The second argument misses the nature of Russia’s missile and drone attacks on Ukraine. They aren’t and haven’t been indiscriminate, they have been deliberately targeting Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, particularly the energy grid in a manner and to an extent that serves no direct military purpose.
Nigel Povoas, lead prosecutor for a team of international experts assisting Kyiv war crimes investigators, told Reuters that Russian attacks in the past two months have “focused on eliminating infrastructure crucial to the means of civilian survival such as heat, water, power and medical facilities”.
Both Schmitt and Povoas say the scale and the intensity of the attacks can additionally amount to them being considered as “acts or threats of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population”.
This is forbidden under international humanitarian law and was confirmed as a war crime by rulings of the U.N. tribunal for the former Yugoslavia relating to the siege of Sarajevo.
Sure, nobody is disputing that the Russian attacks are conducted in an unlawful manner.
But it may be that the drone attacks on Moscow are also conducted in an unlawful manner. We know that three residential blocks were hit. If they were targeted, or the drones were launched with indifference as to where they would come down (the people launching them wished to demonstrate that they could target Moscow, for instance, but beyond “Moscow” didn’t care what they hit) that would be unlawful. So unless it can be said with plausibility that the drones were targeted at legitimate targets, and care was taken to avoid hitting civilian targets, Ukraine might not wish to be identified as the launcher of the drones.
Ah, but it also sends the message that “we can fly drones through Russian airspace undetected until they get to Moscow and hit targets” which should scare the shit out of Putin every time he goes near a window.
The primary soft-kill method of defending against drones is to jam them from receiving input from their controllers, causing them to go to places the operators didn’t intend them to go. Residential blocks, for instance.
Now for some extremely poorly timed news from TASS just two weeks ago:
The equipment features five frequency bands ranging from 900 MHz to 5.8 GHz that enable it to operate against both civilian and special drones. The system suppresses the drone’s control channel, breaks its communication with an operator, knocks out its navigational equipment, causes the UAV to lose its bearings and disrupts its flight assignment.
The system jams GPS, Glonass and Beidou signals (in the L1, L2 and L5 frequency bands) and also disables drone Wi-Fi control. The system maintains communication with its control post via the Ethernet.
Of course all that jamming that can be defeated by a properly designed and equipped drone.
It’s cheap and easy to navigate solely by GPS / GLONASS. But you can navigate by other means that don’t depend on external signals at all. It’s handy to have a drone controlled by a remote pilot when you’re chasing a mobile target that the remote pilot is looking for via the video link from the drone’s camera(s). But if you just want to drop ordnance or crash kamikaze style at a particular lat/long that corresponds to a particular building or structure, there’s no need for control communications. Start it, launch it, and forget it.
GPS/GLONASS signals can be jammed and spoofed as well, there were reports of a good deal of chaos in Moscow in the wake of the first two drone strikes on the Kremlin 4 weeks ago.
This is why cruise missiles have used terrain contour matching and similar navigation methods for 30+ years. It seems there’s been some adaptations for drones and I imagine there’s some furious work being done to make it available to the Ukrainians.
Of course part of the idea of jamming is your own (military) systems are designed around your own (military) jamming. Not perfectly, but much better than all those cars lost “in” the Moskva river.
Current generation airliners all use inertial nav with GPS for fine tuning. If the GPS goes stupid turn it off and intertial will get you near the target with zero dependence on outside signals. That’s probably the most cost effective current tech for targeting a lat/long with an area weapon. Which a drone swarm (even a small one) collectively is.
This tech need not cost thousands. The trick is identifying when the GPS / GLONASS / whatever signal becomes no longer reliable. If you have to assume it’s unreliable from just after launch your position error goes up the longer your flight time.
Reposting here what I just posted in the MPSIMS thread on the Ukraine war:
Here’s an analysis by a “CNN Senior International correspondent” (the article’s description) on the usefulness of the cross-border attacks into Russia, headlined: " Ukraine’s cross-border tactics are aimed at destabilizing Russia. Judging by the response, they’re working."
I don’t have anywhere near the expertise to question the analysis, and would be interested to hear from those of you who could discuss how [in]accurate this take is.
The fact that Britain has supplied Storm Shadows to Ukraine and Russia hasn’t made the world end is proof enough that America now has no excuse not to give ATACMS to Ukraine. Both weapons are of similar range and capability.
I disagree with this analyst that the Belgorod-area incursions are aimed at destabilizing Russia. Destabilization might be a welcome side effect, but the primary aim of these incursions is much simpler - force Russia to deploy military assets along the border in the north, where they cannot be used as reserves to shore up defenses in the south. The entire point is to pull Russian troops away from the areas where Ukraine wants to launch its main counteroffensive. Causing some domestic political anxiety for Putin is nice, but liberating Melitopol and Berdyansk is the goal.
I agree with @Gorsnak, destabilization isn’t the primary goal of these operations, it’s to force Russia to actually defend the entire length of its border with Ukraine or face more repeated humiliations of being unable to defend its own territory from a Russian dissident army operating from Ukraine. The active frontline in the war is already very, very long and up until this point Russia has been able to dictate its expansion by attacking from Russia or Belarus into Ukraine or choose to leave the border practically undefended knowing Ukraine won’t (or at least hasn’t so far) crossed into Russia with its own troops. Forcing them to properly defend the entire length of the Russo-Ukrainian border will mean having to thin out their front lines inside Ukraine proper.
The comparison in the CNN article to the South African Border War is bizarre and isn’t really apt. There is an actual full scale conventional war going on in Ukraine right now, this isn’t a 23 year long unconventional conflict being carried out by Ukraine in support of separatists and anti-government factions in civil wars with its neighbors.