The Invisible Russia-Ukraine Battlefield

Above the bar at a small brewpub in Užupis, a hip neighborhood in Vilnius, Lithuania, hangs a portrait of a Madonna-like saint cradling a weapon—something between a rifle, a bazooka, and a 5G antenna.

The caption below reads: “Saint EDM4S.”

EDM4S—or Electronic Drone Mitigation 4 System—is a portable electronic-warfare weapon from Lithuania. Point the EDM4S at a hovering uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) and pull the trigger: The drone should lose contact with its operator and fall inertly from the sky.

Hundreds of EDM4S systems have been donated to Ukraine over the past two years. They are just one weapon in an unseen, and under-appreciated, battle for control of the electromagnetic spectrum. Powering this battle is a furious arms race. Ukraine and its allies on one side, Russia on the other. Both sides are trying to innovate better ways to spoof, jam, and disrupt enemy communications, particularly drones, while simultaneously working to harden their own systems against hostile signals.

This is electronic warfare. In late 2023, Kyiv identified winning the upper hand in this battle as one of its key priorities. With Russia steadily advancing across eastern Ukraine, the need to gain control of the electromagnetic space—and the skies—has only grown more important. Regardless of how this war unfolds in 2025, Ukraine has already changed electronic warfare forever.

Fighting to Electromagnetic StalemateElectronic warfare, or EW, has been a part of human conflicts for more than a century. Soon after radios were deployed to the battlefield, soldiers realized that sending bursts of static over a frequency could disrupt the enemy’s ability to communicate. But it wasn’t until World War II that EW really came into its own.

Early in WWII, the British were desperately trying to recapture control over their skies in the Battle of Britain. While British dogfighters grew steadily better at downing incoming Luftwaffe bombers, the Germans slowly moved their raids to the cover of darkness. This prompted a perplexing mystery for the British: How were the Germans so good at flying to their targets in the dead of night?

A young British scientist solved the mystery when he discovered a clue in the wreckage of a downed bomber. The plane’s landing assistance system, which used radio waves to measure the plane’s relative distance to the runway, had been improved so dramatically that it was being used as a rudimentary navigation device. Operators on the ground in Germany and occupied France would emit long, narrow bands of radio signals over British skies: The target factory or town could be found where the two beams coincided.

Armed with this information, the English raced to build their own radio and relay stations, broadcasting their own radio beams into the skies to confuse the incoming German pilots.

Thus began the Battle of the Beams. The Germans refined and upgraded its ability to broadcast and receive signals in British airspace, while the United Kingdom raced to detect and disrupt those signals. It set the pace of EW fights for a century to come.

Today, the electromagnetic space is much more complicated: Different types of signals are broadcast straight across the electromagnetic spectrum, from radar to GPS and GLONASS, to cellular signals. At any given moment, a soldier, UAV, fighter jet, or cruise missile could be sending and receiving a variety of different signals.

With that, militaries have raced to find new ways to jam, intercept, and even spoof those signals. One nation may issue new encrypted radios to its forces, prompting a rival country to develop more powerful radios to flood those channels with static. Recent decades have also seen radar and radio used to detect artillery launches and triangulate their exact position, allowing counter-battery systems to hit the source of fire. Fighter jets, in particular, have developed some of the most advanced onboard radio and radar systems for communications, EW, and counter-EW.

Throughout the Cold War, NATO and the Soviet Union were locked in a fierce battle to obtain even a marginal advantage over the other in this EW fight. That dynamic has driven some anxiety. A 2017 report commissioned by Estonia’s military took stock of Russia’s EW capabilities and warned that, should Moscow invade NATO’s eastern flank, it could likely knock out communications across a huge swath of the Baltics, thereby “negating advantages conferred on the Alliance by its technological edge.”

It wasn’t until Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 that the world got to see the extent of Russia’s EW prowess. And it was a dud.

“Russian EW was a no-show,” wrote Bryan Clark, director of the Center for Defense Concepts and Technology at the Hudson Institute, in a July 2022 analysis for IEEE Spectrum.

Moscow had spent years planning for a major war with NATO, designing its EW systems to interfere with the onboard systems of advanced fighter jets and to jam the targeting computers of advanced ballistic missiles. Instead, it found itself in a war against fast-moving defenders making ample use of off-the-shelf UAVs.

Russia’s systems were “not very mobile, not very distributed,” Clark tells WIRED. Their relatively small number of big systems, Clark says, “weren’t really relevant in the fight.”

Moscow’s strategy assumed there would be a relatively static battlespace. Along the front, they would deploy the Infauna, a heavily armored vehicle that targets radio communications. Further out, around 15 miles from the front lines, they would send the Leer-3, a six-wheeled truck capable of not only jamming cellular networks but of intercepting communications and even relaying SMS to nearby cell phones. Even further out, from a range of about 180 miles, the fire-truck-sized Krasukha-4 would scramble aerial sensors.

“When you get close to the front, you get electronic weather,” Clark says. “Your GPS won’t work, your cell phone won’t work, your Starlink won’t work.”

This electromagnetic no-man’s-land is what happens when you “barrage,” Clark explains. But there’s a big trade-off, he says. Jamming across the spectrum requires more power, as does jamming in a wider geographic area. The more power a system has, the bigger it must be. So you can disrupt all communications in a targeted area, or some communications further afield—but not necessarily both.

Move Fast and Jam ThingsRussia’s military was marred, early in the war, by bad communication, worse planning, and a general sluggishness in adapting. Even still, it had a big head start. “Unfortunately, the enemy has a numerical and material advantage,” a representative for UP Innovations, a Ukrainian defense tech startup, tells WIRED in a written statement.

So Ukraine developed two complementary strategies: produce a large volume of cheaper EW solutions, and make them iterative and adaptable.

Ukraine’s Bukovel-AD anti-drone system, for example, fits comfortably on the back of a pickup truck. The Eter system, the size of a suitcase, can detect the jamming signals from Russian EW systems—allowing Ukraine to target them with artillery. Ukrainian electronic warfare company Kvertus now manufactures 15 different anti-drone systems—from drone-jamming backpacks to stationary devices that can be installed on radio towers to ward off incoming UAVs.

When the full-scale war began in 2022, Kvertus had one product: a shoulder-mounted anti-drone gun, like the EDM4S. “In 2022, [we were producing] tens of devices,” Yaroslav Filimonov, Kvertus’ CEO told me when we sat down in his Kyiv offices this March. “In 2023 it was hundreds. Now? It’s thousands.”

“Our advantage is that we have many clever people and clever engineers, and we have our own research and development department,” Filimonov says. “Our reaction for different changes on the front line is very fast.”

That’s because Kvertus dispatches its staff to the front lines to see how things are working—or not. EW operators constantly send back reports on which parts of the spectrum are being bombarded by Russia, and which parts of the spectrum Russian forces are inclined to use. Military tech firm Piranha-Tech’s systems are now capable of downing drones from more than a kilometer away, from a height of roughly 500 meters.

UP Innovations was financed as part of Business Springboard, a government-led initiative to finance veteran-run businesses in Ukraine. Being veteran-run means they have firsthand knowledge of what their soldiers actually need. UP has been working on special helmet pads with fabric that works as a Faraday cage to protect the wearer’s radios from jamming.

“Today, every unit has specialists working with tactical radio electronic warfare devices,” Yuriy Momot, deputy CEO of Piranha-Tech, tells WIRED. “There is no operation that goes without the use of radio electronic warfare. As we talk, one of their anti-drone guns sits on the table between us. Just the day before, guns just like this one helped one unit shoot down a dozen enemy drones—including one carrying a grenade.

The early versions of these anti-drone guns caused some skepticism that they would ever be much use in the real world—Russian military analysts mocked them as cheap toys. That mockery has long since faded, however. In recent months, plywood shacks have been popping up on high-rise rooftops in Moscow and St. Petersburg. They house a couple of Russian soldiers, a shotgun, an assault rifle, and a Russian-made anti-drone gun.

But when it comes to defending themselves, Kyiv has opted for a very apropos solution: a decentralized, distributed EW solution.

For more than two years, Ukraine has faced an onslaught of missiles, drones, and glide bombs—all equipped with onboard communications and radar designed to overcome Ukraine’s air defense systems. In recent months, the Iranian-designed Shahed drones have been known to weave, deke, and loiter through Ukrainian skies, distracting and frustrating air defense systems.

To deal with this aerial threat, Kyiv developed Pokrova, a secretive mesh network of EW systems that was revealed earlier this year.

“It’s not one, not two, not three transmitters” that make up Ukraine’s electromagnetic force field, Oleksandr Fedienko, a Ukrainian politician who serves as deputy chairman of a parliamentary committee on digital transformation, wrote on Telegram earlier this year. “There are hundreds of thousands of devices that are installed throughout the country.”

Pokrova isn’t just jamming the Shahed navigation systems, but spoofing their signal. This allows Ukrainian EW operators to feed them new coordinates, gently bringing down the drones so that they can be analyzed and cannibalized for parts. In recent months, Ukraine managed to spoof the signals being sent to these drones—flying more than 100 back into Russia.

Fedienko promised that Ukraine was still racing to scale up the system even further. “It’s only a matter of time when the rockets and missiles with which the Russians attack us will fly in the opposite direction,” he wrote.

EW isn’t completely foolproof. But it remains an incredibly promising defensive technology when layered on top of other anti-air systems.

Ukraine’s ability to scale up this domestic industry has put it toe-to-toe with Russia, once thought to have the most impressive EW program in the world. But Russia has learned and adapted too. It’s now a “cat-and-mouse game,” Clark says.

Beating EWIn a secret drone workshop in Kyiv, Yvan holds up a tiny chip. Installed on a small FPV drone, Yvan hopes this chip could overcome Russia’s EW efforts.

With these chips and two cheap antennas, Yvan’s drones are programmed to hop across the electromagnetic spectrum at a dizzying rate, as many as 25 times per second, in unison with its base station.

Yvan hopes that the link between the drone and its operator can move frequencies faster than Russian EW operators can jam the signal. If that works, it could keep these drones in the air significantly longer. AI is already being used to make this signal-hopping seem as random as possible. (Just as AI is being used to detect the hopping pattern in order to predict its next move.)

There are existing solutions to these problems, like controlled reception pattern antennas (CRPAs), which can tune out jamming signals. However, they can cost upwards of $30,000 per unit, meaning Ukraine simply cannot afford to acquire them at scale. So they’ve had to innovate. Yvan’s solution can be dispatched for just hundreds of dollars.

Ukraine first started sending drones deep into Russia in early 2023—with a brazen attack on the Kremlin itself. Then, one small drone exploded spectacularly over the Moscow sky. Since then, Ukraine has stepped up its efforts. In early September, Kyiv launched its most expansive drone attack on Russia since the beginning of the war: An estimated 158 drones descended on targets across the country, setting fires at oil refineries, power plants, and pipelines. Although most were downed, likely through more traditional air defense systems, the attack shows the limitations of Russia’s own EW defenses.

With this constant competition on the electromagnetic spectrum, defense companies are getting creative about how their drones travel.

“In the Western world, GPS always works. Here, GPS never works,” says Stepan, a Ukrainian defense executive. (WIRED is using only his first name for security reasons.) That’s why he’s been developing drones to operate without GPS—or its Russian equivalent, GLONASS. Instead, he employs the drones’ onboard cameras to conduct thermal imaging of the ground below, employing “pure math” to confirm its trajectory by checking terrain, landmarks, and waypoints. This is not entirely new: The US Tomahawk missile, for example, has used terrain mapping for decades. What’s novel is how quickly and nimbly Ukraine has been able to distribute this technology to its nascent drone industry.

Since speaking to Stepan in Kyiv in March, this strategy of terrain mapping has become more common on the battlefield. Artificial intelligence has helped augment how drones understand the land below. They’ve also introduced other kinds of strategies, such as using cell phone towers as landmarks to guide their trajectory—much like the Luftwaffe pilots used radio beams to guide their flight towards British cities.

“The newer systems are using a combination of GPS, terrain mapping, and electronic signal intelligence to figure out where they are and to make themselves more precise,” Clark says.

Ukraine is already coming up with new ideas about what it could achieve if its drones can penetrate deeper into Russia. One drone prototype is equipped with EW systems that could, if it lands in the right spot, wreak havoc on Russian radar, air defense, and communications systems.

Innovation isn’t just moving forward—it’s also looking backwards. One of the most ingenious innovations being deployed in Ukraine is the German-made HIGHCAT drone, and it’s surprisingly old school. A lightweight quadcopter, the drone comes with a 6-mile cable, providing a fixed link to its base station.

It’s not just unscrewed aerial vehicles that are targeted by EW: Ukraine has increasingly deployed land and naval drones to aid in its fight to recapture territory.

Drone manufacturer SkyLab has, despite its name, become known for its ground-based autonomous vehicles. Those land vehicles have been used to deliver artillery, carry wounded soldiers, and could even be used for demining efforts. At their secretive offices in Kyiv, Denys gestures to a stout four-wheel vehicle in the corner. He says SkyLab has been exploring everything from AI to lidar to help these devices find their way home, even in an electromagnetic barrage. (WIRED is identifying the executive with a pseudonym for security purposes.)

“What frequency and mode do I have to use in the next version? What cameras, what gimbals, what logistics, what batteries?” he says. “Now it’s six, maybe seven generations of this rover.”

Innovate or DieThe Battle of the Beams was on track toward an electromagnetic stalemate. As they continued to improve and pioneer their radio warfare technique, neither the British nor the Germans looked set to gain a meaningful advantage over the other.

Then Britain innovated. When the Bristol Beaufighter took to the skies in mid-1940, it adapted Germany’s innovation to create an early aircraft interception radar. By using radio signals to identify enemy planes in the dark skies, British pilots quickly began downing Luftwaffe bombers and took back control of its airspace. The Germans then abandoned the Blitz and redeployed most of their offensive air assets eastward.

England’s victory in the battle came, in large part, because it was capable of uncovering the secrets to Germany’s innovation and reverse engineering it.

That’s happening in Ukraine, too, in both directions. Filimonov says his company’s effort to stay one step ahead is always frustrated by the “rats”—those who are “gathering information and then sending this information to our enemy.” The longer Ukraine’s technological innovation remains a secret, the more effective it will be. On the other side, Piranha-Tech’s Momot says he is always racing to identify Russia’s technological leaps forward, then “developing a countermeasure before the enemy can start large-scale production.”

Late last year, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the erstwhile commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, wrote in a detailed paper that Ukraine had achieved “parity” with Russia on EW—but it needed superiority.

While Ukraine is iterating advantages, a real breakthrough may have to come from Washington.

The United States has transferred an enormous amount of equipment to Kyiv, but it hasn’t—yet—handed over the EW crown jewels. “Electronic warfare is one of those very, very closely held technologies for the US and its closest partners,” Mick Ryan, a veteran of the Australian military and an independent military analyst, tells WIRED. “We’re going to have to change the paradigm on how we look at EW and how we share the technologies with other partners, if we want to beat the Russians.”

Clark agrees that the Pentagon is “holding back some of the most sophisticated capabilities,” but there are signs that has changed in recent months: When the American-made F-16 fighter jets arrived in Ukraine in August, the US announced it had upgraded the jets with advanced onboard EW systems.

“One F-16 with a reprogrammed pod won’t achieve air dominance alone, but it may give you a pocket of air superiority for a moment’s time to achieve an objective that has strategic importance and impact,” the director of the US Air Force 350th Spectrum Warfare Wing said in a statement.

More than 80 years after the Battle of the Beams, Ukraine has put a modern spin on the Bristol Beaufighter: drone-on-drone combat. Footage emerged last year of two drones duking it out over the front lines. In mid-April, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky was briefed on a new drone capable of intercepting Russian helicopters and loitering munitions.

The world may soon see more of these drone dogfights. Igor, another defense executive (who WIRED is not identifying for security reasons) says his company has been working furiously on a drone designed to hunt and destroy Russian UAVs.

Igor’s anti-drone drone would be a “fire and forget” solution, he says, meaning the drone could loiter in the skies, using a suite of onboard sensors to target all incoming Russian drones. If perfected, it would bring the story of EW full-circle.

There’s one big technological problem with having these drones patrol the skies, Igor says. “You need to confirm that it’s not a bird,” he laughs. “You don’t want to make enemies with Mother Nature.”