Forget Patriot air defences — volunteer brigades equipped with clunky machineguns are taking down swarms of lethal Shaheds
George Grylls
January 8, 2025
The Times
Across the city, the sound of clicking padlocks marks the beginning of the hunt. As night falls, Kyiv’s defenders climb out on to icy roofs and turn their guns to the sky. From the top of a Soviet apartment block, the drone-hunters scour the enormous blackness above for prey. The conditions are hardly pleasant — the temperature is forecast to drop to a low of minus ten — and in a war characterised by the speed of its technological advances, Natalya Kovalenko relies on a twin-mounted machinegun built in 1946. “It doesn’t matter that our weapons are old,” says Kovalenko, 43, a mother of two and constitutional judge by day, noting that a good bashing with a hammer usually resolves any glitches. “The main thing is they work.”
Ukraine suffered ten times the number of kamikaze drone attacks last autumn as in the same period in 2023, according to President Zelensky. On a single night in November, Russia launched 188 drones at Ukraine, an unwelcome record.
Previously, Iran sold a single Shahed-136 to Russia for $193,000. But Russia’s stockpile of UAVs has swelled since Putin struck a deal with Tehran to build a drone factory in Tatarstan, reducing costs. Now, Russia is churning out Shaheds for as little as $50,000 and tinkering with the design to make them more deadly.
Russian engineers have attached thermobaric warheads — vacuum bombs that suck oxygen from the air — to the Shaheds, and also appear to have increased their range.
Yet despite these lethal adjustments, it makes little economic sense for Kyiv to use the capital’s US Patriot air defences to shoot down the drones at a cost of $4 million per missile. Instead, it is left to part-time volunteers armed with antique guns to keep the Shaheds at bay.
The drones converge on Kyiv after taking a circuitous route to the capital intended to confuse Ukrainian air defence teams, some of whom roam the city on the back of pick-up trucks.
Previously the drones flew straight along roads and rivers to muffle the sound of their puttering engines, a noise so distinctive it earned them the nickname “mopeds”.
Now, the Shaheds are scattering, doubling back on themselves, corkscrewing here and there, feinting an attack on nearby cities, before simultaneously approaching Kyiv from random directions, dropping from various altitudes.
Hidden among the swarms of Shaheds are decoys made of white foam wrapped in foil, designed to trick Ukrainian radar systems and distract the capital’s air defence teams. Between 50 and 60 per cent of all drones are now decoys, western officials believe.
Watching an iPad out of the corner of her eye as Shaheds zigzag across a map of Ukraine, Kovalenko awaits the call to be put on high alert. Her ageing gun has been fitted with a night-vision camera. A second member of the four-person team uses a spotlight to illuminate the dark, a third exchanges updates via walkie-talkie with the brigade’s headquarters, and a fourth fires a comparatively modern Czechoslovak machinegun from 1964.
Kovalenko explains that shortly before the start of her 24-hour shift with the Mriya Volunteer Brigade, she was presiding over a rather important case.
A notorious pro-Russian MP, Oleksandr Dubinsky, had called on the government to stage presidential elections, claiming that Zelensky had served out his five-year term. Decreeing that it was impossible for the president to hold a ballot at a time of martial law, Kovalenko struck out the case — then put on camouflage and went out on to a suburban rooftop to protect the Ukrainian capital.
In fact, the brigade is largely staffed by volunteers with legal backgrounds. “We have 10 MPs and more than 50 judges,” says Serhiy Sas, 67, the brigade’s commander and himself a former judge on Ukraine’s constitutional court. “At the beginning of the full-scale invasion, we realised that if Kyiv fell there would be no parliament, no courts, and we would be the first people rounded up by the Russians. We needed to protect ourselves.”
In the almost three years since that invasion, more than 12,300 civilians have been killed in the war, a UN official said on Wednesday, noting higher casualties in recent months amid the use of drones, long-range missiles and glide bombs.
The part-time drone hunters model themselves on the volunteer British units that defended London during the Blitz. Dissecting a downed Shahed in the Mriya Brigade’s oily workshop, Sas rips at the tough fabric that protects the drones from glancing blows and holds up a Bosch component — evidence of Russia’s success at avoiding sanctions. “We aim for the drone’s engine or its explosives. That’s the only way to ensure it gets destroyed,” he says.
Outside Kyiv, helicopters can machinegun Shaheds out of the sky or drone pilots can crash quadcopters into them, but the risk of collateral damage is too high among the high-rise apartments of the capital.
Another way of stopping the Shaheds reaching Kyiv is to trick the drones into returning to Russia or divert them into Belarus, a technique known as spoofing that involves transmitting false GPS co-ordinates.
Despite the surge in Shahed attacks, Ukraine’s interception rate, which exceeded 90 per cent last month, remains remarkably high for a country where judges wielding antique machineguns are a vital part of the capital’s air defences.
On the wall in Sas’s office, a classified map of Kyiv shows the positions of the drone-hunters spread out across the city. “Each drone we shoot down is a saved life,” he says. “The challenge is to keep our concentration. All night.”
However, Ukrainians continue to suffer daily Russian attacks, often with casualties if the missiles get through. The latest such attack on the southern city of Zaporizhzhia on Wednesday killed at least 13 civilians and injured about 30 others, officials said. Minutes before the attack, warnings came of high-speed missiles and glide bombs being fired at the city. “There is nothing more brutal than aerial bombing of a city, knowing that ordinary civilians will suffer,” Zelensky wrote on Telegram.
Additional reporting by Vika Sybir.
George Grylls covers defence and politics for The Times. He won the Anthony Howard Award for Young Journalists in 2019.