Russia's Kinzhal Missiles Are Too Fast To Shoot, So Ukraine Jams Them With Music

Spoofing a Kinzhal's navigation receiver sends it off course

The remains of a downed Kinzhal. Via Night Watch

The Kinzhal is one of Russia’s most fearsome missiles. Streaking at Mach 5.7 as high as 15.5 miles in the air, the 4.7-ton missile—launched by a modified Mikoyan MiG-31 interceptor—can deliver a 1,000-pound over a distance of 300 miles.

It’s so fast that Ukraine’s best kinetic air defenses, its U.S.-made Patriot missiles, often struggle to hit incoming Kinzhals. The Russians often include a few Kinzhals in the mix when they bombard Ukrainian cities and powerplants roughly once a week. Want to knock out Ukraine’s electrical grid as the cold winter looms? Use Kinzhals.

Good news for Ukraine. One of the country’s most popular strategic electronic warfare systems, Lima EW, now works against the Kinzhal, according to the system’s user. Full disclosure, I have done contract social media work for a company that’s active in the same E.W. field.

Not only are the operators from the Night Watch unit using Lima EW to take down Kinzhals—around a dozen in just the last two weeks—they’re doing it in style: by replacing the incoming missiles’ satellite navigation signals with a popular patriotic Ukrainian anthem, “Our Father Is Bandera.” (Bandera was a World War II Ukrainian insurgent.)

Why that song? “Any nonstandard information which is provided” to a satellite-guided munition via targeted spoofing can introduce navigational error, one Night Watch officer explained.

Any random signal pattern would’ve worked. But Night Watch didn’t just want to knock out Kinzhals. The officer said the unit also wanted to make a statement—and “counter the Russian propaganda” that casts Bandera as a villain.

Closing in on a Ukrainian city or power plant, a Kinzhal begins to hear the anthem instead of its usual signals. Confused, the missile veers off course and impacts potentially hundreds of yards from its target. Recent imagery confirms one errant Kinzhal impact near Starokostyantyniv in western Ukraine.