At 21:31 local time, a Ukrainian drone the size of a compact car lifts off a rural highway outside Churnney and screams into the sky.
Across northern Ukraine, dozens more are launching from roads, dirt strips, and frozen fields at the same time.
Unknown to the Russian air defense network tracking every one of them, the majority of these drones aren’t carrying warheads.
They’re carrying something different.
And the drones that are armed are racing toward Russia’s biggest oil export hub in the Baltic Sea.
The swarm crosses into Russian airspace within minutes.
Neibo SVU radars, Russia’s early warning network, VHF band systems that use radio waves the length of a school bus, long enough to bounce off small targets that shorter wavelengths miss entirely, light up across Baranskin, Smolinsk blast with dozens of returns from the Jouahib.
Some of those returns are big.
The kind that makes every buck crew in the sector sit up straight.
Others flicker in and out of the clutter like static on a bad television.
30 plus tracks in the opening 10 minutes.
More showing up every 30 seconds.
And nobody on the Russian side can tell which ones matter.
The biggest return gets shot first.
That’s what you do when your scope looks like a Christmas tree and you have to pick something to shoot.
Even if half of those large returns are real cruise missiles, the entire Berant sector is about to have a catastrophic morning.
Missiles scream off the rails across the sector.
Six batteries firing almost simultaneously.
The first warhead shreds a drone doing 80 knots at 300 ft.
A million-doll interceptor destroying a piece of foam.
On six more scopes, six more crews are watching the same result.
What just fired? The Buck M2, Russia’s medium-range surfaceto-air workhorse, built to squad cruise missiles and aircraft at ranges up to 50 kilometers.
The 9M317 missile it carries weighs $715 kg, screams past Mach 3, and costs roughly a million per shot.
Tonight, those milliondoll shots are tracking targets worth 45,000.
And it only worked because of one thing.
If you look here at the wreckage of the drone that buck just shredded, there’s a small sphere mounted on the nose, a corner reflector called a Lunberg lens.
A Lunberg lens is basically a ball of layered plastic and glass that bounces radar waves straight back where they came from.
And it makes whatever it’s sitting on look enormous on a radar screen.
That FP1 drone, Ukraine’s cheap mass-produced strike drone, foam and fiberglass, cost about $55,000, rolls off the production line at roughly 100 per day, has a natural radar signature of about 0.
01 m, about the size of a pigeon.
Slap a Lunberg lens on the nose and it jumps between 1 and 5 m, which looks exactly like a cruise missile on the scope.
the radar equivalent of a Pomeranian wearing a wolf costume on Halloween.
Eight of the 12 large returns the buck just engaged were decoys.
Russia burned $8 million in interceptors chasing $440,000 worth of foam and insulation.
Somewhere in Kiev, someone with a spreadsheet is grinning the way your wife grins when she finds a 90% off clearance rack.
Except the savings are measured in Russian interceptors.
The Russian air defense commander at the sector operations center is doing math he doesn’t like.
His buck batteries carry four ready missiles per launcher.
Three launchers, 12 missiles total.
Eight gone in the first 10 minutes, chasing what turned out to be foam.
Four left.
30 plus contacts still on the scope.
More crossing the border every minute.
He can order a cease fire and save the remaining missiles for whatever comes next.
or keep shooting and risk having empty rails when the real threat arrives.
He keeps shooting.
That’s exactly what the Ukrainians are counting on.
The doctrine that says engage the biggest threat first is burning through his magazine faster than his resupply trucks can drive.
While every buck in the sector is chasing Halloween costumes, a dozen shadows slip through at 200 ft.
Too small on radar to bother with while the big scary returns are still on the scope.
They clear the border zone and push north into 950 km of hostile Russian airspace.
950 km at 150 km per hour.
6 hours and 20 minutes of flight time on a fuel load that gives them roughly 7 hours.
40 minutes of margin.
And that’s before headwinds, course corrections, or anything that forces a single extra kilometer.
What just slipped through? The AN196 Luti, Ukraine’s long range one-way attack drone built by Ukro Bonprompt.
Fiberglass airframe rear-mounted gasoline engine pushing it to 150 km per hour.
Carrying a 50 to75 kg warhead depending on how far it needs to fly.
Range 1,000 km, roughly New York to Detroit.
Cost about $200,000 or what the buck batteries just spent on a single decoy.
A dozen of them are now headed for Russia’s most valuable oil port with no pilot, no escort, and no way home.
Two SU35s fighters scramble from a base in western Russia to drop into the swarm inside 4 minutes.
The Urbus Era you see here tracks fighterized targets at 350 plus kilometers, but against a looty at 200 ft, the screen is a wall of ground clutter.
every tree, barn, and frozen field, producing returns that look exactly like the drone.
He switches to Urst infrared search and track, which hunts by heat instead of radar.
The Lut’s gasoline engine runs at 400 to 500° C exhaust, and the Earth picks that up.
So does every farmhouse chimney, vehicle engine, and heated building in a 10 km swath below.
Listening for one person breathing in a dark house where every room has a space heater running from a jet doing 600 mph.
He descends to visual range and opens up with the GSH31 cannon.
30 mm rounds at something he’s about 60% sure is in a barn.
To avoid overshooting a drone doing 150 kmh, he slows to nearly 300.
Dangerously close to the SU35’s low altitude limits at night.
Russia accidentally shot down one of its own SU30 SM over Crimea doing exactly this kind of intercept in October 2025.
Friendly fire in the chaos.
He fires a burst and misses.
The looty keeps flying because it has no idea it’s being shot at.
He pulls up 4G shoving him into the seat, burns through a turn and comes back for a second pass.
Same problem.
The drone is below him now, hugging terrain at 200 feet, and he has to dive toward the ground in the dark to get a firing angle.
The Earth paints the exhaust, but the targeting computer won’t hold a stable solution.
The closure rate is all wrong.
The jet is vibrating at low speed, and the target keeps merging with ground heat below.
He fires another burst.
Tracers arc past the drone’s left wing and chew into a frozen field.
He pulls off.
15 minutes of fuel burn chasing a target that costs less than his ejection seat.
And every pass puts an $85 million fighter at the edge of its flight envelope in the dark.
Like trying to swat a mosquito with a Cadillac, except the mosquito doesn’t even know you’re in the room.
The drone has no idea it survived.
No radar warning receiver, no missile warning system, no clue what’s happening around it.
A fiberglass tube with a GPS, a camera, and a warhead flying deaf through a flight it can’t hear.
Against a supersonic fighter, that cluelessness is the best defense system on the airframe.
The jet can’t slow down enough to shoot something that doesn’t know it should be scared.
The surviving looies push north and 20 minutes past the border, the GPS signal goes silent.
If you look here at what just shut it down, that’s a pole 21, a Russian groundbased jammer that drowns out satellite navigation the way a bohorn drowns out a whisper.
It broadcasts noise across every GPS and glowness frequency simultaneously, and the drone’s receiver can’t hear the real satellites through the static.
The computer gives up on satellites and starts flying by dead reckoning, gyroscopes for direction, and a downward-facing camera checking the ground against a stored library of what the terrain is supposed to look like.
In the basement outside Chernah, the operator watches GPS indicators go red one after another.
She pushes an updated waypoint through the satellite data link.
Nothing.
Backup channel.
Nothing.
The Pole 21 is drowning every frequency she has.
The drones are on their own now, navigating on gyroscopes and a camera.
And she can do exactly nothing except watch the telemetry lag further behind reality.
Without GPS, to keep it honest, the gyroscope drifts.
Errors stack up like compound interest.
Small at first, then growing.
After 90 minutes of flying blind through the Smolinsk Biscoff corridor, the Lutis have wandered roughly 800 m west of where they’re supposed to be.
That’s nothing over open countryside.
It’ll be everything at the target.
6 hours of droning through hostile darkness on a gasoline engine and a prayer.
The occasional smear of city lights off the left wing.
The glow of a military airfield where pancer batteries sit on alert.
The looty passes between the two of them, too low and too small to register.
threading the gap like a mouse between sleeping cats.
No pilot, no operator, just a gyroscope, a camera, and a set of coordinates programmed into its brain before it left the runway.
Then the GPS comes back.
Clean signal, full constellation, position updating 10 times a second.
The computer accepts the fix and banks west.
Except the GPS is lying.
The drone starts drifting towards Estonia.
If you look here at what just happened inside the navigation computer, it accepted a counterfeit satellite signal.
A fake so good the receiver can’t tell the difference.
This is GNSS spoofing, and it’s a completely different animal from jamming.
Jamming blocks the signal.
The drone knows GPS is gone and switches to backup.
Spoofing feeds the drone a perfect forgery that says, “You’re right here.
” When you’re actually 15 kilometers east, you follow the directions with total confidence, arrive at the wrong address, and never know the map was a lie.
During this campaign, the spoofing shoved drones sideways into NATO airspace.
A loot slammed into an Estonian power plant.
Two more crashed in Finland.
Others came down in Latafia and Lithuania.
If the terrain camera fails or the terrain is too featureless to match, the drone trusts the fake GPS and flies wherever Russia points it.
Every one of those drones trusted that counterfeit signal and flew precisely where Russia told them to.
But this Lut’s camera catches the lie.
The ground below doesn’t match.
The computer sees a riverbend at coordinates that contradict the GPS fix, recognizes the mismatch against its stored terrain library, and overrules the satellite entirely.
Banks back onto the original track as if the spoof signal will never happen.
Like having a friend in the passenger seat who looks out the window and says, “I don’t care what the GPS says.
I recognize this intersection.
Turn left.
” As long as the camera can see landmarks, a lying GPS is irrelevant.
The problem comes when every field is under March snow and the library has nothing to compare against.
The spoofing system defeated by an off-the-shelf camera module that costs less than a decent anniversary dinner.
The spoofing is beaten, but the 800 meter drift from the GPS blackout is still there, baked in before the spoofing even started.
Close to on track, but 800 m off.
Jamming, spoofing, and a supersonic fighter.
And the drones are still flying.
What’s waiting at us won’t be so forgiving.
The surviving lutis 8 to 10 from the original package cross into lengrad all blast at 0348 at 200 ft.
The camera locks the Luga River ahead.
A strong feature cutting through flat coastal lowland and the drones drop to 100 ft to follow the river northwest toward the port.
The drones are descending over a port that’s already been hit multiple times.
Five strikes since March 22 have left two BS closed, three tankers at anchor, and repair crews still welding ruptured feed lines under flood lights.
Inside the air defense command post, the duty officer has watched this approach for 16 consecutive days.
Same direction every time.
Drones from the southeast dropping into the Luga River lowlands below the S400’s radar horizon, running treetop altitude into the tank farm.
The S400 is built to find cruise missiles at 400 meters.
A security camera designed to spot cars on the highway.
It doesn’t find a skateboard rolling through the parking lot.
The paner batteries at the port, Russia’s short-range goalkeeper layer, have engaged on every attack, and the drones keep punching through because by the time the radar picks them up at river level, there’s maybe 3 seconds to shoot.
He spent the last week repositioning assets to fix that problem.
Tonight, the drones think they know this approach.
The lead luty rounds a riverbed 18 km from the tank farm.
It’s infrared seeker warming for acquisition.
A radar emission hits it from inside the valley, not from the hilltops where air defense batteries are supposed to sit.
A 9 M317 MA missile screams off a rail at Mach 4.
The drone doesn’t deviate.
No warning receiver.
No evasion capability.
Fiberglass at 500 kmh against a missile doing 20 times its speed.
Direct hit.
The auto loader cycles.
Second missile finds a second blue te 400 m back.
Two drones gone in 4 seconds.
If you look here at what just fired from the valley floor, that’s a Buck M3, Russia’s newest mediumrange air defense system.
And it’s not where a buck is supposed to be.
Normally, you put these batteries on a hilltop so the radar can see as far as possible.
This commander put his inside the river valley in the terrain the drones use cover for along the exact corridor they’ve flown five times in 16 days.
The 9M317 MA has a minimum engagement altitude of 15 m and a range of 70 km.
But inside the valley, the range shrinks to under 10 km and the missile gets there in seconds.
The radar already knows which direction the drones are coming from.
A speed trap on one road.
every driver uses to dodge the highway.
The kind of trap your wife sets when she asks, “What time did you get home last night?” She already knows the answer.
But the third looty isn’t where the buck expects.
That 800 m of drift from the GPS blackout pushed its track north of the river center line outside the box the radar was pointed at.
The radar sllew to reacquire, but the drone is past the window.
The missile fires late.
Tail chase.
Bad geometry.
Target disappearing behind the trees.
The proximity fudge detonates 40 meters behind the drone.
Shrapnel tears through the mid fuselage.
If you look here at what the shrapnel actually hit, the lut’s warhead sits in the nose.
The engine sits in the tail.
And between them is nothing but fuel tank and fiberglass skin.
The fragments punched through the fuselage wall and ruptured the fuel bladder.
Gasoline leaking from three holes in the belly, streaming into the slipstream.
The left control surface is shredded, the drone grabbing sideways, fighting to hold heading with what’s left on the right side.
But the engine is untouched, and the warhead is intact.
The navigation computer has no way to feel pain, check its fuel level, or notice that it’s even flying crooked.
It flies until it can’t.
Russia’s own Pole 21 Jammer, the system that created the drift 4 hours ago, just accidentally saved a $200,000 drone from a $1.
2 million missile.
Sometimes the best countermeasure is dumb luck and bad math.
15 km out, the survivors climb from the valley.
The Cameron needs a clear sight line for target lock, and the trees block it.
They pop above the canopy at 150 ft.
Tracer fire arcs up from three directions.
Behind a sandbag cord on the port’s eastern perimeter, a Russian gunner has been sitting in the cold for 4 hours, waiting for exactly this moment.
The drone appears on his thermoscope as a bright white dot moving left to right across a green black field.
Engine heat glowing against the frozen sky.
He leads the target two body links ahead, the same instinct you’d use leading a duck with a shotgun and squeezes the trigger.
The cord hammers against its shoulder and tracer rounds climb into the dark.
If you look here at the OENT footage from this attack, those arcs of light in the pre-dawn sky are 12.
7 mm tracer rounds from positions across the port perimeter.
Disc and cord heavy machine guns, truck mounted, sandbagged with thermal scopes that pick up a warm engine against cold ground the way a lit cigarette stands out in a parking lot at midnight.
Against a fighter jet, this hardware is decoration.
against a looty at 150 ft.
Fiberglass, zero armor locked into its dive, concentrated 12.
7 mm fire is devastating.
The cord fires 750 rounds per minute and one round through the engine, fuel line, or control surface ends the mission.
Your grandfather’s anti-aircraft guns doing a job that billiondoll defense systems couldn’t.
80 years old and against the target that can’t dodge, it works just fine.
One luy takes a hit to a control surface and spirals into a field 3 km short.
Another absorbs rounds through the fuselage but keeps flying.
Engine intact, warhead intact.
Seeker locked onto the thermal plume of 50,000 cubic meter oil storage tanks.
A radar locks a loot at 6 km.
A missile smaller than anything in Russia’s standard inventory screams off a rail on the port perimeter.
Direct hit fiberglass confetti.
If you look here at what just fired, that’s a Pancer SMD.
And this is not the standard Pancer.
The original carries 12 missiles, and against a swarm of 20 drones, it runs dry after 12 shots, and the rest fly through.
That’s been the core problem with missile defense against cheap drones since this war started.
The SMD variant fixes it.
48 TKB1055 mini missiles.
Each one smaller and cheaper than the standard interceptor purpose-built to swat a $55,000 drone without burning a million-doll missile to do it.
Every radar and sensor around the port feeds into one network.
So when one scope sees a drone, every gun in the defense knows where it is.
Four drones made it past the machine guns.
The pancer got one.
Three are diving.
At 12 km, the Lut’s infrared seeker powers up, a heat-seeking version of your phone’s camera that locks on to the brightest thing in the frame.
The tank farm appears as a cluster of warm spots against frozen ground.
50,000 cubic meters of crude oil, and even ambient temperature glows against frozen March landscape.
The Seeker doesn’t pick a specific tank.
It locks the warmest cluster and commits.
No course changes, no second thoughts, just a warhead on a one-way trip.
At 0402, the first warhead, 50 kgs of high explosive, the lighter warhead traded for range on a thousand km mission punches through the steel shell of a Trans Nef Baltika storage tank.
Crew doesn’t explode, it ignites, and a column of black smoke begins climbing over Luga Bay.
8 seconds later, the second drone hits a tank 200 m south.
Then the shrapnel scarred one arrives.
The drone leaking fuel from three holes, crabbing sideways on a shredded control surface.
Navigation computer oblivious to the fact that it’s barely flying and slams into a loading birth at the water line.
The petroleum pipeline ruptures, fire runs down the birth and into the water.
If you enjoyed this video, then watch this other video on the war in Ukraine.
Bye for now.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
