Jam Russian radios, blow up Russian jammers
Dec 13, 2023
UKRAINIAN DEFENSE MINISTRY
It’s not for no reason the Russian assault on Avdiivka, a key Ukrainian stronghold in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region, seems to be stalling out.
There are indications the Ukrainians have deployed their new drone and counter-drone strategy: targeting the radio-jammers the Russians use to ground Ukrainian drones, while setting up their own jammers to ground Russian drones.
“The Ukrainian advantage in electronic warfare seems to be holding in this sector,” analyst Donald Hill wrote in fellow analyst Tom Cooper’s newsletter. “The number of Ukrainian drone attacks have increased. A lot. The number of Russian drone attacks have decreased by the same amount.”
That’s encouraging for advocates of a free Ukraine as the winter deepens and Russia launches its traditional cold-weather attacks in several sectors of the 600-mile front line.
Avdiivka is the locus of these winter assaults. After failing to capture the city’s ruins with vehicular attacks and then also failing with infantry attacks that cost them 17,000 casualties, the Russians pivoted to an aerial assault—sending explosive first-person-view drones, some outfitted for night flights, to harry Ukrainian supply lines in the hope of strangling the garrison and forcing it to withdraw.
That the Ukrainians are grounding the drones before they can attack, and also preventing the Russians from grounding Ukrainian drones, means the Ukrainians’ supply lines might stay open—and the Russians’ supply lines might fray.
“There is no telling how long Ukraine will have this advantage, but it’s currently saving Ukrainian lives,” Hill wrote.
As small, explosives-laden drones steadily have become some of the most dangerous weapons in Russia’s 22-month wider war on Ukraine, electronic defenses against these drones—as well as against unarmed unmanned aerial vehicles both sides use for reconnaissance—have become indispensable.
The force with the radio-jammer advantage is in a position to control the air over the battlefield. More and more, the Ukrainian military holds this advantage. Note the recent videos depicting Ukrainian attacks on Russian jammers near Avdiivka, and the other videos depicting Russian drones tumbling from the sky over Avdiivka.
Ukrainian forces’ apparent jamming edge is no accident. Kyiv lately has chosen to prioritize electronic warfare, a traditional strength of Moscow’s forces. When Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces, recently listed his troops’ most urgent needs, electronic-warfare systems tied with command, counter-mine, counter-artillery and air-defense systems.
“Every piece of equipment must be protected by electronic warfare,” Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s minister of digital transformation, said in October. “Every trench, every location of our soldiers must be protected by electronic warfare to analyze the frequencies at which enemy drones fly. This is a huge systematic work and a new doctrine of modern technological warfare.”
The first hint that Ukraine’s jam-first approach to operations might work came in late summer, as Kyiv’s forces prepared the left bank of the Dnipro River in Russian-occupied southern Kherson Oblast for an impending river-crossing operation by the Ukrainian marine corps.
Before the marines boarded their boats for their successful attack on the left-bank settlement of Krynky, Ukrainian electronic-warfare troops, artillery gunners and drone-operators struck Russian jammers and grounded Russian drones. The result: for several months now, the Ukrainians have controlled the air over Krynky, helping them to hold onto their narrow bridgehead in the settlement.
The implications of Krynky and Avdiivka are profound. The Ukrainians have figured out a new way of winning.
Whether they can scale it depends in large part on foreign aid. Many of Ukraine’s radio-jammers have come from the United States, most recently in September as part of a $600-million aid package.
American aid is about to end, however. U.S. president Joe Biden has proposed $61 billion in new funding for Ukraine. But pro-Russia Republicans in the U.S. Congress voted down the funding after demanding, as a precondition, that Biden effectively end refugees’ right to asylum in the United States.
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As we see, the digitalization of the battlefield is now well entrenched. Sorry for the pun. I’m happy to see an advantage in this on the Ukrainian side. I hope it’ll stay that way.
Ukraine will get help, if not from the US, which will do so sooner or later, than from Europe, which even more can’t allow a mafia victory on its doorstep.
The 1951 Refugee Convention does not require a person to claim asylum in the first safe country they reach. As a consequence, Britain allows very dangerous criminals from primitive cultures to enter from small boats. If they were DNA’d, printed and turned around, the problem would end. Same with the US border.
The failure of mainstream governments to act on this has caused a gaggle of putlerite shitbags to take power: Orban, Trumpkov, Fico and now Wilders, with Le Pen and AfD waiting in the wings.
The Ukraine Aid blockers have no leg to stand on with the money argument. On illegal immigrants they are right. But using an unrelated issue to block aid is blackmail. It is also evil and unforgivable because a) Ukrainian soldiers are dying due to ammo rationing and b) they can’t take out orcs in the required numbers because promised weaponry has not arrived.
moskovia is trying every way it can to ferment unrest everywhere in the World that the US is or might become involved.
They hope that by so doing, aid for Ukraine can become diluted.
I’m willing to bet that moskovia has a hand in every bit of trouble.
Agreed. And some of us here are fomenting unrest too and always blaming one side of the political spectrum when clearly both are guilty. Fairness accomplishes policies, unfairness leads to unrest. You could say they are helping Putler.
I fully agree, масон. I’m also convinced that mafia land has its fingerprints on countless problems around the globe. We’ve been far too naive, far too lenient, and far too cowardly for far too long about it.