I ask who is ahead in the drone war, Fin answers philosophically. “It’s a pendulum,” he says, “swinging back and forth every day.” Today, the enemy is better at long-range electronic warfare, but Ukrainian jamming and interception are more agile. “Sometimes we’re ahead and they learn from us,” Fin says, “sometimes vice versa. The one thing that’s certain—the U.S. and Europe are way behind.”

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