How Russia Built A Jam-Proof Drone Force
And how China helped
This story was commissioned by Euromaidan Press. Since Substack pays only around a fifth of my bills, I have no choice but to take on a lot of freelance work. I still want my Substack audience to know where to read those freelance stories, however. Hence this excerpt.
Frustrated by Ukrainian electronic warfare, Russia transformed its drone arsenal to be harder—or impossible—to jam.
Most of Russia’s tiny first-person-view drones now send and receive signals via jam-proof fiber optic cable instead of wireless radio. For heavier one-way attack drones that travel too far for fiber optics, the Russians have mostly switched to jam-resistant mesh radio networks made up of many interconnected senders and receivers.
In both cases, China is key. Chinese companies sell Russian companies the optical fibers and mesh modems that the Russians install in their drones. In other words, Beijing is the critical enabler in Moscow’s ongoing aerial aggression.
That’s the unsurprising yet sobering conclusion that Tatarigami, the founder of the Ukrainian Frontelligence Insight analysis group, reached in a recent investigation.
It’s not enough for Ukrainian forces to shoot down or otherwise defend against Russian drones, or to fight back with their own drones. To win the drone war, Ukraine and its allies must “step up pressure on Chinese manufacturers,” Tatarigami wrote.
As the drone war over Ukraine ramped up in 2022 and 2023, most Russian FPVs were wireless models. And most heavier one-way attack drones navigated via satellite. Both classes of drone could be jammed. A cottage industry of Ukrainian electronic warfare producers sprung up. Each firm offered some variation of a radio noisemaker that can ground or misdirect wireless and satellite-guided drones.
The jamming worked. Combined with kinetic defenses—guns and missiles—and add-on protections such as mesh, cages and netting, the jamming blunted the impact of Russia’s drone arsenal. But the Russians adapted. The turning point came in the spring of 2025, when Russia’s elite Rubicon Center drone group led the counterattack against Ukrainian troops occupying parts of Kursk Oblast in western Russia.
Rubicon’s fiber optic FPVs wreaked havoc on Ukrainian forces in the Kursk salient, damaging or destroying hundreds of trucks and other vehicles in the span of a few weeks. Starving for supplies and in danger of being cut off, the Ukrainians retreated.
But the Russian adaptation was just beginning.
Read the rest at Euromaidan Press.
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