Russia’s arsenal of decoys is also rich and varied.
About half of the drones involved in any of Russia’s recent aerial attacks are actually cheap imitations, the Ukrainian military says.
“It’s fifty-fifty these days. Fifty per cent are real Shahed drones, and fifty per cent are imitation drones. Their job is to overload our air defences and ideally get us to use a missile against a drone that costs peanuts,” says Ukrainian air force spokesman Yuri Ihnat. “Sometimes it’s a plywood thing that looks as though it was knocked together by some schoolchildren.”
While up in the air, however, it looks the same as a lethal Shahed drone to Ukrainian radars, Col Ihnat says.
One Russian firm, Rusbal, produces imitations that include 2D decoys to mislead intelligence gathering from the air or space, decoys that mimic the heat given out by engines or radio traffic coming from soldiers’ walkie-talkies, and reflectors that fool the enemy’s radars.
Actual soldiers can be imitated too. Volunteers from the Kremlin-backed People’s Front movement in Novosibirsk have made dummies wearing military uniforms. To imitate human heat and thus deceive Ukrainian thermal imaging cameras, their trunks are wrapped with heating wire underneath the jacket.