Russia's electronic warriors are switching to 'much more subtle' operations around the frontlines in Ukraine

• Electronic warfare has played an important if less visible role in the war in Ukraine.
• Both sides are using EW to intercept and disrupt the other's communications and coordination.
• As the war has evolved, EW troops on both sides have had to adapt and innovate to remain effective.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, it hoped for a quick campaign. After nearly 300,000 casualties and many humiliating defeats, the Russian military is still struggling to adjust to Ukraine's willingness and ability to fight.

Equipped with Western weapons, the Ukrainian military is now pushing hard in a counteroffensive it launched in the southern and eastern part of the country in June.

But while everyone is paying attention to the rumble of tanks and the buzz of drones, electronic-warfare troops on both sides are taking on more subtle and often risky operations around the frontlines.

The electronic war in Ukraine

The fighting in Ukraine features much more than tanks battles, trench fighting, and missile and drone strikes. Electronic warfare — the use of electronic signals to find, intercept, and jam enemy forces — has been an important element of daily combat.

In September, the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank, released a report on the Ukrainian counteroffensive, scrutinizing the tactical actions by combatants on both sides with the goal of informing assessments of Ukraine's counteroffensive operations.

An important point highlighted in the RUSI report is developments in electronic warfare, an arena where both sides are continuously adapting their tactics, techniques, and procedures to match and counter the innovations of the other side.

"One area of continued Russian adaptation but also improvement is EW. Russian EW has been a major area of investment" and its EW troops "tend to be technically competent," the RUSI report says.

Ukraine's military has been very effective with GPS-guided weapons, including Storm Shadow and SCALP-EG cruise missiles, Guided Multiple Launch Rockets fired by HIMARS launchers, and M982 Excalibur 155 mm artillery shells.

The Russian military's use of electronic warfare is meant to interfere with the signals that guide those weapons as well as with the Ukrainian military's command-and-control and communications. The goal is to protect frontline areas and rear echelons from Ukrainian drones and missiles and to prevent reconnaissance by Ukraine's drones, which are vital to guiding many of those attacks.

Russian EW forces are mostly using updated version of Soviet-designed equipment, which the report says generally has "each type of effector" placed on a single large platform, with formations of those platforms deployed to provide "a range of EW effects."

Ukraine's military appears to have spotted this vulnerability, given its "targeting of specific emitters," which in turn has led Russian electronic-warfare troops to use "much more subtle employment" of their large platforms, such as Zhitel R330-Zh, the RUSI report says.

Ukrainian targeting has also led Russian EW troops to begin putting antennas on lighter platforms or to distribute those antennas to cover more Russian positions. "The channelling of effects through antenna can therefore be carried out by EW suites that are not tied to the emitting signature," the report says.

Russia's military feels it can bear the cost of losing those antennas, but doing so means treating certain electronic-warfare systems — like the Pole-21, an electronic-countermeasures system meant to thwart precision weapons by interfering with their guidance signals — as expendable.

While this is "a transition in progress" rather than a new, uniform approach, a preference to use "systems such as Pole-21 and to treat them as disposable systems in order to provide wide-area protection from [unmanned aerial vehicle] strikes reflects a change in mindset, and how the Russian EW branch is learning from the conflict," the RUSI report says.

That adaptation and Russia's investment in electronic-warfare capabilities is just another indicator that Moscow isn't ready to quit the fight. But Russian troops are not alone in making adjustments. The Ukrainians have been very adept at electronic warfare as well.

Ukraine's military has sought to use EW as well as cyber capabilities to defend against Russian missiles and drones and to enable its troops to be effective at the front. Kyiv has often deployed cyber troops to the frontlines to control the fierce drone fight taking place over the battlefield and to protect Ukrainian infantry and mechanized forces from incoming munitions.

Electronic warfare may not be sexy or even very visible, but it can shape the battlefield in many ways.

Stavros Atlamazoglou is a defense journalist specializing in special operations and Hellenic Army veteran (national service with the 575th Marine Battalion and Army HQ). He has a B.A. from the Johns Hopkins University, an M.A. in strategy, cybersecurity, and intelligence from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and is currently pursuing a Juris Doctor degree from Boston College Law School.