#13- International hard or featured news

 

In a secret location in Northern Ukraine sits one of the country's biggest training centers for mobile air defense units.   In the large open-air area, soldiers train to shoot drones with machine and anti-aircraft guns mounted on pick-up trucks. Some of those weapons are at least two times older than the young Ukrainian soldiers who are learning to operate them.   More than 600 miles long, the border touches both Belarus and Russia. With winter coming, here in the North, there is no fog of war, apart from half a million mines, according to Nayev. But the real threat comes from the air.  Far from towns and prying eyes, Ukrainian instructors are launching dummy drones -- a central part of the training for mobile air defense crews. It is an imitation of defending against attacks from the Russian’s Iranian-made Shahed drones -- a daily routine for Ukrainian air defense forces.   

Six crews using different types of anti-aircraft guns are trying to hit a small drone, firing thousands of rounds. Yet, 5 minutes later, you can still see it maneuvering through the clouds of smoke in the sky.  In the real attack scenario, such an outcome would mean using modern Western air-defense systems to destroy an enemy drone as a last resort option, firing missiles which on average cost 100 times more than each Shahed-131/136 drone. But the cost of even one UAV hitting its target could be enormous, especially with winter coming.  

According to Ukrainian Air Force and Defense Intelligence, in the last two months, Russia fired more than 800 drones to Ukraine, having kept around 870 cruise and ballistic missiles in stock for major attacks against the country's energy infrastructure. An abnormally warm autumn is possibly the only factor stopping it for now. And as much as Ukraine is trying to prepare -- training hundreds of such mobile air-defense teams -- it is no longer about the quantity in this war.