For Ukrainian soldiers facing the near-constant threat of Russian drones, a crude-looking, pocketable drone detector has become one of the most sought-after gadgets on the battlefield. Dubbed Tsukorok, or “sugar,” by its London-based creator, the grassroots device produced by a variety of manufacturers beeps loudly when a drone enters its detection range, allowing soldiers time to run to cover or turn on their jamming devices.
For Ukrainian soldiers facing the near-constant threat of Russian drones, a crude-looking, pocketable drone detector has become one of the most sought-after gadgets on the battlefield. Dubbed Tsukorok, or “sugar,” by its London-based creator, the grassroots device produced by a variety of manufacturers beeps loudly when a drone enters its detection range, allowing soldiers time to run to cover or turn on their jamming devices.
“It’s amazing because it is so cheap and simple,” a mortar crewman, currently positioned in the Donbas region, said of the Tsukorok. He, like all soldiers cited in this article, spoke to Foreign Policy on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the press.
More than two years into Russia’s war in Ukraine, the Russian military still enjoys the upper hand in electronic warfare. “The Russians have powerful electronic warfare equipment. … Unfortunately, Russia is significantly ahead of Ukraine,” Ukrainian activist Maria Berlinska told Ukrainska Pravda in April. Berlinska was instrumental in pushing the Ukrainian military to develop its own drone capabilities and has trained soldiers and civilians to fly reconnaissance and attack drones.
On Ukraine’s front line, electronic warfare has largely focused on the ability to use and defend from reconnaissance and strike drones as well as long-range missiles. Small, agile first-person-view (FPV) drones, which can carry between 2 and 11 pounds of explosives, are now used extensively by both sides. The ability to detect and jam the signals sent and received by those drones is a matter of life and death.
The Russian military has successfully used elaborate truck-mounted jamming systems to reduce the effectiveness of Western-made, GPS-guided artillery shells as well as HIMARS and JDAM guided bombs, the Washington Post reported in May. More recently, Moscow has used armored vehicles and tanks mounted with jamming devices to push across the front line.
Now, with the sky on the front line saturated with drones, Ukraine is attempting to catch up. That often means employing simpler, more inexpensive equipment with smaller ranges, such as the Tsukorok, to detect signals coming from Russian drones and other guided weapons. More than 50 Ukrainian companies are engaged in producing electronic warfare equipment, from the humble Tsukorok to expensive jamming devices. Tens of thousands of drones are also produced or assembled in the country every month.
But the detection gadgets are hard to obtain. “Right now, I think the demand [for jamming equipment] is at least 10 times higher than what we can provide,” said Bohdan Danyliv, the head of the military department at the Prytula Foundation, one of the biggest organizations supporting the Ukrainian military. “Honestly, it may be 50 times bigger.” The Prytula Foundation already delivers equipment including SUVs, strike drones, rifle optics, communication, and medical equipment to the armed forces. In recent months, the organization has looked to ramp up deliveries of electronic warfare devices.
“Yes, it’s difficult right now,” said Dmytro Selin, the London-based Ukrainian software engineer behind the first model of the Tsukorok. “Deliveries [of parts for manufacturing] aren’t reliable. Parcels can get stuck for weeks at a time. … Demand is a lot higher than our team can handle.”
Soldiers and the Ukrainian companies producing electronic warfare equipment must also deal with the ever-changing nature of electronic warfare. “Both the technologies and the tactics evolve very quickly,” said Anton Veklenko, the chief instructor and co-founder of Global Drone Academy, a Ukrainian company training Ukrainian civilians and soldiers in the use of military drones and electronic warfare.
Since 2022, electronic warfare has quickly made GPS guidance, which most off-the-shelf consumer drones use to navigate, obsolete. Both sides now deploy drones that act as relays to increase the flying range of their FPV drones to distances of up to 31 miles. Russia and Ukraine have also each experimented with autonomous guidance systems, allowing drones to strike their targets even when their signals jammed.
“We also train our pilots to detect which frequencies are being jammed in a specific area of the front line so that they can quickly change the frequencies used to fly their drones,” Veklenko said. “There’s no universal jammer that can block everything, so it’s a constant game of adaptation.”
The rise in popularity of the Tsukorok in late 2023, boosted by positive word of mouth from a Ukrainian military blogger, represents one of these adaptations. The constant threat of drones created the need for a small detector that could be used by any soldier without the training that more accurate and reliable—but also more complex—spectrum analyzers require. Selin, who moved to the United Kingdom in 2019, developed the first prototype in the summer of 2022, focusing at the time on detecting signals from the Russian Orlan reconnaissance drone.
Front-line troops use the Tsukorok to know when to turn on their energy-intensive jamming devices; artillery crewmen think of it as a last-resort warning, allowing them to run to prepared shelters as loitering munitions hurl toward them. A combat medic currently serving in the Kharkiv region explained that he always leaves a Tsukorok in his olive-colored ambulance: “I use it as a guide, to know when to use the jammer.”
The surge in demand put Selin and other groups building the device in a bind, as they went from producing a handful of detectors every month to hundreds, and then thousands, facing hurdles to scale up production. “I’m in talks with manufacturers and governments in Europe, but it is complicated, in good parts because of the bureaucracy,” Selin said. “But now we’re looking to diversify as much as possible,” with a goal of producing up to 10,000 detectors every month. Currently, half of the parts of the Tsukorok are produced in China and half in Ukraine; the final product is assembled in Ukraine.
“When it comes to the production of [electronic warfare] equipment, the situation right now is similar to what we had with FPV drones a year and a half ago,” said Danyliv of the Prytula Foundation. There is an “unstructured market, few established players, and a mix of bad devices that can cost a lot of money and high-quality devices that cannot be produced in enough quantities to meet the demand.”
The Tsukorok isn’t a miracle solution, Selin admitted: It can lose effectiveness in areas saturated with drones and is meant to complement, rather than replace, other detecting and jamming devices. “It is meant as a last warning device, but on the battlefield, soldiers will get information from lots of other sources,” Selin said.
“I call them personal protectors—it’s something that every soldier should have,” Danyliv said. “It won’t solve everything, but when you have one of those things in your pocket, you feel a lot calmer.”
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