Jens Asbjørn Bøgen
Ukrainian mobile air-defense crews rely on their ears as much as radar to spot incoming Shaheds—and Russia just found a way to go silent on the final stretch.
The sound of an incoming Shahed has been one of the clearest warnings Ukrainian air defense crews get before a long-range Russian strike. That acoustic cue is no longer reliable on every attack.
Russia’s attack drones have added a new trick on the last stretch of their run. The jet engine is switched off, and the drone coasts the final distance to its target in silence.
The adaptation was flagged publicly on Thursday, November 12, by Serhii Beskrestnov, an adviser to Ukraine’s president on defense technologies, who publishes under the call sign “Flash.”
In a public warning addressed to mobile fire groups and air-defense units, Beskrestnov batted down rumors that Russia had bolted a secondary electric motor onto its Shaheds to achieve silent flight.
“There is no such motor, but what does exist is a tactic of shutting down the jet engine before impact,” he said, as reported by UA News.
The jet, he explained, delivers enough acceleration and inertia for the drone to glide the final part of the flight unpowered.
A second tactic: hugging the terrain
Beskrestnov warned defenders of a second pattern his team is now seeing. Shaheds are being routed at extremely low altitudes through corridors where no obstacles stand in their path, so Ukrainian radar cannot pick them up.
He urged mobile fire teams to factor both the silent glide and the low-altitude approach into their defensive playbook. Those teams, pickup-truck-mounted crews with heavy machine guns, shoulder the first line of Ukraine’s drone defense and rely heavily on acoustic and visual cues when radar is blind.
Jet-powered Shaheds dominate the latest attacks
The silent-approach tactic targets what has become Russia’s dominant long-range strike weapon.
Overnight into November 8, Russia launched 164 drones at Ukraine, 112 of them jet-powered variants, the Ukrainian Air Force reported via Ukrainska Pravda. Ukrainian air defense downed or jammed 137, including 88 of the jet-powered drones, a roughly 79 percent intercept rate on the faster variant.
Those rates have been climbing. According to TechTimes, the November 7-8 figure of 78.6 percent on jet Shaheds is up from a 66 percent monthly average in October and 57 percent in September.
Russia is also now fitting electronic-warfare jammers directly onto Shaheds to interfere with the Ukrainian interceptor drones chasing them, the TechTimes report notes.
Russia is estimated to be producing up to 3,000 Geran drones a month.
