This Old soviet RELIC Is Fighting Drones Today! (video commentary)

12/12/2025

Ukraine is modernizing sixteen old Soviet anti-aircraft Shilkas to fight against drones!

Imagine taking a Soviet anti-aircraft tank designed in the early 1960s and throwing it headfirst into the most drone-saturated war in human history. That weapon is the ZSU-23-4 Shilka, and against all odds, it’s back as one of Ukraine’s most effective drone-smashing workhorses.

In this video, I break down how Ukraine resurrected the Shilka, why sixteen of them are now being fully modernized through civilian funding from the Come Back Alive Foundation, and how a Cold War relic is once again shaping the battlefield, this time against Iranian Shaheds and Russian UAV swarms.

The Shilka was once feared by NATO pilots. Four 23mm autocannons, radar-guided, mounted on tracks, throwing a wall of metal into the sky. Then time caught up. Aircraft got smarter. Missiles got longer-ranged. The Shilka was parked, forgotten, and left to rust across former Soviet stockpiles.

I walk through the Shilka’s strange second life in this war:

How Ukraine pulled decaying Shilkas out of storage after 2014
Why they became devastating ground-fire platforms in trench warfare
How they were repurposed once drones took over the sky
And why their original Soviet radar simply wasn’t good enough anymore

This episode is about adaptation. About why Ukraine keeps finding ways to fight smarter with what it has, while Russia keeps dragging old systems out of storage and pretending that alone counts as modernization.

The Shilka shouldn’t work in 2025. But war doesn’t care about design intent. It cares about results. And right now, a system built when the Beatles were still touring is once again saving Ukrainian brigades from what falls out of the sky.

If you want to understand how legacy systems can be reborn, why cost matters more than hype, and how Ukraine keeps out-innovating a larger adversary, this is one you don’t want to miss.

Subscribe if you value real military analysis without the AI. And as always: glory to Ukraine! Glory to the heroes! Crimea is Ukraine!