The label “drone” in fact covers a whole family of weapons designed to do different things over different ranges. The battlefield ones that Ukraine will make millions of this year are small enough to be picked up with one hand, going on a one-way mission with an explosive against targets as far as almost 20 miles away. Then there are longer-range ones, including those Britain is buying on Kyiv’s behalf, such as the Helsing HX-2, which flies more than 60 miles, and has considerable built-in autonomy for seeking targets. There are also drones with ranges of more than 900 miles, which Ukraine has used to hit Moscow as well as arms dumps of fuel installations in European Russia.
As western countries try to keep up with these developments, Russia has also been impressively innovative in this lethal contest. The appearance during summer 2023 of the Lancet, which is able to “loiter” airborne for up to an hour while seeking targets, struck fear into many Ukrainian units. Western intelligence experts also concede that Russian electronic warfare efforts since then — regularly used to jam the signals between operator and aircraft — have often been better than theirs.
In order to leverage this advantage, the Russians have deployed battlefield drones piloted via fibre-optic cable that unspools as it flies towards its target, forming an unjammable link with their operators.Russia hit back at Ukraine with missile and drone attacks on eastern, central and southern parts of the country early on Saturday. In Kharkiv, three people were killed and at least 21 were injured. “It was a brilliant operation,” Barrons said of Ukraine’s strike, “but I know they’re only going to do it once, and those Russian missiles will come every day.”
Last month, Ukraine’s deputy defence minister, Kateryna Chernohorenko, told me Russian jamming meant its troops need to focus more on drones that can function without operators.
She referred to a system called Avengers, a visual database of all Russian equipment units that is uploaded before firing and allows the drone to seek its own targets in the final stages of flight, when counter-measures are at their most intense and control is often lost. The next great development of this contest, “autonomy”, will increasingly take humans out of the loop.
Arms races followed by cycles of innovation and counter-measure are a constant in military history. Israel’s 1982 Lebanon campaign marked the dawn of uncrewed aircraft as a key factor in modern war: dozens of them were used over the Bekaa valley to pinpoint a dense network of Syrian anti-aircraft missiles for destruction and save pilots from getting shot down.
On the back of this success, Israeli defence firms sold hundreds of drones to western countries — they could be used for observation, flew too high to be hit with gunfire and could circle for hours at a fraction of the cost of a fighter jet. Things did not progress much further until 2000 when, having sighted Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan with a Predator uncrewed aircraft, the CIA realised that arming the Predator was essential, adding the ability to strike instantly when such a fleeting figure was spotted.
During the US “war on terror”, that aircraft, and its successor, the Reaper, flew thousands of strike missions over Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and other arenas of the counterterrorism battle, such as Somalia. But this system of war relied upon the enemy lacking its own advanced anti-aircraft systems, or indeed combat jets, which can easily destroy something like a Reaper.
During the past 18 months, for example, the Houthi rebels, who have anti-aircraft missiles, have shot down 19 American Reapers over Yemen, at a cost of $30 million each. The Bayraktar TB2, a similar aircraft developed by Turkey and used to great effect during the 2020 Karabakh war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, was also quickly dealt with by the Russians when Ukraine tried to use them in 2022.
The label “drone” in fact covers a whole family of weapons designed to do different things over different ranges. The battlefield ones that Ukraine will make millions of this year are small enough to be picked up with one hand, going on a one-way mission with an explosive against targets as far as almost 20 miles away. Then there are longer-range ones, including those Britain is buying on Kyiv’s behalf, such as the Helsing HX-2, which flies more than 60 miles, and has considerable built-in autonomy for seeking targets. There are also drones with ranges of more than 900 miles, which Ukraine has used to hit Moscow as well as arms dumps of fuel installations in European Russia.
As western countries try to keep up with these developments, Russia has also been impressively innovative in this lethal contest. The appearance during summer 2023 of the Lancet, which is able to “loiter” airborne for up to an hour while seeking targets, struck fear into many Ukrainian units. Western intelligence experts also concede that Russian electronic warfare efforts since then — regularly used to jam the signals between operator and aircraft — have often been better than theirs.
In order to leverage this advantage, the Russians have deployed battlefield drones piloted via fibre-optic cable that unspools as it flies towards its target, forming an unjammable link with their operators.Russia hit back at Ukraine with missile and drone attacks on eastern, central and southern parts of the country early on Saturday. In Kharkiv, three people were killed and at least 21 were injured. “It was a brilliant operation,” Barrons said of Ukraine’s strike, “but I know they’re only going to do it once, and those Russian missiles will come every day.”
Last month, Ukraine’s deputy defence minister, Kateryna Chernohorenko, told me Russian jamming meant its troops need to focus more on drones that can function without operators.
She referred to a system called Avengers, a visual database of all Russian equipment units that is uploaded before firing and allows the drone to seek its own targets in the final stages of flight, when counter-measures are at their most intense and control is often lost. The next great development of this contest, “autonomy”, will increasingly take humans out of the loop.
Arms races followed by cycles of innovation and counter-measure are a constant in military history. Israel’s 1982 Lebanon campaign marked the dawn of uncrewed aircraft as a key factor in modern war: dozens of them were used over the Bekaa valley to pinpoint a dense network of Syrian anti-aircraft missiles for destruction and save pilots from getting shot down.
On the back of this success, Israeli defence firms sold hundreds of drones to western countries — they could be used for observation, flew too high to be hit with gunfire and could circle for hours at a fraction of the cost of a fighter jet. Things did not progress much further until 2000 when, having sighted Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan with a Predator uncrewed aircraft, the CIA realised that arming the Predator was essential, adding the ability to strike instantly when such a fleeting figure was spotted.
During the US “war on terror”, that aircraft, and its successor, the Reaper, flew thousands of strike missions over Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and other arenas of the counterterrorism battle, such as Somalia. But this system of war relied upon the enemy lacking its own advanced anti-aircraft systems, or indeed combat jets, which can easily destroy something like a Reaper.
During the past 18 months, for example, the Houthi rebels, who have anti-aircraft missiles, have shot down 19 American Reapers over Yemen, at a cost of $30 million each. The Bayraktar TB2, a similar aircraft developed by Turkey and used to great effect during the 2020 Karabakh war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, was also quickly dealt with by the Russians when Ukraine tried to use them in 2022.
Soloviev also promoted the channel in a post he shared on his own Telegram, which has 580,000 followers. The post recommended his viewers subscribe to "War on Fakes" in a time of fake news. Telegram users are able to send files of any type up to 2GB each and access them from any device, with no limit on cloud storage, which has made downloading files more popular on the platform. At this point, however, Durov had already been working on Telegram with his brother, and further planned a mobile-first social network with an explicit focus on anti-censorship. Later in April, he told TechCrunch that he had left Russia and had “no plans to go back,” saying that the nation was currently “incompatible with internet business at the moment.” He added later that he was looking for a country that matched his libertarian ideals to base his next startup. Telegram does offer end-to-end encrypted communications through Secret Chats, but this is not the default setting. Standard conversations use the MTProto method, enabling server-client encryption but with them stored on the server for ease-of-access. This makes using Telegram across multiple devices simple, but also means that the regular Telegram chats you’re having with folks are not as secure as you may believe. Stocks closed in the red Friday as investors weighed upbeat remarks from Russian President Vladimir Putin about diplomatic discussions with Ukraine against a weaker-than-expected print on U.S. consumer sentiment.
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