EW, depth ownership and long-range drones

Ukraine has been actively working to disable Russia’s mesh-network technologies — a new solution designed to compensate for the loss of access to Starlink. Last week, the Defense Forces neutralized a mesh network that had enabled Russian Shahed-type drones to enter northern Ukraine from Belarus.

With all these innovations being actively reverse-engineered and adapted, the key question is: when will Ukraine adopt mesh networking? Or perhaps that process has already begun?

In this edition:

• Mesh Networks and EW Trends in Ukraine;

• Depth Ownership in Ukraine’s Drone Warfare;

• Ukraine’s Long-Range Drone Capabilities;

• and 5+ additional developments in drone warfare in Ukraine and Russia.

Thank you for reading and supporting my work!

Earlier this week, I joined Luke Johnson for a 30-min conversation about drones in Ukraine – listen here.

Mesh Networks and EW Trends in Ukraine

In last week’s digest, I wrote about the growing challenge posed by mesh networks in Russian drones and the need for Ukraine to further strengthen its EW capabilities.

Mesh has the potential to reshape not only the tactics of mass drone attacks but also to increase drones’ resilience against electronic warfare and the loss of direct communication with operators.

Tymofiy Yurkov, a Ukrainian defence industry expert in the development and production of EW equipment, told ArmyInform that mesh networks allow the enemy to rapidly respond to areas of active countermeasures and attempt to reroute drones around zones where air defence or EW systems are most effective.

Mesh modules are not installed on every drone, according to Tymofiy. They are typically used during mass launch scenarios, when a large group of Shaheds is simultaneously airborne. In these cases, the network architecture makes sense and provides additional capabilities for control and coordination among unmanned systems.

There have been documented cases in which Russians use algorithms or elements of artificial intelligence to enable automatic drone coordination.

At the same time, operator-controlled systems remain more effective for now. However, the algorithms are already embedded: the system can automatically register that a drone has successfully passed through an area covered by EW or air defence, and redirect other Shaheds along a similar route without direct operator intervention.

The logic behind the development of such systems is to reduce dependence on human operators and shift decision-making directly to algorithms.

Full autonomy would mean that a group of UAVs could independently assess the operational environment — identifying areas where electronic warfare is active, where air defence systems are engaged, and which routes are safer — and adjust their behavior accordingly without manual intervention. “This is the direction in which the enemy is evolving. Given the current pace of development, such capabilities could emerge in the near term, potentially within the next six months,” explained Tymofiy.

To better understand these developments, I spoke with the Ukrainian company Kvertus, one of the leaders in developing tactical electronic warfare (EW) and electronic intelligence (ELINT) systems.

According to Yaroslav Filimonov, CEO and co-founder of Kvertus, we are now seeing a transition from standalone pieces of equipment to a unified digital battlefield.

• The key trend is the deep integration of electronic warfare (EW) and electronic intelligence (ELINT) systems into interconnected networks, where target detection and suppression occur almost instantaneously.

• Beyond expanding frequency ranges, we are also seeing the active deployment of AI-enabled algorithms to analyze the electromagnetic spectrum. This enables the automatic identification of hostile signals among thousands of others — a capability that is critically important in today’s highly saturated and contested spectrum environment.

Yaroslav shared that the main difficulty in countering mesh technologies lies in their decentralized resilience. Drones relay signals to one another, meaning that disabling a single node does not collapse the entire network. This significantly reduces the effectiveness of traditional jamming solutions.

Today, Ukraine’s primary challenge is not technological capability per se, but scale. The critical task is to move from isolated solutions to the development of global, automated systems. The future lies in architectures where data from ELINT sensors is automatically transmitted to strike systems or EW assets with minimal operator involvement. In modern warfare, the speed of information transfer determines frontline survival.

“As for future threats, we are already seeing the adversary move toward machine vision capabilities. This allows drones to ignore electronic warfare interference in the final phase of flight, as the system switches to autonomous terminal guidance. We must begin preparing now for the large-scale deployment of such “smart” drones,” Yaroslav added.

At the same time, Ukraine needs not only to scale up its electronic warfare (EW) capabilities but also to improve coordination among military units. According to the commander of the EW company of the 260th Territorial Defense Brigade “Khortytsia”, the effectiveness of EW operations depends on coordination between units, as it is necessary to agree on who is blocking which frequency, given that both enemy and Ukrainian drones are operating simultaneously in the air. EW units need personnel ready to operate electronic warfare systems at the front, as well as developers.

He emphasized that in the first years of the full-scale war, Ukraine paid insufficient attention to the field of electronic warfare, while Russia had been systematically developing these capabilities for a long time.

“The enemy’s EW is not just powerful — it is several times stronger, and this must be taken into account. The adversary has been developing it for a long time. They have many long-range systems that ‘hit’ at 45 kilometers and are also capable of jamming communications at distances of 60–80 kilometers,” the serviceman noted.

Since November 2025, Ukraine’s government has been promoting the decentralized procurement of EW systems, allowing military units to purchase them directly. 180 brigades of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the National Guard of Ukraine can now order EW equipment directly through the DOT-Chain Defence weapons marketplace using their own allocated budgets. On the very first day after EW systems appeared on DOT-Chain Defence, military units placed orders worth nearly 6 million UAH (139,000 USD).

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Depth Ownership in Ukraine’s Drone Warfare

One of the most discussed pieces in Ukraine was a thread on X by Ryan O’Leary, an American serviceman and former company commander in Ukraine. In January 2026, he wrote that Ukraine is not losing the drone war tactically. Rather, it is losing operationally and strategically because it never defined control of depth as the objective.

His ideas gained significant attention in Ukraine’s military and defence-tech circles and prompted a response from the Commander of the Unmanned Systems Forces, Robert “Madyar” Brovdi.