Russia’s Kometa navigation modules, produced by the company VNIIR-Progress, use arrays of small receiving elements called patch antennas to keep satellite navigation working through jamming. They have been found on Geran drones, glide-bomb kits, Iskander-M and Kinzhal missiles and the new Filin cruise missile, according to a database of Russian weapons run by Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, HUR.

The Kremlin is already using Kometa modules with 16-element antenna arrays at scale and is setting up serial production of 20-element arrays, increasing its capability to work out which direction jamming comes from and compensate for it, HUR said Oct. 19.

Shaheds carrying antennas with 32 elements have already been found attacking Kyiv, said Serhii “Flash” Beskrestnov, an electronic-warfare specialist and adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on defense technology.

“The more elements, the more electronic-warfare signal sources the antenna can suppress,” he said in an October post on Telegram.

The larger antennas give Russia an asymmetric advantage by being easier to counter than to install, Beskrestnov said. 

“This race is difficult for us because it is easier for the enemy to increase the number of elements on an antenna than it is for us to add electronic warfare sites,” Beskrestnov said.

Russia’s better-protected drones can fly through Ukraine’s EW shield — one of its most affordable and widespread layers of air defense — leaving more of them to be shot down by costlier options, like interceptor drones, jets and missiles.

A Kometa module’s resistance to jamming depends on the number and arrangement of its patch antennas, the receiving elements on the array, and on the algorithm its processing chip uses to separate the satellite signal from interference, HUR said.

Drones carrying the upgraded antennas can still be taken out by jamming more satellite bands at once or by networking devices to feed drones false coordinates, defense leaders say.

The commander of Ukraine’s Night Watch unit, who goes by the call sign Alkhimik, bought a 32-element antenna taken from a Shahed, “that had crashed and was being sold on the secondary market,” he told Militarnyi in July. 

He discovered that the device was simply two 16-element arrays covering different satellite-navigation bands put together, he said, giving him inspiration on how to counter it.

“By creating two systems — one operating in the L1 band and the other covering L2/L5 — we’ll be able to jam this antenna without any problems,” Alkhimik said.

Spoofing works, too, according to Fly Group Ukraine. It links multiple devices into a network to feed a drone false coordinates, Anatoliy Khrapchynskyi, the defense company’s director of development, told Reuters in September.

“The drone continues to think it is flying toward its target, but its own autopilot, relying on the false coordinates, gradually changes course on its own and steers the craft away from cities into safe areas,” he said.

Russian defense firms have ordered more than 100,000 Kometa modules in various configurations this year to guide cruise and ballistic missiles, strike drones and guided bombs, HUR said, a measure of demand for the technology.

Kyiv communications-equipment maker CODE380 developed the D·Vision SDR, which uses a software-defined radio (SDR) to sweep frequencies from 500 megahertz to 8.7 gigahertz for drone signals and convert them into video, reducing common visibility problems and allowing easy software updates for new drone specs.

The D-Vision SDR scans its frequency range without “blind spots” and offers greater sensitivity than competing detectors, the developers told the Ukrainian tech outlet DOU on Oct. 17.

The receiver joins a growing set of cheap, passive Ukrainian drone sensors that listen for threats without emitting a signal that could give away a unit’s position, working alongside radar, acoustic sensors and interceptors rather than replacing them. 

CODE380’s device can display analog video from drones up to 6 miles (10 kilometers) away on frequencies between 540 megahertz and 6 gigahertz, and from 2 to 3 miles (3.5 to 5 kilometers) away on higher frequencies, according to manufacturer figures reported by Militarnyi.

Analog drones broadcast their camera feed unencrypted, so a receiver tuned to the right frequency can show a unit where an attack is heading and what the pilot is aiming at before impact.

The receiver’s sweep covers the 4.1 to 4.5 gigahertz band where Russia’s Molniya strike drones began sending video in June, according to Serhii “Flash” Beskrestnov, presidential adviser and radio specialist.

“Most detectors don’t see these frequencies, or see them poorly,” he wrote in June. “I’m warning you so that trust in a detector doesn’t cost you your life.”

The D-Vision SDR is not the first Ukrainian receiver to tap drone video, but its receiver weighs less than half as much as its main domestic rivals at roughly 10 ounces (290 grams).

Babai’s roughly 2-pound (0.9-kilogram) Vydun 7.5 intercepts analog video up to 7.5 gigahertz, while Contra-drone’s 21-ounce (600-gram) SENSE-4 reaches 8.2 gigahertz and BlueBird Tech’s Chuyka 3.0, which weighs up to 23 ounces (650 grams), can now be upgraded to 8.8 gigahertz, according to manufacturers.

Many receivers struggle to decode digital video, detect Mavic-compatible signals beyond a few miles, and pick up fiber-optic drones guided by cables. 

Drone variants are already being designed with harder-to-hack video feeds, Beskrestnov said, pointing out Russia’s Molniyas as an example.

“We need to be ready for digital video to one day fully replace analog,” he wrote, warning that portable detectors and fixed analog receiving stations would then become ineffective.

Fire Point, the Ukrainian company leading the project, is building the FP-7.X interceptor and its launcher while partners such as Norway’s Kongsberg and Germany’s Diehl Defence are responsible for developing parts that find, track and guide the missile to its target.

“Ukraine has done what it was supposed to do, and that is good news,” Zelenskyy told journalists Oct. 17. “As for what the partners are supposed to do, you know that there are ten participating countries, and they are in the process.”

The push comes as Ukraine runs short of costly Patriot interceptors and Russia fields faster weapons, including jet-powered Shahed drones, forcing Kyiv to spend scarce antiballistics on both drones and increasingly large missile barrages. 

Russia has fired more than 100 ballistic missiles at Kyiv and the surrounding region in the past two weeks after launching nearly 3,500 jet-powered drones across Ukraine in September, Zelenskyy said, quoting air force figures. 

Civilian casualties from January through September ran 59% higher than a year earlier, according to the U.N.

“People work on systems like this for decades. We want it very fast, because there is no time,” Zelenskyy said about the new antiballistic system.

Freyja is designed to end Kyiv’s dependence on the Patriot and provide Europe with its own antiballistic capability. However, now that Ukraine has delivered the system’s base elements, one of the program’s most demanding phases – fitting European sensors, seekers and fire-control systems to a Ukrainian interceptor – hinges on partners’ pace of development. 

Fire Point had already begun “the most intense and also the most complicated stage” of final assembly with specially designed radars and seekers from other countries, capping an overall effort to “squeeze a [antiballistics development] program that usually takes 20 or 30 years into a matter of a couple of years,” chief executive Iryna Terekh said in August. 

Ukrainian officials consider the Patriot their only reliable defense against ballistic missiles, but the U.S.-Israel war with Iran has drained an estimated two-thirds of America’s prewar PAC-3 interceptor stock.

The missiles are also expensive and slow to arrive. A PAC-3 interceptor costs roughly $3.8 million, takes years to deliver, and can get held up in licensing talks or delivery issues.

Fire Point unveiled Freyja in May to end that dependence, offering Kyiv and its allies an interceptor they can build and deploy independently.

Ukraine and nine European partners, including France, Germany and the United Kingdom, officially launched Freyja’s coalition in Paris on July 13.

“Europeans themselves will be able to decide how many systems Europe needs and where they should be deployed,” Zelenskyy said at the launch. Poland joined the cohort in September, and Canada is “ready to contribute its technologies,” Zelenskyy said after meeting Prime Minister Mark Carney Sept. 10, according to the presidential office.

Under a June agreement with Germany’s Hensoldt, Fire Point is the prime contractor and design authority, and Hensoldt supplies the radars, such as the TRML-4D, which the company says can track roughly 1,500 air targets.

A preliminary design shared by Fire Point co-founder Denys Shtilerman on X in May pairs the FP-7.X with a long-range radar from Sweden’s Saab, France’s Thales or Hensoldt, a fire-control radar from Denmark’s Weibel or Italy’s Leonardo, and a command center from Kongsberg, maker of the NASAMS systems Ukraine already uses.

The system would tie into Ukraine’s wider air-defense network over NATO’s Link 16 standard, connect its radars through the Asterix protocol and use a two-way data link to correct the interceptor’s course in flight, according to the slides. 

European partners will supply that data link and the command center, Reuters reported in June. Most of the system’s components are designed to be interchangeable.

The system’s seeker remains the bottleneck, Terekh told The War Zone, adding that Fire Point is integrating Diehl’s infrared seeker and developing other options with two unnamed partners.

“If we look at everything but the seeker, our production is already ready, even for mass production,” she said. “Even the seeker manufacturers are doing this for the first time in such an integration.”

The first FP-7.X will use a blast-fragmentation warhead, closer to the older PAC-2 than the hit-to-kill PAC-3, and intercept at roughly 12 to 16 miles (20 to 25 kilometers) up, Terekh told Janes in July. A hit-to-kill version will follow.

Fire Point aims to produce at least 2,000 interceptors a year for under $1.2 million (€1 million) each, though Terekh said that price would come “probably not from the first iterations, but definitely in serial production.”

Frejya’s next technical milestones depend on European partners.

“If, for example, every European government starts moving swiftly, we can do interceptors by the end of this year,” Fire Point’s Shtilerman said. The company is aiming for battlefield use next July.

In Oslo last week, Zelenskyy, Norwegian Defense Minister Tore Sandvik and Kongsberg chief executive Eirik Lie identified where work “can and must be accelerated to begin testing by the end of this year,” Ukraine’s presidential office reported.

“Fortunately for Europe and for Ukraine itself, we have Fire Point,” EU Defense and Space Commissioner Andrius Kubilius said Oct. 17, according to UNN, adding that its work on ballistic missiles and Freyja “could become a huge change.”

Diesel averaged $6.35 a gallon on Monday, just below the record $6.53 set in September, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

The economy is the top issue heading into the Nov. 3 midterms, with 84% of registered voters calling it “very important” to their vote and 54% saying the same of energy policy, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted Sept. 28 to Oct. 4.

“The president decided to pin this problem not on Putin, but on me. Explaining to his people that because of this, diesel prices in America are going up. That is completely untrue,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said of Trump’s recent claims that Ukraine’s attacks on Russian refineries were to blame for the price increases.

Trends in federal data back up the Ukrainian president, showing that the steep initial rise in diesel prices followed the start of the Iran war — not Ukrainian strikes on Russian production infrastructure.

U.S. diesel stayed below $3.90 a gallon from August 2025 until the U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran began Feb. 28, then jumped nearly 25% in a week to $4.86, according to the Energy Information Administration.

“This crisis has its roots in the Middle East. Everyone understands that perfectly well. Everyone knows how to do the math,” Zelenskyy said on Oct. 12, quoting his remarks to the Warsaw Security Forum. “If Russia accounts for 2.2% of global diesel supplies, what impact can it have on the price? That’s how negligible it is.”

Even Moscow’s senior officials agree.

“The key guarantee of full stabilization of this market is the speediest normalization of the situation around the Persian Gulf, overcoming the conflict around Iran,” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Georgy Borisenko told reporters Oct. 12.

The International Energy Agency confirmed in an Oct. 14 report that easing Russia’s diesel export ban is unlikely to materially change global supplies because Russia lacks the working refinery capacity.

Critics of the deal

The diesel sales will barely move American prices before the vote, but the deal would benefit Russia disproportionately and cost Kyiv one of its few levers against the Kremlin, according to the Institute for the Study of War and the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center.

The current situation gives Moscow deeper diplomatic ties with Washington — economic cooperation that continues despite Russia’s attacks on Ukraine’s more vulnerable energy grid — as well as more money for its war chest and the prospect that U.S. pressure will halt Ukraine’s strikes on its refineries that help fund the war, experts at both institutions said.

“The diesel agreement gives Putin an opportunity to advance economic cooperation with Washington before any settlement in Ukraine,” Carnegie senior fellow Tatiana Stanovaya wrote on Oct. 14. “Economic agreements can coexist with unchanged demands on Ukraine and continued military pressure.”

The Kremlin is also using the deal to win U.S. support for its negotiating position with Ukraine, part of a recurring effort to offer Washington economic incentives it claims are unrelated to the war “in order to extract concessions from the U.S. regarding the war,” ISW said.

Critics in Kyiv and Washington, including members of Trump’s own party, warn the deal will put more oil money in Russian hands and disproportionately impact Ukraine. Zelenskyy told the Warsaw Security Forum that the country has “just one oil refinery,” while Russia has 32 major refineries, according to the International Energy Agency.

Four Republican and three Democratic senators urged the Trump administration Oct. 11 to “immediately reverse course,” saying in a joint statement that “the United States should not provide Putin with a financial lifeline while Russia continues to kill Ukrainian civilians.”

Two days later, 12 senators from both parties, including Republicans Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and John Cornyn, R-Texas, wrote to Trump in a letter that the deal will have “a negligible impact on fuel prices” and “is a gift to our adversary and a betrayal of our Allies.”

“Putin is looking for a way to get the United States to pressure Ukraine to stop striking those refineries,” Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., wrote the day the deal was announced.

Not enough to offset losses

Ukraine’s strikes have taken some Russian diesel off the market.

Russian diesel production fell by nearly 30% as attacks on refineries intensified, the International Energy Agency said in a Sept. 17 analysis.

The estimated gross value of Russia’s seaborne crude shipments hit a wartime high of $2.76 billion this week, up roughly $430 million from the week before, Bloomberg reported. 

No strikes on Russian refineries were reported last week, and the lull has allowed Moscow to boost processing rates, likely diverting crude that would otherwise have been exported, the outlet reported.

But the Gulf’s losses are far larger. Diesel exports from the region dropped to 390,000 barrels a day in August, just over a quarter of prewar levels, according to International Energy Agency figures.

Russia’s promised deliveries won’t close that gap.

The first shipment equals just about 2% of U.S. diesel demand over a month, CNBC reported. Goldman Sachs estimated the first two months of deliveries would cut wholesale prices on the U.S. Gulf Coast by just $1 to $2 a barrel, or roughly 2 to 5 cents a gallon.

“Now we can see how cash will start flowing back into Russia through the diesel deal,” Zelenskyy told reporters at a European Union summit in Brussels on Oct. 16, according to Reuters.

“This diesel deal will never be enough to offset the impact of the Strait of Hormuz on global markets. But it will put more money straight into Putin’s pocket to fund this war.”

Trump eased sanctions on Russian diesel after an Oct. 9 call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, saying in a Truth Social post that Russia would supply hundreds of thousands of tons of diesel fuel “immediately” and that diesel prices would come down “IN RECORD NUMBERS, AND FAST!”

The same day, U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner told Ukrainian negotiators in Miami that the White House hoped the diesel deal would soften Moscow’s stance on peace talks. Witkoff met Putin for in-person negotiations last week for the ninth time since February 2025.

Kyiv offered to refrain from striking Russian refineries if Moscow stopped hitting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, Zelenskyy said Oct. 11.

Ukraine paused refinery strikes at Trump’s request, but Russia kept hitting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, prompting Kyiv to resume its own counterattacks, Zelenskyy told the Financial Times on Oct. 15.

“We’re done,” he said.

Within days of Trump’s sanction announcement, Ukrainian officials accused Washington of pressuring Kyiv to capitulate by withholding missile warnings and throttling the military’s essential Starlink connectivity, intelligence that Zelenskyy said “helps save people’s lives.”

Trump denied any interruption in missile warnings or Starlink service, but Ukrainian officials have stood by their account, prompting Zelenskyy to say he felt betrayed by the U.S.

Both have since been restored, Zelenskyy said Saturday, but Russia’s attacks have not let up.

Russia fired 16 ballistic missiles and more than 280 drones at Ukraine overnight Monday into Tuesday, targeting “energy, logistics and ordinary urban infrastructure” almost everywhere, Zelenskyy said.

The barrage came as the U.N. Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine concluded that Russian authorities had committed war crimes and crimes against humanity through attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure.

The extent of the drone war is underestimated, with Ukraine and Russia each using roughly 10,000 drones a day, the former CIA director and onetime commander of U.S. Central Command said, speaking at an American Primary Aluminum Association event in Washington.

“This is an unmanned systems war,” Petraeus said. “Tanks aren’t survivable there anymore.”

For Ukraine, drones and unmanned weapons have become central to how the country has leveraged a smaller, outgunned force against a much larger, better-financed adversary for almost five years.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy ordered the creation of a new Unmanned Systems Forces military branch in 2024, and the Defense Ministry has said time and again that developing more autonomous weapons is a top priority.

But for the rest of the world, Petraeus said, the fighting in Ukraine is a window into the future and a warning about the dangers of being underprepared for the battles to come.

“Really, no NATO country and not even the United States is undertaking yet the urgent revolutionary institutional change that should be taken based on what we see in Ukraine, which is the future of war,” he said.

The U.S. needs a new concept of warfare that runs through force structure, training, procurement, personnel policy and bases, the general said, replacing much of the legacy, heavily manned equipment with unmanned systems that are cheaper and far more numerous.

“What’s going to happen is we’ll see the introduction of autonomous systems really for the first time in warfare,” Petraeus said.

Washington is making “some commendable steps” toward developing these weapons, according to Petraeus, including establishing a new Autonomous Warfare Command that requires each military branch to stand up its own component command.

“But my hope is that they will not just create an unmanned systems force in terms of force structure, but that they will also spur the initiation of true institutional change,” Petraeus said.

That includes how the U.S. buys weapons, Petraeus said, calling for “very, very substantial manufacturing capacity but not necessarily producing all the time.”

“You want it to be able to make software changes every week, hardware changes every few weeks, which is what’s going on in Ukraine because the enemy continues to evolve and Russia’s been innovating very substantially as well,” he said.

Ukraine will produce as many as 20 million unmanned systems this year, Zelenskyy said in a July speech, with a shortage of trained operators and the acquisition of some weapons components — including optics, gimbals, brushless motors and fiber-optic cable — becoming the domestic industry’s production bottleneck.

The general also rejected the idea that the U.S. war with Iran has hurt Washington’s ability to help Kyiv, though he acknowledged the U.S. has used “a fair number of missile interceptors,” which “makes it more difficult to share those with others around the world.”

The war has consumed between one-half and two-thirds of the U.S. inventory of certain missile-defense interceptors, according to a Congressional Budget Office estimate released in September.

“We can help the Ukrainians in any way in which we decide to assist them,” Petraeus said. “These are policy decisions.”

The Russian satellite, Cosmos 2612, spent more than two weeks maneuvering toward ICEYE-X36, a radar satellite operated by the American arm of Finnish company ICEYE that supplies imagery to Ukraine’s military through some of its spacecraft, then shadowed it from as close as a third of a mile through the weekend of Oct. 17.

U.S. Undersecretary of State Thomas G. DiNanno called the Russian satellite’s behavior “threatening,” and said the country had been “intentionally maneuvering dangerously close to a commercial satellite, behaviors consistent with on-orbit weapons operations.”

Space historian and former NASA astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell said that he believed it is the first rendezvous in low Earth orbit between two active satellites without one owner’s approval.

The close encounter came weeks after Air Force Secretary Troy Meink publicly confirmed that the U.S. has weapons in orbit and the Space Force picked two companies to build space-to-space reconnaissance satellites. It also followed reports that trillionaire Elon Musk — under White House orders — slowed the military-grade Starlink that Ukraine relies on, rendering some of the country’s essential air defense weapons useless.

The operation fits a wider Russian campaign of intimidation against Europe and the U.S. that lets Russian President Vladimir Putin “poke the West in the eye and watch the West do nothing,” according to Clayton Swope, deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“They prove a point – the West can’t stop me,” Swope added Wednesday during a CSIS panel on the encounter.

As the U.S. and its allies increasingly rely on commercial capabilities for national security, key assets like satellites have “become vulnerabilities that can be exploited by our adversary,” according to Greg Gillinger, senior vice president of strategy and development at Virginia-based Integrity ISR, who also spoke on the CSIS panel.

The impact of a possible satellite attack could reach well beyond one company or country, since commercial satellites now carry much of the imagery and connectivity militaries fight with, experts said. Musk’s Starlink slowdown in Ukraine showed how quickly a military force can suffer when that access is throttled without notice — and how easily local geopolitical conflicts can explode into global security crises.

On Oct. 12, commercial trackers feeding the U.S. military’s Joint Commercial Operations cell flagged the possible rendezvous when Cosmos 2612 slid into ICEYE-X36’s orbit roughly 345 miles above Earth, according to Integrity ISR’s newsletter.

On Oct. 15 and 16, the Russian satellite moved from more than 200 miles behind ICEYE-X36 to roughly 3 miles away before moving in closer and holding position through the weekend, tracking firm LeoLabs said in a statement reported by CNN.

Both satellites travel at roughly 4 miles (7 kilometers) per second, so getting two objects “within a hundred meters or even a kilometer” of each other is “the equivalent of flying in a very tight formation in an aircraft,” Gillinger said.

“Russia didn’t accidentally get within a kilometer of X36,” he said. “It is an indication of intent that they’re sending a message.”

ICEYE, whose radar satellites see through clouds, smoke and darkness, expanded cooperation with Ukraine’s military, pledging continued imagery “on tactical timelines,” according to a January statement. However, the company has not confirmed which of its satellites serve Kyiv.

Moscow has warned since the first year of its full-scale invasion that Western commercial satellites helping Ukraine could become legitimate military targets.

ICEYE said it is “aware of the situation and tracking it closely” and that its “constellation architecture is designed for continuity and resilience,” a spokesperson told Air & Space Forces Magazine earlier this week.

Russia’s intent behind the satellite maneuvers remains unclear. According to LeoLabs, an American space technology company, possible aims range from intelligence collection and close inspection to coercion and groundwork for future operations against satellites.

The maneuvers demonstrated capabilities that could be used to “inspect, characterize, shadow, or potentially interfere with another spacecraft,” though they “do not establish hostile intent,” the company said.

Analysts could not yet say whether Moscow planned an attack and then reversed course, or was orbiting nearby for another purpose entirely.

Russia could have been doing “a dry run” for a future attack, or the satellite could have been carrying a weapon, from a jammer to a laser to a projectile, Swope explained.

“Was the intent to blow up the satellite? No,” he said. “Was the intent to put some type of energy on the satellite? Probably… I don’t know why you’d need to maneuver in this way, this close, unless you wanted to do something that involved putting energy on that satellite.”

The Russian satellite has since pulled back, but not far.

It was again flying at ICEYE-X36’s altitude on Wednesday, holding roughly 250 miles (400 kilometers) behind it, and could “easily close that gap again at the time and place of their choosing,” Gillinger said.

Russia could try to approach another ICEYE satellite within weeks, as two more satellites from the same launch will soon line up with the orbit of a second satellite, ICEYE-X37, according to Integrity ISR.

If they move in, “we could see another scenario where another commercial satellite is closely trailed by one of these Russian satellites,” Gillinger said.

The retreat began Oct. 18, two days after President Donald Trump signed an executive order waiving tariffs and most economic restrictions on Russia.

Swope said Trump’s move to ease sanctions “could have been a reason why Putin said, ‘You know, now’s not the time to exacerbate tensions specifically with the United States. Maybe we should pause this operation.’”

“If you’re getting close to a deal on something, why jeopardize that?” he said.

The potential for a conflict in space has been growing in recent months.

Washington “appears to lack response options” if Russia threatened U.S. military and commercial satellites with a nuclear weapon in orbit, according to the conclusions from a 2025 war-game scenario where fictional Russian space objects threatened American interests.

There is no public indication that Cosmos 2612 carries a nuclear weapon, but Swope said that there is also still no internationally recognized rule for determining if a maneuver like this one should be considered hostile — or what international standards should be followed in a response.

“Even though we all can make a good case on why this was [hostile], there’s no norm that you could point to,” he said.

Without a clear response plan or real consequences for aggression, menacing satellite moves like this one are “literally just a spigot that Russia could turn on and off” to increase pressure on adversaries, Swope said.

Russia, he added, “is going to turn it on again.”

U.S. President Donald Trump has so far denied that there had been any interruption in Starlink connectivity or incoming missile warnings — the two forms of American intelligence that Ukrainian officials say are no longer flowing freely to Kyiv.

The crisis comes just days after Trump told allies that the U.S. would ease sanctions on Russian diesel last week during peace talks in Miami. He then reportedly threatened to cut off intelligence and weapons sales to Kyiv if it kept striking Russia’s oil infrastructure, according to CNN.

“Ukraine did not strike Russian oil refining and the energy sector in general for two days after the American President announced a ceasefire in the energy sector. But Russia did not listen,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Tuesday.

“Unfortunately, there was a ballistic missile strike on Kyiv yesterday, and there was no warning from our partners regarding this attack. Usually, such a warning is provided, and it is a crucial factor that aids our defense.”

Partner intelligence is an indispensable asset for Kyiv, which relies on NATO and especially U.S. information for both offensive and defensive operations. Curtailing that relationship could cost civilian lives along with the virtual stalemate Ukraine has managed to establish along the frontline, according to Ukrainian officials.

“Intelligence data on the launch of Russian ballistic missiles helps save people’s lives, and this is one of the most critical issues. This is what helps prevent people being killed when there is a warning about ballistics,” Zelenskyy said on Telegram.

On Sunday, Trump announced an energy ceasefire between Kyiv and Moscow — without the confirmation of either party, officials from both countries said.

Ukraine initially resisted Trump’s push to spare Russia’s oil network, repeating that it would stop hitting refineries only if Moscow stopped striking Ukrainian power plants. After Trump declared an “energy ceasefire” that Moscow never accepted, Kyiv held its fire for three days. Russia, however, did not.

Kyiv residents heard at least five powerful explosions Sunday night before air-raid sirens sounded.

Rumors immediately circulated that the missing alert stemmed from a disruption in partner intelligence, but officials initially urged people not to jump to conclusions.

“You can call me an optimist, but I don’t believe (I don’t want to believe) that the United States will leave us without this information,” presidential adviser and communications expert Serhii “Flash” Beskrestnov wrote Monday on Telegram, noting that Ukraine still relies on partners for reports of ballistic missile launches.

“Because it’s about the survival of civilians,” he wrote.

But when more missiles and drones struck Kyiv the following day, mainly targeting energy infrastructure and the power grid, reports began surfacing across the country that strike drones, interceptors and frontline vehicles were losing connection above roughly 100 mph (160 km/h), units across the country reported.

By Wednesday, multiple officials confirmed that Elon Musk’s SpaceX had restricted Starshield, the military version of its Starlink service, without notice, just as Kyiv struggles against faster Russian jet drones, larger ballistic and cruise missile barrages and a global shortage of missile interceptors.

“This complicates UAV missions, particularly those involving interceptors and mid-range strike drones, and hampers capabilities for frontline logistics, reconnaissance, and signal relay,” the Ministry of Defense said in a statement on Wednesday.

Zelenskyy ended the pause on hitting Russian energy facilities on Wednesday after Kremlin forces kept striking Ukraine’s grid days after Trump declared a ceasefire.

“We’re done,” he told the Financial Times after making the decision.

Russia began using the jets heavily in July, when their numbers jumped fivefold from the previous month. They can now reach speeds of up to 373 mph (600 km/h) — more than three times the speed of the propeller-driven Geran-2 drones they evolved from — far exceeding the top velocity of the average Ukrainian interceptor drone, air force officials told lawmakers last week.

To stop the drones, Ukraine must instead rely on F-16s, newly installed machine gun turrets that use artificial intelligence to aim and costly air-defense missiles that are in short supply globally.

“Ukraine did not strike Russian oil refining and the energy sector in general for two days after the American president announced a ceasefire in the energy sector. But Russia did not listen to the American president,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote after jets seriously damaged a gas production facility in the northeastern Kharkiv region on Sunday night.

Russia launched 167 missiles and drones overnight Tuesday into Wednesday, including 77 jet-powered drones, which officials said struck one of Kyiv’s main power plants and left 600,000 without power.

Ukraine’s Air Force says they are beginning to field more effective countermeasures, but with Russia continuing to optimize the design of jet-powered drones to destroy critical infrastructure, the development of jets and anti-jet interceptors has become the latest neck-and-neck technology race on the battlefield.

Iran shipped Russia its first Shahed-131 and Shahed-136 drones in mid-August 2022, and Moscow rebranded them the Geran-1 and Geran-2 and was firing them at Ukrainian civilian infrastructure by that October.

Those propeller-driven drones were slow enough for Ukraine to build an economical defense around mobile fire teams and cheap interceptor drones rather than spending scarce missiles on every Shahed, and in February the interceptors accounted for more than 70% of Shahed downings over Kyiv.

The jet-powered Gerans are outrunning that defense, and Russia has since stopped building the slower Geran-3 and ramped up production of the Geran-4, which cruises at 217 to 311 mph (350 to 500 km/h), and the missile-shaped Geran-5, which carries a 90-kilogram (198-pound) warhead, Militarnyi reported in August, citing Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, known as HUR.

“The Geran-5 flies 150km/h faster than the Geran-4, so the goal is to intercept from the front rather than the rear — a much harder problem to solve,” an engineer at a Ukrainian defense contractor told the Kyiv Independent.

And they are still getting faster, with the Air Force projecting speeds of 500 to 560 mph (800 to 900 km/h), though none have been recorded yet, its deputy commander, Col. Yurii Cherevashenko, told a parliamentary commission Oct. 6.

A Geran-4 version Russia began flying this autumn is built to take out infrastructure, navigating by a U.S.-made magnetometer and an optical system and carrying a new warhead designed to cut bridges and power line supports, HUR said in an Oct. 5 statement.

The new 88-pound (40-kilogram) warhead “was created specifically to destroy high-voltage pylons and iron bridge structures,” Serhii “Flash” Beskrestnov, an EW expert and adviser to Zelenskyy, wrote on Telegram Sept. 30 when Russia was first spotted using the upgrade on a jet drone.

These optimized Russian jet drones hit Kyiv’s South Bridge, which carries cars and metro trains across the Dnipro River, at least five times on Oct. 1 and 2, once exploding near a pier as a train crossed overhead, then struck the city’s North Bridge on Oct. 3, officials said.

Ukrainian interceptors stopped roughly 90% of the older propeller-driven drones, but against the jets, the interception rate has been significantly lower.

“Initially, we saw a very low interception rate in Ukraine. It then rose to more than 30%, and in recent nights it has increased to over 50%,” Matthias Lehna, vice president of German drone maker Quantum Systems, told Ukrinform last week.

Air force officials reported downing 77% of incoming jet-powered drones on Tuesday night.

Ukraine put its first jet interceptor, the Alexa Spatium, into service only on Aug. 21, and a handful of other prototypes, including Wild Hornets’ STING S and SkyFall’s P1-SUN Jetkiller, have successfully downed a small number of Geran-5s, according to officials speaking to the Kyiv Independent.

Fourteen companies are flight-testing jet interceptors with the Air Force, and three have shown promising results, but the deputy air force commander said officials don’t expect the jet interceptors to be delivered at the scale Ukraine needs until the end of November at the earliest.

Jet drones already make up approximately 40% of the drones Russia launches and the Air Force expects that share to reach up to 80% of total attacks.

The push comes as the world runs short on the weapons Ukraine needs most. U.S. forces in Europe face a “beyond critical” shortage of Patriot interceptors after stocks were moved to the Middle East for the Iran war, a NATO official said in August.

Ukraine is also bracing for another winter of Russian strikes on its energy grid, a campaign that increasingly relies on jet-powered Shahed drones too fast for most of the cheap interceptor drones Ukraine has used to stop older models.

“Russia uses almost only jet-powered Shaheds to attack Kyiv because the interceptors that we were using in the past against older generations of drones had an interception rate of around 90%,” a manager at Ukrainian interceptor developer Grim Tech told Defense News last month.

The faster drones force Ukraine to expend scarce and expensive missiles just as it tries to conserve Patriot ammunition for ballistic threats — the only reliable option against Russia’s even harder-to-stop ballistic missiles, according to Ukrainian officials.

“Ballistic missiles are especially difficult to deal with,” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said after a massive aerial barrage on Wednesday night saw Russia fire 70 missiles, many of them ballistic, and waves of Shahed drones at Kyiv and 12 other regions.

Soldiers downed 39 of the 48 cruise missiles but only five ballistic missiles, according to Ukraine’s air force. At least 32 people were killed in the attacks, and over 100 were injured, Zelenskyy wrote on Telegram.

Civilian casualties in Ukraine have risen monthly throughout most of 2026. U.N. monitors verified 372 civilians killed and 2,349 injured in August, second only to July, with long-range missiles and drones causing 47% of the toll.

Kyiv is assembling a patchwork of antiballistic air defense solutions, each piece on a different clock: Rounds transferred from allied stocks for this winter, imported systems and licensed production that will begin to matter over the next several years, and Freyja, a Ukrainian-European interceptor still in development.

Stockpile swaps

The fastest fix depends on allies sharing existing stockpiles, a request Defense Minister Yevhen Khmara put forward at his first Ukraine Defense Contact Group meeting with allies on Sept. 8.

Kyiv has signed contracts for roughly 1,000 Patriot missiles in recent months, but most will not ship for years, Khmara said.

He asked partners for 300 interceptors from their stockpiles now, offering newer missiles from those contracts as replacements.

“The situation with ballistics is much more difficult. And that difficulty is precisely down to the lack of Patriot missiles,” he told allies.

Germany answered Khmara’s call by promising an undisclosed number of PAC-2 interceptors from Bundeswehr stocks.

Britain committed £100 million through NATO’s Prioritised Ukraine Requirements List (PURL) for Patriot missiles and other air-defense equipment intended to arrive before winter, according to the British government.

But the United States did not include Patriot missiles in the nearly $400 million in expiring Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative money it moved to obligate before the fiscal year ended, a source familiar with the package told Reuters.

Surging production of existing antiballistic interceptors

“Ukraine is ready not only to produce ballistic missile interceptors for its own needs, but also to strengthen the United States and its allies through joint production,” Zelenskyy wrote on X after a recent meeting with a U.S. congressional delegation in Kyiv.

Both Europe and the U.S. are in talks with Ukraine to begin ramping up joint manufacturing initiatives for both the Patriot missile system and the Franco-Italian Aster 30.

Zelenskyy said Sept. 25 that U.S. President Donald Trump made a final political decision to grant Ukraine licenses to produce Patriot missiles. But Washington and manufacturers have not publicly identified the variant, Ukraine’s workshare, production site or first-delivery date.

Lockheed Martin said it aims to raise its own annual PAC-3 MSE capacity from roughly 600 missiles to 2,000 by 2030, while a $14.7 billion Boeing contract would triple production of the interceptor’s seeker.

Germany is scheduled to begin PAC-2 GEM-T production, and Berlin has separately asked Washington and Lockheed Martin to permit PAC-3 MSE production in Germany, but that proposal remains unresolved.

France and Italy agreed in a joint declaration in July to authorize licensed production of Aster 30 interceptors in Ukraine before the end of 2026, along with providing Kyiv with four SAMP/T NG systems — becoming their first combat user.

France also committed two interim SAMP/T complexes, a GF300 radar before year’s end and progressive SAMP/T NG deployment beginning in 2027.

The sovereignty bet: Freyja

Ukraine and Europe are looking to a new weapon called “Frejya” as a longer-term solution.

Freyja is a Ukrainian-designed ballistic interceptor built around Fire Point’s FP-7.X missile, including an interceptor, launcher, radar and command-and-control network.

It’s priced at roughly $1 million per round, about one-quarter of the cost of a PAC-3 MSE, and designed to plug into NATO-standard radars and command posts already in the field.

The FP-7.X flew for the first time in early June and is built to kill ballistic targets at roughly 15 miles up using a high-explosive fragmentation warhead rather than the PAC-3’s hit-to-kill collision — which may come in later versions — at a target price of approximately $700,000 per interceptor, or roughly one-fifth the price of a PAC-3.

The company says it will build three interceptors a day starting in August. Zelenskyy wants the system up and running within a year, and the coalition is targeting its first real ballistic intercept for the end of 2027.

Zelenskyy launched the initiative with nine European countries in Paris in July — and the effort is still growing.

Poland joined the group on Sept. 17, a week after Canadian PM Mark Carney told Zelenskyy that Ottawa would contribute its technologies to Freyja along with providing Kyiv with a broader package that includes C$350 million in interceptors.

The EU is separately weighing direct funding for the program on top of national contributions, according to Militarnyi.

Space Systems Command awarded the prototype contracts to Northrop Grumman and True Anomaly under the Geosynchronous High-Resolution Optical Space-Based Tactical Reconnaissance program, or GHOST-R, on Sept. 18.

The deal pairs a veteran American defense prime with a four-year-old space tech company – both of which are already under contract with the Space Force to develop space-based interceptors for the Pentagon’s Golden Dome missile defense initiative.

“To be able to negate threats in space, we must be able to find, fix, track, and target those threats,” Gen. Stephen Whiting, head of U.S. Space Command, said Sept. 16 at the AMOS Conference in Maui, Hawaii, just days before the announcement.

“Targeting in the space domain is maturing, but it still has a long way to go.”

GHOST-R is meant to address some of these problems by using “commercially developed space vehicles, buses, and electro-optical payloads to deliver high-resolution, space-to-space imagery for characterizing resident space objects in [geostationary Earth orbit] GEO,” according to the command announcement.

The new contracts are the latest major development in the RG-XX program, the Space Force’s next-generation orbital tracking initiative aiming to field a fleet of agile, low-cost reconnaissance satellites in geosynchronous orbit to help build out U.S. defense capacity in space by the end of the decade.

“Collaborating with DIU on GHOST-R is a true force multiplier. We are leveraging rapid prototyping to push the envelope of what commercial tech can deliver to the RG-XX program,” Col. Bryon McClain, acting Portfolio Acquisition Executive (PAE) for Space Combat Power, said in the release.

Northrop will deliver a prototype the size of a “small suitcase” built on its ESPASat-L spacecraft, using a commercial optical sensor, and produced on “an accelerated 24-month timeline.”

“Space is becoming more congested and contested every day, and our joint forces depend on clear, timely insight into what’s happening on orbit,” Ryan Tintner, Northrop’s vice president, said in a company announcement about the deal.

True Anomaly will deliver its Jackal autonomous orbital vehicle and Mosaic command-and-control system, a dynamic operations sensor suite, through the initiative, according to the company’s release.

“As agile, maneuverable adversary platforms become more capable, the reconnaissance architecture can no longer rely on a handful of exquisite assets,” company CEO and co-founder Even Rogers said in the announcement.

Neither the Pentagon nor the companies have so far disclosed the value of the contracts or the source of their funding – although the money did not come from Andromeda, the Space Force’s up to $6.2 billion contract pool for RG-XX, an SSC spokesperson told Breaking Defense.

The new GHOST-R prototypes are set to launch directly to geosynchronous orbit by 2028 and fly government-owned and operated missions by 2029, officials said.