The New York Times (NYT) published a report about the difficult struggle of Ukrainian militants with Russian (in the material they are called Iranian) drones in Ukraine.
The material begins with a story about a Ukrainian pilot with the call sign Dzhus, who tried in vain to shoot down a slow-moving UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) with an air missile.
“But on this day, as on many others, Juice found nothing [on the aircraft’s sensors],” the article notes.
Fighting noisy propeller-driven drones of Iranian production (and / or development) is “an unpleasant and more difficult matter than it might seem,” writes the NYT. Several teams on the ground and in the air had to work closely together 24 hours a day to counter this seemingly insignificant threat.
“The last few weeks have been very stressful, very exhausting for us. It’s still very, very hard to bring them down,” Dzhus admitted.
Lined up against a “swarm” of Russian army drones, the Ukrainian defense consists of three layers of defense: fighter jets that patrol around the clock, ground-based anti-aircraft missiles, and a group of soldiers with automatic weapons who try to shoot down the drones as they fly by.
The pilot with the call sign Dzhus notes that the most difficult thing is to find the drones themselves in the air. They are low on radar and slow, so they can easily be confused with migratory birds or moving trucks on the highway.
Earlier, the American edition of the Washington Post, citing the Ukrainian military and politicians, reported that an acute shortage of air defense systems was ripe in Ukraine. Volodymyr Klimin, the captain of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, who was interviewed by the newspaper, noted that Russian air defense bypassing Ukraine’s air defenses is possible thanks to accurate intelligence and information about the landscape. Most air defense systems were produced back in the USSR, so today they are over 30 years old, the newspaper writes.
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