Battlefield inventors knock out Russian drones with homemade jammers

With a harried glance at the time, Svitlana Rezvan, a 47-year-old sommelier, stuffed the homemade drone jammer into a plastic bag and threw it into the boot of her car. Her husband was on the front line outside Kharkiv, fighting the Russians, and she needed to get it to him before nightfall.

The jammer — a pistol-shaped holder with an antenna on the end that looked like something out of Ghostbusters — was the budget version of those used by militaries across the world to disrupt the signals of enemy drones, severing the connection between drone and operator.

It was desperately needed. On hundreds of miles of front lines up and down the east of the country, Ukrainian soldiers are fighting a war that in many places boils down to relentless, pounding artillery battles. Drones are key to the exchanges: although some are used to attack enemy positions they are just as deadly as reconnaissance tools for the rival gunners. Their involvement has made targeting so precise that fighters expect a strike on their position about two minutes after firing.

Part of the bombardment on both sides is directed by commercial drones of the kind that can be bought in any electronics shop. Unlike military-grade drones such as the Bayraktar TB2, which has been a critical part of Ukraine’s armoury, they are vulnerable to drone jammers.

Western weapons and equipment are trickling on to the battlefield but not in anything like sufficient numbers. So Ukrainian inventors are creating their own stop-gap solutions.

Rezvan’s jammer had been 3D-printed by a drone expert in Kyiv called Bogdan Deruzhko, who had made it for his sister, a soldier.

But when the Russians withdrew from the gates of the capital, the need was greater in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city, which was under intensive bombardment.

Deruzhko sent the jammer in the post to Yury, an engineer in Kharkiv who calls himself Kulibin, the name of an 18th-century Russian inventor. He, in turn, figured out that if he paired the jammer with an app that measures the number of satellite signals in the area — and disruption to them — the soldiers he gave it to would be able to pick up when Russian electronic warfare was active around them, which would in turn mean that a drone was likely to be working near by.

They could then point the jammer at the drone, sending out a high-frequency radio wave and disrupting the signal, cutting the feed to the operator and causing the drone to land, change course or crash.

Kulibin hoped it would save Rezvan’s husband’s life, and those of the men in his unit. The idea was one of many dreamt up by a loose network of scientists, inventors and engineers in Ukraine, who are working relentlessly to create fast solutions to problems caused by the lack of equipment and weaponry.

Over recent months, they have built drones, jammers and batteries through parts bought online or 3D-printed. A group composed mainly of science students in Kyiv is collecting used e-cigarettes to turn into extra batteries for drones. Others have built targeting software and antennae that can dramatically extend the range of commercial drones.

 “We’re just trying to save lives,” Kulibin, a greying man with bright eyes, told me as we sat in a shuttered café in Kharkiv. “That’s the most important thing.”

Their innovations have plugged some gaps in the Ukrainian armed forces, currently outgunned and outmanned by the Russians. They have even managed to circumvent Moscow’s extensive electronic warfare capabilities, launching drone attacks behind Russian lines — taking out tanks with shells dropped from what appeared to be a modified agricultural drone — and bringing down military-grade Orlan-10 drones.

Yet this isn’t a glorious tale of Ukrainian ingenuity in the face of war. It’s about a desperate attempt to slow the destruction of the country’s fighting force, using any means possible, even if it’s a circuit board from an e-cigarette or an app designed to check your GPS signal.

“We’re going to keep fighting, this is like a holy war for us,” said Captain Ilko Bozhko, press officer for the eastern operational command.

Both sides are using commercial drones to spot artillery targets or drop explosive payloads. For Ivan and Georgy, both soldiers who are making drones in their spare time, their work is a constant battle to buy parts, which sometimes sell out in the time it takes them to put in their credit card information online. They suspect the Russians are, like them, buying up everything they can find for use on the battlefield.

“There’s a big rivalry between the Ukrainians and Russians on the markets,” Georgy, 33, said.

At the Nato summit in Madrid last week, the western world promised to massively bolster support for Ukraine. Billions of pounds of weaponry and equipment has been pledged to support the nation’s armed forces.

But it just isn’t enough. Russia is firing 2,500 shells and rockets an hour, ten times more than Ukraine, according to officials in Kyiv. An adviser to President Zelensky has estimated that up to 200 Ukrainian soldiers a day are dying.

In Kharkiv’s Constitution Square last week, two soldiers with the Ukrainian air defence laughed as they showed videos of Russian tanks wiped out by homemade, or modified, Ukrainian drones.

One, a former businessman who went by the callsign Monk, said he’d recently been trapped under a drone between two minefields with nowhere to escape to. Their neighbouring unit had a drone jammer, he said, but they were incredibly expensive.

“We can’t see the Russian drones, but they can see us,” he said. “The only thing we can do is hide.”

Even the most ingenious schemes are just a drop in the ocean for the comprehensively outgunned men on the front lines.

“Drone jammers work only with the small drones, not the Orlans [Russian military drones], and these are the biggest problem,” said Kostyantyn Zhydkov, 43, commander of the 228th brigade in Kharkiv. “The situation now is difficult, the war is mainly about artillery duels. Russians are using Orlans that cannot be shot down with normal guns — we need Buks and Tors [air defence systems] for that.”

At a bombed-out petrol station just past the northern city limits, towards Russian forces, two ambulances and three vans carrying soldiers were parked in the forecourt, hidden from drones by the canopy. The soldiers were deploying to the front, and the medics were waiting for the injured and dead to be sent back to them.

“We’re seeing shrapnel, blast wounds, head wounds,” said the youngest medic, who was in her late teens and wore glitter nail varnish. “It’s from artillery.”

“Drones are the biggest problem,” said Serhii, a young fighter in a bucket hat. “If we have a place to hide, we hide, otherwise we just send information to the command and hope for the best.”