Russia is fitting its cheap Molniya strike drones with digital video, a quiet upgrade that threatens to blind the detectors Ukrainian troops rely on to spot drones coming. Digital transmission is turning up on more and more Molniyas and will eventually replace analog altogether, making today's portable detectors useless against them, President Zelenskyy's defense-technology adviser Serhii "Flash" Beskrestnov told UNIAN.
Front-line soldiers depend on cheap detectors that pick up a drone's analog video signal, buying the seconds of warning that let them take cover. Digital video is invisible to that gear.
The Molniya is the drone Ukraine can least afford to lose track of, a $300 plywood aircraft that Russia already churns out in numbers and keeps re-engineering to slip past detection. Beskrestnov's point is that Ukraine has to answer the change before the switch is complete, not after.
Digital video slips past the detectors
"Digital video transmission is increasingly found on Molniyas," Beskrestnov said, urging Ukraine to prepare for a future in which its current gear is useless against them.
The fix, he continued, is to build digital-video detection into interception systems now, before the switch is complete. Such a system would not show what the drone sees, but it would flag the signal and point to its source.
"We will not see the image, but we will see the presence and determine the bearing, warning the user of the threat," he explained.
A $300 drone keeps outrunning detection
The Molniya is among the cheapest weapons Russia fields: an aircraft-shaped kamikaze drone built from plywood, foam, and off-the-shelf Chinese electronics, making it easy to mass-produce and upgrade. Russia launches up to 10 of them a day in the Zaporizhzhia direction alone.
It has already moved its Molniyas onto video frequencies of 4.1 to 4.5 gigahertz that most detectors barely register, and has begun fielding an autonomous, AI-guided version that flies with no radio link for a detector to catch at all.
Ukraine is racing to close the gap
Ukraine has lagged on this exact tool. It only fielded its first portable, mass-produced drone detector in July, while Russian soldiers had long carried a Chinese-made device that identifies drone types.
Each fix Ukraine builds risks being overtaken by the next cheap change Russia bolts onto a drone that costs less than a smartphone.
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