Octopus Adds an Additional Layer to Ukraine’s Air Defences

30 Nov 2025 03:50 PM

The value of the UK-Ukrainian drone interceptor is not in the characteristics of the munition, but in the process that brought it into being.

When Russia set up production of a licensed copy of Iran’s Shahed-136 – calling it the Geran-2 – two things became clear. First, the Shahed-136 strikes were absorbing expensive air defence missiles at an unsustainable rate. Second, the use of these weapons would go up dramatically as Russia inevitably scaled production. This set off a scramble to find cheap ways of defeating Russia’s strike drones.

Tracking Innovations

The initial challenge was to track them as the Gerans flew low, beneath the radar horizon of most defence sites. This allowed more Gerans to arrive at an eventual target than the local air defences could handle. The first loss of a Patriot system in Ukraine was as a result of it simply being overwhelmed by 75 successive Gerans. 73 were shot down. The Patriot was damaged.

The tracking problem was solved with a dense laydown of cheap acoustic sensors, along with mobile spotting teams and a digital map that allowed all air defence units to retain a common air picture. Using mobile fire teams with heavy machine guns and search lights, the Ukrainians would move their vehicles onto the projected path of incoming Gerans and shoot them down. This was initially effective but absorbed some 50,000 personnel.

The Russians responded by flying high – up to 13,000 feet – above the engagement ceiling of mobile machine guns. In addition, intelligence in early 2024 indicated that the number of Gerans being used would rise dramatically the following year. Several organisations therefore began to design cheap drone interceptors.

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