Kyiv, Ukraine \u2013<\/strong> No nation knows more than Ukraine about how to down Iranian-made or designed drones.<\/p>\n Tens of thousands of them have rained death over it since 2022, and now, Ukrainian experts will help shoot them down over Gulf nations, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced on Sunday.<\/p>\n list of 4 items<\/span>end of list<\/span><\/section>\n Just days earlier, Ukrspecsystems, one of Ukraine\u2019s largest drone manufacturers, opened a factory in the eastern English town of Mildenhall to churn out up to 1,000 unmanned aircraft a month.<\/p>\n Ukraine\u2019s former top general and current ambassador to the United Kingdom, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, attended the opening, the BBC reported.<\/p>\n Back in 2022, when Moscow started the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, some Western military analysts believed that two ex-Soviet armies would fight each other using obsolete stratagems and weapons.<\/p>\n Who would have thought that four years later, China, the United States and Europe would scrutinise the war\u2019s technological and tactical breakthroughs, a combination of unorthodox, hi-tech solutions and jury-rigged fixes that make warfare cheaper and arms manufacturing faster and deadlier?<\/p>\n \u201cUndoubtedly, Bundeswehr in particular and NATO in general are closely studying this war\u2019s technological innovations,\u201d Nikolay Mitrokhin of Germany\u2019s Bremen University told Al Jazeera, referring to German armed forces.<\/p>\n \u201cFirstly, there\u2019s a task to modernise [military] equipment and machinery according to [the war\u2019s] outcomes,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Secondly, the newest Western technologies are being tested during the war, including German air defence systems and certain drones, he said.<\/p>\n And thirdly, Western armies will learn how to wage wars when drones dominate the front line, and traditional weapons and ammunition lose their role, he said.<\/p>\n A top US military official compared Ukrainian servicemen with MacGyver, a fictional secret agent from the 1980s\u2019 television series who used his wits, engineering skills and whatever was at hand to get out of death traps.<\/p>\n Outmanned and outgunned, Ukrainians \u201chave MacGyver-ed and come up with whatever they have to do to get to an outcome they need\u201d, US Army Secretary Dan Driscoll said in November. \u201cThere are no rules to get to that outcome.\u201d<\/p>\n Army SOS, a Kyiv-based startup, is one example.<\/p>\n It began by raising money to buy flak jackets and deliver them to the front line, but its volunteers kept hearing one persistent request \u2013 \u201cGuys, give us maps\u201d.<\/p>\n Instead of printing them out, Army SOS developed software that turns any cheap tablet or smartphone into a precision guidance system that acquires and transmits coordinates for correcting artillery fire.<\/p>\n It calculates the distance to targets, directs shots and even gets meteorological data that can affect each shot.<\/p>\n But Russia follows suit by \u201cmirroring and scaling up\u201d Ukraine\u2019s findings, Andrey Pronin, one of the pioneers of drone warfare in Ukraine, told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n The mirroring takes weeks.<\/p>\n In early 2023, Ukrainian engineers were the first to attach barely visible optic fibre to drones to make them immune to radio jamming, but their commanders initially rejected the innovation, Pronin said.<\/p>\n But Russians mimicked and scaled up the invention \u2013 and these days, forests in front-line areas are covered with countless glistening threads of optic fibre that resemble post-apocalyptic Christmas decorations.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Russian optic fibre drones began reaching Kharkiv, Ukraine\u2019s second-largest city that sits 40km (25 miles) from the Russian border, and Zaporizhzhia, the administrative capital of the eponymous eastern region.<\/p>\n Drones of all shapes and sizes buzz in the sky over the front line 24\/7, risking Russia\u2019s use of large columns of soldiers.<\/p>\n In 2022, these columns failed to enter Kyiv.<\/p>\n \u201cI heard them. And I was killing them,\u201d serviceman Bohdan Yavorsky told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n On the invasion\u2019s third day, he and 21 other servicemen and barely-armed volunteers ambushed and immobilised a column of three dozen Russian tanks and armoured vehicles in Bucha, north of Kyiv.<\/p>\n Yavorsky and his men fled in getaway civilian cars and sent the column\u2019s coordinates to Ukraine\u2019s air force, which bombed it within 30 minutes.<\/p>\n By 2026, Russia no longer risks amassing such large groups.<\/p>\n It dispatches soldiers in twos or threes to infiltrate the front line, carry ammo and jamming equipment and wait for more twos or threes.<\/p>\n They have cheap smartphones with Alpine Quest, a topographic app that lets one move around using coded coordinates without access to the internet or the Global Positioning System\u00a0(GPS).<\/p>\n \u201cWe didn\u2019t know the names of villages we were told to go to,\u201d Mohammad (not his real name), a Tajik labour migrant who was duped into becoming a Russian soldier and was taken prisoner in eastern Ukraine last year, told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n Soldiers on both sides use anti-thermal camouflage to avoid being detected by the drones\u2019 thermal vision devices, hang fishnets over roads and mount electric scooters or snowmobiles to evade explosives-laden first-person-view drones.<\/p>\n Ukraine\u2019s entire navy consisted of three dozen decades-old vessels that could fit into one small harbour in the Black Sea port of Odesa.<\/p>\n They were almost all annihilated in 2022, and Russia\u2019s Black Sea Fleet based in annexed Crimea gained control of Ukraine\u2019s territorial waters as Russian vessels shelled Odesa.<\/p>\n But by mid-2023, Ukraine developed sea drones that destroyed Russia\u2019s largest ships \u2013 while aerial unmanned aircraft attacked a dry dock in the southern Crimean port of Sevastopol that had for decades been used to repair ships.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat was critical for Russia wasn\u2019t damage to vessels, it was damage to the shipyard,\u201d Kyiv-based analyst Ihar Tyshkevich told Al Jazeera. \u201cThis is the reason why a large part of the Black Sea Fleet vessels were relocated to [eastwards, to the Russian port of] Novorossiysk.\u201d<\/p>\n Beijing is also especially eager to study and adopt the innovations of war, analysts said.<\/p>\n \u201cOf course, they\u2019re watching,\u201d Temur Umarov, a Sinologist and China expert with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Berlin-based think tank, told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n Beijing\u2019s close attention to every development in Russia dates back to the 1950s, when the Soviets were crucial in shaping newborn Communist China\u2019s armed forces and military industrial complex.<\/p>\n \u201cBoth the Chinese military, scientific community, as well as economists and historians [are watching] everything that is happening in Russia,\u201d Umarov said.<\/p>\n China, however, has a major problem with adopting the new tactics, another military analyst warns.<\/p>\n \u201cHorizontal algorithms\u201d, or rapid, real-time sharing of data on the battlefield to process intelligence faster, along with the top-down delegation of responsibilities, almost don\u2019t get implanted in authoritarian or totalitarian nations, Pavel Luzin, a Russia-born senior fellow at the Jamestown Foundation, a US think tank, told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n The war\u2019s main challenge is \u201corganisational principles such as coordination building, delegation of decision making, logistics and so on\u201d, Luzin said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Kyiv, Ukraine \u2013 No nation knows more than Ukraine about how to down Iranian-made or designed drones. Tens of thousands of them have rained death over it since 2022, and now, Ukrainian experts will help shoot them down over Gulf nations, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced on Sunday. Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13671,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-europe-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13670"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13670\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13671"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Recommended Stories <\/h2>\n
Ukraine\u2019s military ingenuity<\/h2>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.aljazeera.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/2026-02-26T105021Z_1721506911_RC2GTJABAO06_RTRMADP_3_UKRAINE-CRISIS-ATTACK-KHARKIV-1772448534.jpg?w=770&resize=770%2C513&quality=80\")
![\"INTERACTIVE](\"https:\/\/www.aljazeera.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/INTERACTIVE-SHAHED136-drone.png?w=770&resize=770%2C770&quality=80\")
<\/p>\nChina watches war developments<\/h2>\n
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