Ukrainian Marines Hacked A Russian Drone To Locate Its Base—Then Blew Up The Base With Artillery

It’s not for no reason that the Ukrainian marine corps’ 36th Brigade has been able to seize, hold and even expand a bridgehead in Krynky on the otherwise Russian-controlled left bank of the Dnipro River in southern Ukraine’s Kherson Oblast.

Ukrainian electronic-warfare crews and drone-operators have taken control of the sky over Krynky—first by grounding Russia’s drones, and then filling the air with Ukraine’s drones.

Now a famous Ukrainian drone commander has revealed one of the ways his comrades target their Russian counterparts in Kherson: by intercepting Russian drones’ video feeds and using them to identify Russian drone bases. Then relaying the bases’ coordinates to the 36th Brigade’s artillery for precision strikes.

Ukrainian commander Robert Brovdi detailed one example of this kill-chain in a video that circulated online this week. The sequence began when a Russian first-person-view drone launched somewhere in Kherson.

The drone’s video feed was “intercepted immediately” by Ukrainian E.W. specialists, Brovdi said. Many FPV drones relay their video back to their operators along widely-used radio frequencies and without much encryption, making them fairly easy to hack.