War in Ukraine pushes innovation in electronic warfare

At the onset of Ukraine’s war for survival, the besieged post-Soviet republic’s electronic warfare capabilities lacked massively behind those of the aggressor, Russia. Three years into the conflict, which has been defined by widespread use of off-the-shelf drone technology, Ukraine’s miltech start-ups are reinventing jamming and spoofing systems at a breakneck pace.

For Ukraine, with its population of 38 million, effective defence against the more than thrice-as-populous Russia was always meant to depend on technical ingenuity. Fortunately, Ukraine’s workforce is one of the best technically educated in Europe.

In the early days of the war, Ukrainians took to using cheap, off-the-shelf consumer drones, turning them into lethal weapons by attaching grenades to them. Russia quickly followed suit. While Russia had its soviet-era jamming systems available to disrupt the drones’ radio links and ward off the attacks, Ukraine had nothing.

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“Ukraine had to create jamming and anti-jamming solutions from scratch,” Vadym Burukin, co-founder of Ukrainian drone-maker Huless, told Shephard. “Now we have a lot of smaller and larger companies producing different types and sizes of jamming and anti-jamming equipment.”

Some technology was available from Western allies, but troops in action soon found out the solutions were not practical, not mobile enough and not covering all the needed frequency bands.

“The equipment that was available covered two frequencies while today’s demands require handling twenty frequencies or more,” Serhiy Skoryk, co-founder and CEO of Ukraine’s leading electronic warfare innovator Kvertus, told Shephard. “The Western companies take years to try to understand the problem and produce one innovation perhaps every three years. We are forced to develop something new every fortnight because the troops demand that of us.”

Kvertus, founded in 2014 with the aim of supporting defenders in eastern Ukraine following Russia’s annexation of Crimea, today offers more than 40 jamming solutions: portable backpacks generating 300-metre-wide protection domes to keep soldiers safe and on the move, directional antennas mounted on tanks and trucks with a reach of up to 2km, and powerful stationary jammers that can block drones from accessing 10km-wide zones around critical infrastructure such as nuclear power plants.

“We can prepare equipment for our soldiers specifically for each mission because every mission has different needs,” said Skoryk. “But without such backpacks, without such equipment, nobody goes anywhere.”

Skoryk said the rapid information exchange with Ukraine’s defence forces drives the fast-paced progress of companies such as Kvertus, allowing them to take advantage of latest advances in electronics.

“Our detection systems, for instance, are compact not because we’re so brilliant, but because modern microprocessors are no longer the size of a table,” Skoryk explained. “Western systems, built back in 2014 or 2015 inevitably lag behind. Ours weigh 12kg while the average system out there is anywhere from 80kg to a tonne.”

Speaking to The Times in October, the UK Defence Secretary John Healy described the pace of defence tech innovation in Ukraine as “unthinkable” for projects overseen by the UK MoD.

Since the invasion in February 2022, Ukraine has not only patched its electronic warfare vulnerabilities but has become a leader in the field. Burukin says that today, half of Ukraine’s territory is protected by equipment that can jam Iranian Shahed drones that are being used by Russia to attack Ukraine’s infrastructure.

Spoofing, the more sophisticated electronic defence technique used to mislead GNSS receivers in adversary systems, is, too, becoming commonplace in Ukraine.

“The advancement in national scale jamming and spoofing equipment is obvious right now,” said Burukin. “In Kyiv, when you have an air defence alarm, you will see that your location on your phone changes to something like Kursk or Belarus, so the spoofing systems are working.”

Russia, however, is not staying behind. Advances in jamming technologies are pushing drone innovators to explore jam-resistant systems including drones connected to optical fibres or autonomous systems relying on AI-driven optical navigation to follow onboard maps based on visual clues detected by onboard cameras. Both technologies have made major strides over the past year, pushing Ukraine’s tech innovators out of the comfort zone once more.