Ukraine says it cracked open a Russian decoy drone used to fool air defenses and found Western parts inside
A Russian decoy drone.
The Ukrainian military said on Monday that it found Western-made parts inside a Russian decoy drone that was used in an attack over the weekend.
Russia has been using unarmed, fake drones in swarm attacks to try to distract and overwhelm Ukrainian air defenses, Kyiv’s military intelligence agency, also known as the HUR, wrote in a statement shared to the Telegram messaging app.
The HUR said these decoy drones are smaller and cheaper than the Iranian-made Shahed-136 one-way attack drone, an explosive-packed system that Russia has been using to terrorize Ukrainian cities for the past two years.
However, the decoy drone — which Ukraine calls “Parody” — can apparently mimic the radar signature of a Shahed in a bid to confuse Kyiv’s air defenses with fake targets.
A look inside a Russian decoy drone.
Russia attacked Ukraine with over 2,000 drones last month, but about half of them were these decoys, the HUR said. On Sunday, two of them crashed in Moldova, a non-NATO country that borders Ukraine to the south.
The HUR said that an examination of the crudely built decoy drones has revealed technology and parts made by companies around the world, including in the US and Europe. Ukraine uploaded purported evidence of these Western-made components — like microcontrollers, antennas, and transceivers — to a government portal and listed the names of several Western companies.
Despite widespread international sanctions aimed at curbing the Kremlin’s war efforts by limiting Moscow’s ability to obtain key parts from abroad, Ukraine continues to find Western-made components inside Russian weapons, including its missiles and drones.
Britain’s defense ministry wrote in an intelligence update last week that Russia has been launching more and more one-way attack drones at Ukraine over the past few months and is likely to continue doing so considering the expansion of Russian launch sites and the current production capacity.
Shahed-136 drones are designed by Iran, but Russia has been domestically producing them under a weapons deal with Tehran.
On Sunday, Ukraine’s air force said Russia attacked the country with a record 145 drones overnight and that 62 of them were shot down.
Kyiv said in a Telegram statement that dozens more were “lost” in different regions of the country, while 10 others left Ukrainian airspace and headed toward Moldova, Belarus, and even back toward Russia. An official confirmed that at least two had crashed in Moldovan territory.
“Two Russian decoy drones—used to mislead Ukrainian air defense — crashed in Moldova today, endangering Moldovan lives and violating our airspace,” Mihai Popșoi, Molvoda’s foreign minister, wrote in a social media post on Sunday.
“We firmly condemn these aggressive incursions and reiterate our condemnation of Russia’s brutal war against Ukraine,” he added.
