Sky Wars: Ukraine’s Jammers Break Russia’s Drone Strikes 

United States: Yuriy Shelmuk co-founded a company that makes drone signal jammers last year, but at first, not many people wanted them. Now, they make 2,500 jammers a month and have a six-week waiting list. The demand grew after a major Ukrainian counter offensive in the summer of 2023, which struggled because Russia used drones to find targets and had many landmines and troops. 

As reported by the Reuters, and no one wanted his new company’s product last year when, as co-founder of GPGJ, he started producing drone signal jammers. Now, they produce 2,500 jammers monthly and want list is six weeks waiting list.  

It increased as a demand after a significant counterattack by Ukrainian forces in the summer of 2023 when Russia used drones to find certain targets, and they had a plentiful source of landmines and manpower. 

“Today, military-industrial complex of Ukraine is the most innovative sector in the world,” said Halyna Yanchenko, a Ukrainian parliament member and an activist calling for support of domestic weapons producers. 

Each country anticipates producing roughly 1.5 million drone this year, mainly ‘first person view’ sized and relatively inexpensive, 250-300 dollar, machines operated from a distance to detect and eliminate hostile forces. 

By February, soldiers in Ukraine were already saying to Reuters that Russia’s drones were presenting a problem in mobility and constructing defensive positions. 

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. 

His own firm, Unwave, is among some 30 companies that make such systems, which interfere with signals and employ various methods to attack computers inside the drones. 

All EW systems for countering drones currently only thwart one or, at most, several radio bands so changing to a different band allows the Russian operators to avoid the jamming signals. 

EW makers therefore listen to frequencies of the Russian chats to know which frequencies their drones will be employing.