Ukraine is leveraging its highly effective – and low-cost – new drone killers for air protection | EUROtoday
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The icy floor crackling underneath their toes, members of an elite Ukrainian drone-hunting group arrange for an extended night time.
Antennas and sensors are clipped to a lightweight stand. Monitors and controls are pulled from exhausting instances, and a game-changing new weapon is readied for deployment.
The Sting, formed like a flying thermos, is one among Ukraine’s new homegrown interceptors.
The unit’s commander says the interceptors can successfully counter Russia’s fast-evolving suicide drones, which at the moment are flying sooner and at larger altitudes.
“Every destroyed target is something that did not hit our homes, our families, our power plants,” stated the officer, identified solely by the decision signal “Loi,” in step with Ukrainian navy protocol. “The enemy does not sleep, and neither do we.”
Nightly assaults on Ukrainian cities and energy infrastructure have pressured Kyiv to rewrite the air protection rule e-book and develop cut-price drone killers costing as little as $1,000.
Interceptors went from prototype to mass manufacturing in only a few months in 2025 and characterize the newest shift in trendy warfare.
Effective protection in Ukraine will depend on mass manufacturing, fast adaptation and layering low-cost methods into present defenses as a substitute of counting on a number of costly, slow-to-replace weapons.
Models just like the Sting – made by the volunteer-driven startup Wild Hornets – and the newly appeared Bullet can surge in velocity earlier than crashing into enemy drones. They are flown by pilots watching screens or carrying first-person-view goggles.
The economics are essential. Andrii Lavrenovych, a member of the strategic council of the fast-growing startup General Cherry which develops the Bullet, says the drones they destroy value anyplace from $10,000 to $300,000.
“We are inflicting serious economic damage,” he stated.
Russia favors the Iranian-designed Shahed suicide drone and has produced a number of variants of the triangle-winged craft, armed with jammers, cameras and turbojet engines in a relentless battle of innovation.
“In some areas they’re one step forward. In others, we invent an progressive answer, and so they undergo from it,” Lavrenovych said.
Federico Borsari, a defense analyst at the Washington-based Center for European Policy Analysis, says interceptors are a valuable addition to Ukraine’s — and Europe’s — anti-drone arsenal.
“Cheap interceptor drones have become so important, and so quickly, that we can consider them a cornerstone of modern counter-unmanned aerial systems,” he said. “They realign the cost and scale equation of air defense.”
Their mobility and low cost allow them to defend more targets, but Borsari added: “It would be a mistake to see them as a silver bullet.”
Their success, he said, depends on sensors, fast command and control as well as skilled operators. They can be used in a menu of options that starts with multimillion-dollar missiles and ends with nets and antiaircraft guns.
Defense planners in Ukraine and NATO expect the hyper-scaling of drone production on both sides of the conflict to continue in 2026, adding urgency to European plans to create a layered air-defense system known as the “drone wall.”
The community alongside Europe’s japanese borders, to be rolled out over two years, is designed to detect, observe and intercept drones, with Ukrainian-style interceptors taking part in a probably central function in destroying threats.
Ukrainian drone makers are set subsequent 12 months to broaden coproduction with U.S. and European corporations. Merging battle-tested designs and precious knowledge with Western scale and funding, the collaboration would enhance output and embed Ukraine in NATO-member provide chains.
Another inevitable development, Lavrenovych argues, is elevated automation.
“Our mobile groups shouldn’t have to approach the front line, where they become targets,” he stated.
“Drones must become fully autonomous robots with artificial intelligence — as scary as that may sound — to help our soldiers survive.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/ukraine-drone-attacks-russia-the-sting-b2888738.html