Ukraine is using music to bring down Vladimir Putin’s “invincible” hypersonic missiles.
An electronic warfare team is jamming satellite signals on Russian weapons and replacing them with a song that parodies Russian propaganda.
Night Watch, the group operating the technology, claims to have brought down 19 Kinzhal missiles – described by Putin as “invincible” – in the past two weeks.
The team told technology website 404 Media that it is using a song and a redirection order to knock the “next-generation” missiles, which carry a 480kg payload and cost around £7.7m each, out of the sky.
Kinzhals and other guided munitions rely on the GLONASS system – Russia’s GPS-style navigation network using satellites – to find their targets.
Night Watch developed its own “Lima” jamming system that replaces the missiles’ satellite navigation signals with the Ukrainian song “Our Father is Bandera”.
The song was chosen as a dig at alarmist Russian propaganda, which has tried to portray all Ukrainians as supporters of the 20th-century Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera.
When the song begins, the Lima system feeds the incoming missiles a false navigation signal, tricking them into believing that they are flying over Lima, in Peru, so that they attempt to change their trajectory.
Travelling at a speed of more than 4,000 miles per hour, however, the missiles become destabilised by the abrupt and unexpected change of course.
Night Watch said they developed the system after discovering that the Kinzhals used a controlled reception pattern antenna (CRPA), an antiquated type of technology for resisting, jamming and spoofing.
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The team told 404: “They had the same type of receivers as old Soviet missiles used to have.
“The airframe cannot withstand the excessive stress and the missile naturally fails. When the Kinzhal tried to quickly change navigation, the fuselage of this missile was unable to handle the speed … and, yeah, it was just cut into two parts.
“The biggest advantage of those missiles, speed, was used against them.”
A Night Watch source told Forbes that on another occasion a missile had been lured 200km off course from the airfield that was the target of the strike.
Night Watch said that Russia was attempting to increase the number of receivers on the missiles, in some cases doubling them, to make them less vulnerable, but maintained that this would not inhibit efforts to bring them down.
Vladimir Putin described the Kinzhal, which has a range of up to 2,000km, as “invincible” and “an ideal weapon” in 2018. Even Joe Biden, the former US president, said in 2022 that “it’s almost impossible to stop it”.
Several have since been shot down over the course of the war following the delivery of Patriot anti-aircraft missile systems to Ukraine, but Kyiv’s supply of the US-made systems is limited.
