Cat and mouse in the skies
The battle for Ukraine’s airspace requires crews to play a game of hit and run, writes Anthony Loyd.
‘‘The threat over the area [of Ukrainian operations] is such that Russian aircraft just can’t loiter there.’’
Air Marshal Greg Bagwell, former deputy Royal Air Force commander
In the final seconds as their weaving missile neared its on-screen target, the soldiers huddling in the armoured hull bawled out encouragement to the warhead as if it were a racehorse galloping down the final furlong.
‘‘Yes, yes, yes,’’ the five-man surface-to-air missile crew called out, watching the glowing blob near the crosshairs on the screen. ‘‘Yeeessssssssss!’’ they shouted at the moment the kill appeared as a sudden plume of black smoke.
There was no time for further celebration. The Ukrainians manning the Osa missile system may have destroyed an enemy drone, but a rocket fired in reprisal from a Russian jet locked on to their radar signal could turn them into charred chunks seconds later.
So the soldiers switched off their radar the moment the kill occurred, and drove their 40-yearold armoured vehicle quickly from the launch site across the shell-churned landscape before they could be hit by a retaliatory strike.
‘‘We don’t have much but what we have, we use well,’’ grinned ‘‘Hassan’’, the team’s 30-year-old lieutenant, using his war alias.
He patted the propeller and nose cone of a Russian Orlan drone his team had earlier shot down, now mounted on their vehicle’s engine cowling, and rued the fact that debris from Wednesday’s kill, likely to have been another Orlan, had fallen too far away to collect as a further trophy.
Mud-spattered, rangy and young, these men seem an unlikely vanguard of the latest high-tech phase in Ukraine’s air war, which sees the skies almost empty of jets and filled instead with drones and surface-to-air missiles.
If the jets are now a rarity, then gone too are the days when Bayraktar TB2 drones, purchased
by Ukraine from Turkey, were the sole killing stars of the drone war.
Today’s A-list includes the one-way trip ‘‘kamikaze’’ drones – Russian Kybs, American Switchblades, and Iranian Mohajers and Shaheds – that loiter in the skies, find a target and hurtle into it to explode. There are also tiny quadcopters that drop bomblets into tank turrets and bunkers with more range and accuracy than a lobbed hand grenade could ever achieve.
Less infamous but more common, and as lethal in their own way, are the surveillance drones, such as the Russian Orlan-10, which loiter over a designated sector of the map, feeding information back to artillery units and spotting targets for them to shell. Hassan claimed his Osa team had shot down nine Orlans in the past three months.
‘‘Leave them in the sky and they will call in artillery on our soldiers,’’ he said, a death’s head painted on his helmet. ‘‘As soon as our men hear the sound of an Orlan above them, they know bad news is coming their way.’’
Thousands of drones are now being used in Ukraine, including cheap commercial ones bought online by individual teams of soldiers and adapted for warfare.
Less well known is the role played by Soviet-era surface-toair missile systems to deny the sky to jets of either side, an absence that has further elevated the role of drones.
Ukraine’s autumn counteroffensives into the Kharkiv and Kherson regions should by rights have been repeatedly hit by Russian aircraft along the flat lands and ribbon-straight roads over which the Ukrainian armoured vehicles advanced. Yet despite the target-rich environment, Russian aircraft remained almost absent, wary of their earlier losses.
‘‘The threat over the area [of Ukrainian operations] is such that Russian aircraft just can’t loiter there,’’ said Air Marshal Greg Bagwell, a former deputy Royal Air Force commander who oversaw combat operations in Syria, Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Though legend recounts
mythical Ukrainian pilots such as the ‘‘Ghost of Kyiv’’ destroying multiple Russian aircraft, the truth is less glamorous. Virtually every one of the 60 Russian fixedwing aircraft known to have been destroyed so far was shot down by surface-to-air missiles (SAMs).
Russia’s failure to suppress its enemy’s air defence systems, and Ukraine’s equal wariness of losing any more of its remaining jets to Russian SAM systems – having lost over 50 of its own aircraft – have caused a scenario in which both sides are highly cautious about flying jets over the battlefield.
‘‘They’ve got to a state of what you could call air inferiority in which neither has control,’’ Bagwell said. ‘‘Ukraine has deliberately sought this stalemate, as it is the best of its air options: a zero-sum game favouring Kyiv.’’
In this way, drones – cheap, effective, and more dispensable – have become the natural inheritors of the skies. Yet not much has changed for the SAM teams on the ground.
‘‘Our fight is all about sudden speed,’’ explained Hassan, standing beside his Osa, nicknamed Otaman, positioned in a shrapneltorn treeline southwest of Donetsk, as artillery thundered away in the distance.
The vehicle looked far from slick. A relic of the Soviet era, codenamed the Gecko SA-8 by Nato, the Osa system first entered service in 1971. Consisting of a six-wheeled armoured vehicle with a radar on its top and six missiles to its rear, it can fire at air targets up to 13km away, yet the control consoles inside look like props from a 1960s B-grade sci-fi film.
‘‘It’s not the best, and spares are difficult,’’ Hassan admitted. ‘‘But it’s all we’ve got.
‘‘We live in the mud in holes beside it, getting rained on, waiting, always waiting. Then if we get a sudden order on the radio from one of our early warning systems that a drone is approaching, we scramble into the vehicle and power it up.’’
His team can only keep their radar on for a maximum of two minutes, to avoid the signal being traced and tracked by a Russian anti-radiation missile. Then, whether or not they have achieved a drone kill, the soldiers switch it off and move on.
They showed off video on their mobile phones of the drones the team had shot down. Then a soldier showed me another clip featuring one of their comrades’ Osa vehicles, its radar on and rotating in the middle of a field, getting blasted to pieces by a Russian rocket before it had the chance to fire its own missile.
‘‘He kept his radar on too long,’’ the men said simply.