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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
There is no single view on exactly how the Russians control the drones that attack Kyiv — there are different versions.
Oleksandr Fediyenko, head of the subcommittee on cybersecurity, government communications, and cryptographic information protection of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on National Security, Defense and Intelligence, said that the Russians might control drones during attacks not from their own territory but using stationary transmitters placed in Kyiv by recruited local residents.
Serhiy (Flesh) Beskrestnov, a presidential advisor on an unpaid basis, also wrote that the Shahed that 4 hit the SBU building in Kyiv in September was guided online via a radio retransmitter that a Russian agent switched on briefly within a radius of up to 5 km during the attack.
LB.ua collected opinions to find out whether such transmitters really exist in Kyiv, whether drones are controlled from Belarus, what role artificial intelligence and ground reconnaissance play in Russian drone attacks, and what is happening with the effectiveness of electronic warfare (EW) tools.
UAV “Geran-4 Seeker”
Are saboteur transmitters present in the city
The presence of retransmitters in Kyiv is possible — the Russians periodically recruit Ukrainians and can pass along such equipment, Fediyenko told LB.ua: “By the way, you don’t even need to hand it over; you can buy it online, many sell it from downed ‘Shaheds.’ Then, using instructions, you can perform the necessary steps and install such a retransmitter.”
The parliamentarian notes that not many of these devices are needed across the city but does not give a concrete number. They do not require any specific conditions to use, Fediyenko says: “You need power from an outlet, a required internet connection, and preferably an upper floor of a multi-story building. It’s desirable that the windows face toward Chernihiv.”
Fediyenko confirmed that the committee is discussing the problem of transmitters in the city and there are ideas for detecting and blocking them, but that is classified information.
Serhiy “Flesh” Beskrestnov recently demonstrated on video that mesh retransmitters can be quite small, and such a device can be placed in an apartment, a car, or even a backpack.
At the same time, Anatoliy Khrapchynskyi, an aviation expert, director of development at a defense enterprise, and a reservist officer of the Air Force, told LB.ua that he does not believe the story about improvised retransmitters on residential buildings in Kyiv: “This very much resembles the mass psychosis of searching for and rubbing out markings on the pavement at the start of the full-scale invasion. Complex digital communications require height, radio line-of-sight, and appropriate power, and any such antenna in a dense urban environment is not only ineffective but is immediately direction-finded by radio-technical reconnaissance assets.”
Anatoliy Khrapchynskyi
In his view, there is no point in this because the city already has a ready civilian infrastructure for that. The modern architecture of mobile communications can be used by the enemy to transmit telemetry or correct routes using ordinary modems.
“Up to 70% of all 3G and 4G LTE equipment historically in Ukrainian operators consists of Chinese platforms Huawei and ZTE. Yes, Ukraine’s joining the Clean Network initiative and the future deployment of 5G is based exclusively on European solutions from Nokia and Ericsson, but that does not in any way prevent any SIM card from operating on the existing 4G network or being in international roaming, transmitting data packets over the standard internet,” Khrapchynskyi says.
Is it possible to detect foreign devices
Detecting any such equipment if someone tries to install it is not only possible — it is standard daily work, and there are sufficient technical tools for this, Khrapchynskyi says: “We have a well-established system of radio frequency monitoring: specialists from UDCR (Ukrainian State Radio Frequency Center) together with the State Service of Special Communications and the relevant units of the security services possess a powerful fleet of modern radio control equipment. These are not only stationary radio direction-finders scanning the air around the clock but also special mobile laboratories based on vehicles equipped with high-precision direction-finding complexes and spectrum analyzers.”
He says that recording the appearance of an unauthorized signal, an unlicensed frequency, or suspicious radio exchange in the city and localizing the source literally to a specific window or roof can be done in a matter of tens of minutes.
For a retransmitter to make sense, Khrapchynskyi notes, it must be brought out into open space, to a dominant height, provided with constant power and active radio emission. For any hostile agent or recruited resident, that means a one hundred percent and almost instantaneous arrest.
“If you place a transmitter in an apartment, reinforced concrete walls and PVC windows will cut most of the signal energy, turning the device into useless metal for a drone in the sky, but in the radio spectrum it will still shine like a Christmas tree,” Khrapchynskyi explains.
Therefore, in his opinion, the Russians do not waste resources on such senseless schemes, but use tall masts beyond our reach and an aerial echelon.
Coordination from Belarus
President Volodymyr Zelensky reported that retransmitters operating on Belarusian territory that help coordinate Russian drone attacks were active on 19 June. He gave Oleksandr Lukashenko a week to remove them — otherwise, he said, Ukraine would do so. Later the president reported that on 22 June, according to reports from then-Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi, the retransmitters ceased operating. However, in early October on the air of the 24 channel, State Border Guard spokesman Andriy Demchenko said that these retransmitters are again being used by the Russians to transmit and amplify signals.
26 August 2026 year explosive ordnance disposal specialists recovered fragments of a “Geran-4” drone in the Holosiivskyi district of Kyiv
Oleksandr Fediyenko notes that given the flight altitude of a Shahed of 3000–6000 m and the distance to the border with Belarus, Belarusian transmitters can reach all of Kyiv. That is, there is no particular need for transmitters in the city.
In Anatoliy Khrapchynskyi’s view, the real and systemic threat is not spy transmitters on apartment building roofs but stationary base towers on Belarusian territory and their linkage with aerial retransmitters, which form a military mesh architecture resistant to external factors across the whole Kyiv direction.
For this the Russians do not need secret military cosmodromes or special camouflage. They use ordinary civilian infrastructure: Beltelecom’s tall masts, cellular operator towers, or border outpost masts, the expert says.
“To the casual eye, a sector antenna of mesh communications at that height looks like standard mobile operator equipment, so visually it is perfectly masked as ordinary civilian telecom,” he says.
Khrapchynskyi believes Russian drones move along the border with Belarus not to create an illusion or distract Ukrainians from searching for retransmitters across Kyiv — he calls that version outright conspiracy theory. They fly in the border zone because at minimal distance from Belarusian towers the drones have an ideal signal level for updating flight tasks. It’s also the use of the border as a living shield, because our air defense and mobile strike groups find it extremely difficult to work on targets right next to the border.
“Any interception where fragments of a downed UAV or our anti-aircraft missile fall on the Belarusian side creates for Moscow a convenient informational and political basis for provocations and for drawing the Belarusian army into open hostilities. The enemy perfectly calculates this, using the neighbor’s airspace as a protected corridor,” Khrapchynskyi notes.
How EW effectiveness is changing
Electronic warfare means are only one of the tools of comprehensive air defense, not a magical panacea or a guaranteed shield that can independently foil any attack, the expert explains.
“EW works against radio frequencies — it suppresses satellite navigation or severs the link between the operator and the onboard system. But radio waves cannot affect silicon, optics, or the mathematical algorithms embedded in the onboard computer,” he says.
The Atlas complex, which includes the PEP system MS Azimuth and the EW Mirage
To neutralize our influence in the radio spectrum at the terminal phase of an attack, the Russians use automatic target acquisition technology via machine vision — this was first done on tactical loitering munitions like Lancets. Now visual navigation by terrain landmarks and final optical terminal guidance are used on heavy strike UAVs as well.
In practice this fundamentally changes the rules of the game, Anatoliy Khrapchynskyi says. If a drone approaches a target, obtains optical contact, and locks onto the contrasting silhouette of a building, tank, or transformer, it switches to a fully autonomous self-guidance mode on the “fire-and-forget” principle.
“At that second even the most powerful object-level EW becomes a bystander, because the UAV no longer needs a satellite or a radio channel with a base in Belarus — it completes the attack using internal mathematical calculations. That is why countering such solutions solely with jamming is impossible: physical destruction of airframes on the approaches to cities again comes to the fore,” the expert says.
As former serviceman of the UAV battalion of the 59-th assault brigade of the Forces of UAVs Oleksandr Karpyuk (Serg Marco) notes on his Facebook page, the main drone control module for Geran-4 and Geran-5 is the CRPA module “Kometa” on 32 antennas. In his view, “there is no longer talk that our EW can block ‘kometas’ and prevent drones and missiles from understanding where they are.”
Karpyuk says one problem is the neglect of installing EW means on aerial drones: “If we jam navigation from the ground, we do it bottom-up and have a limited effect on CRPA. To maximize suppression effectiveness, we must also place jammers with polarization from top to bottom.”
Does local agent network help the Russians
Reconnaissance of targets by Russia-recruited local residents exists, but its real role is often confused with cinematic clichés, Anatoliy Khrapchynskyi says.
“Nobody is placing physical ‘beacons’ on roofs and nobody will: modern air attack means are guided by digital flight maps, inertial units, and satellite navigation, so a target is determined by mathematical coordinates, not radio markers on a fence,” the expert says.
Consequences of the strike by a “Geran-4” drone on the Epicenter in Kharkiv 17 September 2026 year
Recruited local residents are needed by Russian intelligence solely to verify information. From a satellite image you cannot see whether a workshop is operating now, whether vehicles are moving on-site, or where personnel are located. Agents confirm that the site is active, record access routes, or assess internal damage after an attack when from orbit nothing is visible due to smoke or obstructions.
Often the Russians don’t need to hire agents at all to record the results of strikes, Khrapchynskyi says: “People still film impacts, post footage of fires and our air defense at work in local Telegram chats, from which the enemy within minutes freely takes a ready-made initial report on the effectiveness of its attack.”
Does artificial intelligence in Russian drones complicate countermeasures
Artificial intelligence is not a function of an individual drone; the real challenge is the enemy’s transition to group raids with elements of collective behavior, where AI is tightly integrated into a digital mesh architecture, Anatoliy Khrapchynskyi says.
In this case the strike group begins to act as a single adaptive organism: if the lead drone or a cheap decoy enters an area of active emission from our EW, detects operation of an air defense radar, or comes under anti-aircraft fire, that information is transmitted to the whole group in microseconds.
“Other airframes instantly receive the threat signal, automatically adjust their trajectories, and bypass the detected ambush or covered sector, minimizing their own losses without the direct involvement of an operator,” Khrapchynskyi says.
Trying to shoot down such a digital swarm with outdated methods is losing in reaction speed. Only a network-centric air defense system with distributed interception can effectively counter it.
A UAV-interceptor crew on combat duty
Air defense architecture needs to be based not on isolated disparate complexes but on a single information field, the expert believes. Data from radio-technical reconnaissance stations, mobile radars, and electro-optical posts in such a system are automatically aggregated and in real time distribute target cues to the nearest fire assets.
“When you oppose their swarm with your own distributed network of autonomous interceptor drones, mobile strike groups, and robotic fire modules, the enemy loses the ability to predict our actions. Only such interaction turns the airspace into an environment incompatible with hostile automation, depriving the Russians of the chance to devalue our defense system through software algorithms,” the expert explains.
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