Ukraine has a new way of countering Moscow's increased use of Shahed drones in mass attacks — redirecting them back to Russia or into the airspace of Kremlin-friendly Belarus.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00While Moscow has found a way to produce more drones to attack Ukraine, Kyiv has found a
00:06way to ground them or even send them back at Russia or Belarus.
00:11During one of the recent attacks, almost half of 110 Shahed drones launched at Ukraine were
00:18lost.
00:19Basically, what Ukraine is doing is spoofing, meaning they are feeding in false GPS targets
00:27to these Shahed or, in the Russian term, Garantu drones to make them veer off course.
00:34And so the drones have a system that's supposed to prevent jamming, but what these are doing
00:40is kind of sneaking in and not letting the drone know that the coordinates are being
00:45changed.
00:46It's kind of tricking it to going to the wrong direction.
00:51This can be possible because of the improved electronic warfare interference tactics, he
00:56says.
00:59So Ukraine's ex-top general, Valeriy Zeluzhny, first publicly mentioned the Pokrova system
01:06back in February.
01:08So I think the system has probably improved since then.
01:11And as you noted, the percentage of these Russian Shahed drones that Ukraine claims
01:17to be spoofing has increased over time.
01:20Independent Belarus monitoring group Hayun Project told Euronews that there has been
01:26an increase in the number of Russian drones redirected into Belarus' airspace every month.
01:32They reported that 38 Russian Shahed drones entered Belarus' airspace on the night of
01:38November 24 and 25, a record number.
01:43Belarus scrambled jets to respond to the airspace violation, suggesting that Minsk was unprepared
01:48to receive errant Russian drones and that Russia had not anticipated the impacts of
01:52Ukrainian interference or communicated them to Belarus in advance.