By Max Hunder
KYIV (Reuters) – When Yuriy Shelmuk co-founded a company last year making drone signal jammers, he said there was little interest in the devices. It now produces 2,500 a month and has a six-week waiting list.
Demand shifted after the failure of a major Ukrainian counteroffensive in the summer of 2023 that was meant to put invading Russian forces on the back foot. Kyiv cited Russia’s extensive use of unmanned aerial vehicles to spot and strike targets, as well as vast numbers of landmines and troops.
“Concentrated, cheap aerial drones stopped all our assaults,” Shelmuk said. “There was an understanding that a new game changer had appeared.”
The vast majority of more than 800 companies in Ukraine’s burgeoning defence production sector were founded after Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion that enters its 1,000th day on Tuesday.
Many were set up in response to rapidly evolving battlefield conditions, including drones – first in the skies and then also on land and at sea – as well as anti-drone technology and, increasingly, artificial intelligence.
“The Ukrainian military-industrial sector is the fastest innovating sector in the entire world right now,” said Halyna Yanchenko, a Ukrainian lawmaker who has advocated for local arms manufacturers in parliament.
Both Ukraine and Russia are on track to make around 1.5 million drones this year, mostly small “first-person view” vehicles that cost a few hundred dollars apiece and can be piloted remotely to identify and attack enemy targets.
In February, Ukrainian troops were already telling Reuters that the preponderance of Russian drones made it harder for them to move around freely and build fortifications.
By summer, as Russia began taking Ukrainian territory at the fastest rate since the early days of the conflict, most battered military pickup trucks sported electronic warfare (EW) domes that would have only been put on high-value equipment last year.
Shelmuk’s company, Unwave, is one of some 30 firms manufacturing such systems, which block signals and use various means to disrupt computer systems inside drones.
Most anti-drone EW systems jam one, or at best a small handful of radio frequencies, meaning Russian drone pilots can sidestep jamming by hopping on to a new frequency.
EW makers thus monitor Russian drone-related online chats to understand which frequencies their drones will use.
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