With hundreds of Shahed drones attacking Ukraine almost every night, there just aren’t enough missiles to intercept them all. DW has met a Ukrainian unit patrolling the skies with propeller plane and rifle.

Kyiv

Russian forces have invaded Ukraine from land, air and sea with strikes causing widespread damage. Global leaders have condemned the move and imposed sanctions.

Ukraine Invasion

Ukrainian air defense teams have adapted old training planes, originally not designed for combat, to intercept Russian reconnaissance and attack drones. These aircraft, such as the Yak-52, are equipped with gunners who use assault rifles to shoot down drones at close range, relying on ground information and visual spotting due to the lack of onboard radar.

The approach is driven by necessity and cost, as the planes can be purchased for significantly less than the price of a single Russian drone or the cost of using advanced missiles. Despite the challenges, including the evolving capabilities of Russian drones and the physical demands on crews, these budget solutions have proven effective in Ukraine's ongoing defense efforts.

How Ukraine shoots down Russia’s drones on a budget

This plane was never built for war, it was meant to train pilots, it even has a propeller made of wood. And yet these dinky planes have become an important piece of Ukraine's air defence, hunting Russia's reconnaissance and attack drones. It's as dangerous as it looks, the gunner has to open the canopy at altitude to take a shot at Russian drones just a few hundred metres away with an assault rifle. Earlier on in this war Russian Shahids could be downed with machine guns from the ground, newer models fly higher and faster. Ukrainian anti-drone crews have to get much closer to their target to stand a chance. We get within about 150 to 200 metres of the Shahids, if you hit them too close the blast wave will get you. If you're a bit further away, say 500 metres, you can go for where the explosives are, it's usually best to shoot at the engine. This gunner, who we're calling Serhii, tells us he recently downed three Shahids in the space of just half an hour. Hitting the drones isn't the problem, he says, it's finding them in the first place. An on-board radar would be too heavy for these planes, so they have to rely on information from the ground and the gunner's eyes. It's usually easier to find them if we're flying above them, and when we want to shoot them down, we descend and we shoot them from below. But relying on the gunner's sight has its limitations. These planes only operate from dawn to dusk, and even heavy rain can be a problem, but not the cold. I've flown in winter when it was minus 24 degrees Celsius on the ground and even colder up there. You don't even have time to feel cold. What this plane lacks in sophistication, it more than makes up for in price. The unit's commander, who we're calling Taras, tells us older Yak-52s like this plane can be bought in Europe for as little as 50,000 euros. That's less than the estimated cost of a single Russian Shahid drone, the kind that these crews shoot down. The price tag is all the more striking when compared with the millions of euros that NATO forces recently spent shooting down the same type of Russian drones over Poland. If I wanted to boast, I could tell you that one of our teams recently downed a Shahid with just five bullets. Five bullets and it was gone. It's thrift born of necessity. Russia now routinely launches over 500 Shahid drones a day, not counting additional reconnaissance drones that direct missile strikes. Ukraine doesn't have the luxury of downing them all with expensive missiles. Reports have even emerged of the country's prized F-16 jets being scrambled to gun down these drones. Much better and cheaper to send up these crews. They turn, they dodge and dive. They now do all kinds of manoeuvres to evade us. It's getting harder all the time. Sometimes it'll take 40 minutes to catch them. The teams come back drenched in sweat and exhausted. But as so often in this war, just as one side finds a solution to counter new technology, the other side responds. These images were captured by one of the Russian drones, targeted by a Ukrainian plane like the one that Taras flies. Newer Russian drones aren't just fitted with cameras to find targets down below, they also increasingly have cameras to spot planes or other drones sent to intercept them. AI or the drone operator can then decide how best to shake off the drone's pursuers. You're just sitting there in the plane working some controls. It's not physically hard, but the responsibility of getting it right really takes it out of you. If you get it wrong, that drone is going to hit someone or send a missile to hit someone else. Often enough, that means these crews and their bases. While far behind Ukraine's Western-supplied F-16s on Russia's hit list, these planes and their pilots have repeatedly come under fire from Russian missiles. All the better then that they can take off from almost anywhere. Even a bumpy field like this.

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How Ukraine shoots down Russia’s drones on a budget

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Ukraine Invasion