Ukraine has publicly shown off a homemade air-defense weapon that turns American anti-tank missiles into a drone-killer, The Defence Blog reported. The launcher stacks spare parts from three countries onto an ordinary military truck. It hands Ukraine a cheaper way to knock down the Russian attack drones that hit its cities.
Ukraine has become a proving ground for cheap air defense, forced there by a Russian bombing campaign that leans on mass and low cost. Then what works over Ukrainian cities is increasingly getting copied abroad.
Three countries' parts, one Ukrainian drone-killer
Ukraine's 302nd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade released an official video of the weapon, called STASH. Clips had leaked online for months, but this is the first time the military has shown it openly.
The build is a patchwork. The missile is American. The radar comes from RADA, an Israeli maker of defense electronics. The truck is a Dutch DAF, a type that the Netherlands has long supplied to Ukraine. Crews bolted them together into a single launcher.
Why a tank missile now hunts drones
The missile at the core is the Hellfire, built to punch through tanks and armored vehicles when fired from helicopters. Ukraine repurposed it to shoot things out of the sky instead.
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Not just any Hellfire, though. This is the radar-guided Longbow version (AGM-114L), not the common laser-guided one. After launch, the missile picks out its target and stays on it without further help from the crew. The crew does not have to keep pointing anything at the drone. They can fire without staying locked in place to guide the missile. The Israeli radar spots small, low-flying drones that slip past standard air-defense sets.
What it can and can't do
The weapon reaches about 10 kilometers (6.2 miles). That makes it a short-range system, built to guard one specific site rather than cover wide stretches of sky the way Patriot batteries do.
It is built to stop Russia's Shahed and Geran attack drones—including the newer jet-powered versions that now fly too fast for Ukraine's cheap interceptor drones to chase down. What it cannot reach are Russia's cruise and ballistic missiles, which travel much faster still.
The cost math behind the welding
A single Patriot interceptor runs into the millions of dollars. A Shahed-type drone sets Russia back just a few tens of thousands of dollars, and it launches them in swarms of hundreds during a single night. Trading costly missiles for cheap drones is a losing exchange, and it drains Ukraine's limited stock of interceptors.
STASH is how Ukraine tries to rebalance those numbers. It leans on anti-tank missiles that are cheaper and more available than purpose-built interceptors, carried on plain trucks rather than the permanent emplacements a full battery demands. Ukraine has been chasing cheaper ways to stop drones for a while now.
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Not the first improvisation
STASH is not brand-new. It draws its missile and radar from a prior system, Tempest, built by the American contractor V2X and reportedly already flying with Ukraine's Air Force. Footage of Tempest downing drones at night surfaced in January 2026. STASH appears to strip that idea down, swapping the buggy-style chassis for a simpler truck or trailer launcher—less mobile, but cheaper to run and better for guarding fixed sites.
Ukraine has welded mismatched gear together like this before, pairing donated missiles with whatever launchers and trucks it can find.
