Lost and spoofed: How Ukraine redirects Russian drones to Belarus

While Moscow might have been producing more drones to attack Ukraine, Kyiv has found a way to crash them or send them back where they came from. 

On Sunday night, Russian forces launched 110 Shahed drones and other decoys against Ukraine. Some 52 of them were shot down by Ukraine's air defence forces, while 50 were deemed "lost" — not shot down deliberately by the air defence, and they did not reach their intended targets. 

So where did more than four dozen drones disappear to?

“Basically, what Ukraine is doing is spoofing. Meaning they are feeding in false GPS targets to these Shahed — or in Russian terms, Geran-2 drones — to make them veer off course," John Hardie, deputy director of the Russia Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, explained.

"The drones have a system that's supposed to prevent jamming. But what these are doing is kind of sneaking in and not letting the drone know that the targets are being changed. It's tricking it to going in the wrong direction," Hardie told Euronews.

This is possible because of improved electronic warfare interference tactics. The number of Shahed or decoy drones reported "lost" due to Ukrainian electronic warfare (EW) interference increased significantly between October and November, the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War think tank (ISW) said.

During the Russian attack on 2 October, Ukraine directly shot down 78 drones while 23 were reported as "lost," representing 22% of the total 105 launched by Russia against Ukraine during the overnight strike. 

Two months later, on Monday, 45% of Russian drones went missing due to Ukrainian EW interference. Some of it is down to an electronic defence system the Ukrainian army calls Pokrova, meaning "veil of