Ukrainian “drone hunters” showed the correspondent of Present Time how they fight Iranian kamikaze attack drones and what these drones have “inside”. While Iran has repeatedly denied deliveries of attack drones to Russia, they say many of the boards are inscribed in Farsi, Iran’s official language. And many electronic components of drones are made in the West, including the USA and Japan. The Ukrainian military has already handed over these details to the authorities of these countries: they hope that they will punish manufacturing companies that sold products to Iran, despite the sanctions.
Border guard Denis is fighting drones in the Odessa region: the Russian military often launch “kamikaze” on Ukrainian cities from the occupied territories or from the sea. Now he is honing shooting from a machine gun: he and another Shaheda can also be shot down from it.
“We were shooting ahead of time. Our observer indicated the direction of the target, as well as the height, with the help of a laser pointer, and we were already orienting along the trajectory and shooting ahead of time,” Denis explains the shooting technology. trajectories and fired, about three or four corps in front of him.”
Recently, Denis managed to shoot down one such “Shahed” from a machine gun:
“At an altitude of about 150 meters, he flew in front of us. The range was somewhere around 200-100 meters, 150-200 meters from us,” he recalls. “Emotions, of course, were very positive, words cannot express! Everyone was happy.”
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All downed drones are carefully studied by Ukrainian specialists: it is important for them to understand how the drones are made, from what components: this helps to better deal with them. Among the downed “kamikaze” – mainly “Shahed-131” and “Shahed-136”, they are shot down in various regions of Ukraine.
“Here we have 20 kg of TNT, as we can see – high-explosive fragmentation, they were used very little,” shows the 131st “Shahed” representative of the Ukrainian intelligence, who asks not to reveal either his name or the place where the shooting takes place. – These “Shaheds” did not do much harm to critical infrastructure facilities. But the 136th “Shaheds” are used more often, because they have a larger warhead, about 40-50 kg.”
The military man says that inside the kamikaze drone everything is done very simply, but effectively. The most valuable thing in this drone is the so-called CPR antenna, the task of which is to counter Ukrainian electronic warfare systems.
“Everything else, all the electronic components that are in these blocks, we can buy on Aliexpress,” the Ukrainian intelligence officer shows. “This, for example, is the simplest GPS antenna. We also have Canadian antennas in this drone. And it’s a simple battery that powers the drone.”
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After disassembling a lot of “Shaheds”, Ukrainian experts came to the conclusion that most of the components in them were produced by companies from Western countries. And because of the sanctions, these parts should not have reached Iran.
“As we can see specifically from this drone, all the electronic components for the Shahed-136 drone, most of them, are foreign-made components, namely Japan, China, the United States,” a Ukrainian intelligence officer shows the “innards” of the drone. “We handed over most of them to our foreign partners so that manufacturers could be sanctioned so that these electronic components never again get into Iran and never again be used against us.”
A few months ago, the US Department of Commerce imposed sanctions on seven Iranian entities involved in the production of kamikaze drones. But methods for circumventing sanctions are constantly being improved, and Russia today probably buys drones far from Iran alone.
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A Ukrainian intelligence officer shows another drone, the Mohajer, which was recently shot down in the Ukrainian skies, an Iranian variant of the Turkish Bayraktar. The bombs for this drone were produced after the start of a full-scale Russian invasion.
“Iranian, their own QM-5 production. If you can see the date of manufacture of this aerial bomb, it’s 2022,” says a Ukrainian military intelligence official.
Iranian authorities have repeatedly denied allegations that they are supplying their drones to Russia for the war against Ukraine. But Ukrainian experts consider these statements to be lies. And they regularly find confirmation of this:
“We can see Farsi inscriptions on one of the boards. This inscription means: “this side down” – this is how this board should be laid and fixed,” shows a military detail from one of the downed drones. “Yes, the markings that we can see “, all are written in English. But the specialists who came to us and know English, said that there are some grammatical errors in the inscriptions here.”
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According to the Ukrainian military, now Russia is changing the tactics of using “Shaheds” in Ukrainian cities. If they used to be launched from the south across the sea, now they are mainly launched from the north. Presumably, this is due to the fact that most of the kamikaze drones that fly from the south are shot down by “hunter” teams.
Border guard Denis says that in his area now “Shaheds” are not as common as they were last fall.
“I think this is precisely because they realized that we can destroy them without any problems and their effectiveness is zero,” he says. “At first, when the very first launches were, we didn’t know how to act correctly, nor how to properly hit targets and the like. But then, later, when we had already begun to practice, started to train, we began to shoot them down already. And the perception has changed: you are no longer afraid of them.”
But, despite the fact that Iranian drone attacks are no longer as effective as in the fall of 2022, Russia still uses them and tries to use them to find vulnerabilities in the Ukrainian air defense. Another strike occurred on the night of Wednesday, March 22: as a result of this attack, eight civilians were killed, and seven more, including an 11-year-old child, were injured.
