Don's Weekly, 21 April 2025: Part 4 (Ukraine, Diplomacy & Equipment)
by Donald Hill
(…continued from Part 3…)
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Ukraine
Over the last three years, Ukraine has significantly increased its military production capabilities, to include vehicles, drones, missiles and artillery. Their designs are effective, less expensive and help their economy grow - and nobody can dictate Ukrainians how to how nor where to use their weapons. They don’t have to wait for the bureaucracy and logistics of allied aid. On top of that, spare parts can be produced as needed. One of the biggest impediments on production growth has been money. Increasingly, European allies are providing the money instead of the weapons because it’s cheaper for the Europeans and they learn from Ukrainian weapons development.
Only the six Patriot- and two SAMP-T air defense systems operated by the PSZSU can engage ballistic missiles. Obviously, this is hopelessly insufficient to defend all of Ukraine. What’s worse, and as ‘warned’ already several weeks ago, here on this blog, the SAMP-T systems are almost out of missiles. Stefan Korshak reports that Patriots are running out of missiles and that Ukraine is willing to buy more Patriot systems and missiles or produce them under license, however: Trump rejected the deal. Vance, who’s brother fought for Ukraine, said, “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine, one way or the other.” Germany will send 30 Patriot missiles at some point but that will only be sufficient for one or two major missile strikes by the Russians.
Three weeks ago, the SBU arrested three men in Kyiv who were passing information to Russia. One was a Russian citizen that passed targeting information. The other two were current and former employees of defense companies. One sought targeting information from former colleagues and the other assessed the damage created by the Russian strikes. Last week they arrested an instructor at a training center that passed information and was working to assassinate his commanders, possibly with bombs.
The CBS show 60 Minutes conducted an interview with Zelensky. Because of that interview and the report on Greenland, Trump said CBS should lose its broadcast license.
A Ukrainian IT specialist talks about how he shot down the first Kinzhal missile as part of a Patriot crew.
Store cameras capture the impact of the first missile in Sumy. The store manager and saleswoman run into the street to help the victims and are both wounded by the second blast.
277 Ukrainian prisoners were swapped, bringing the total number of Ukrainian prisoners returned to 4,552. Recently, 909 of the Ukrainian fallen were returned.
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Diplomacy
Because facts are inconvenient, Trump said Russia made a mistake when they killed 35 civilians and wounded 117 more in Sumy. He also pretended there was no fighting in Ukraine during his first term and continues to blame Ukraine for being attacked. Trump won’t support a G7 statement condemning the attack. A list of Trump’s pro-Russian moves as of two months ago. Witkoff also repeats Russian propaganda.
Witkoff proposed that Ukraine should cede Crimea, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Donetsk, and Luhansk, which is an absolute Russian demand. Zelensky says they would never cede Ukrainian territory. As a result of the impasse, Trump and Rubio are threatening to move on from peace talks if there’s no progress soon. Given Trump’s refusal to aid Ukraine or even sell equipment to Ukraine, the best Ukraine can hope for is that the US will not begin trading with Russia. If the US walks away from the peace talks it will still engage with Russia on matters like energy, the Arctic and space operations. Any relief provided by the US on energy matters could cost Ukraine thousands of casualties.
A memo for next year’s budget will cut the US State Department budget in half, and funding for the United Nations, NATO and 20 other organizations would end. It is unknown if the Republican-controlled Congress would approve of such cuts but Trump has already not spent money that Congress said must be used by law. In yet another symptom of authoritarianism, Trump tells the president of El Salvador that he needs to build five more prisons because he plans to send convicted US citizens to his country. This, after the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that the Trump officials should facilitate the return of a permanent resident that they admitted was mistakenly sent to El Salvador. Trump is not abiding with that ruling. The stability of the US no longer exists. The lack of consequences will inevitably lead to more dangerous decisions, both domestically and in the world.
The US voted against a UN resolution that mentioned “the aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine, and against Georgia prior to that.” The US said that the language in the resolution does not contribute to progress toward peace. Russia agreed that the wording was unacceptable.
Although his coalition partners refused to send Taurus missiles when they led the country, Merz said that Germany’s European partners are supplying cruise missiles than Germany should also participate, and the missiles could be used to attack the Kerch bridge in Crimea.
EU sanctions have to be renewed every six months and there is always the danger of Orban vetoing them. In January, the Hungarian delegation was refusing to renew the sanctions until US Secretary of State Rubio told them to back down. To prevent that from happening, several nations are considering making the sanctions a national decision. Some nations are concerned about undermining a common front. Some nations don’t have the ability to transpose sanctions into national law. Germany is advocating the possible removal of voting rights of those that violate the EU rule of law but other nations are now sure how that could work.
Rubio and Kellogg are advising Trump to crack down on Russia. The State Department is preparing options for more sanctions but Trump is still following Witkoff’s advice, who proposes that Ukraine give Russia ownership of the occupied regions. Looking beyond Ukraine, Witkoff says commercial partnerships create stability, completely ignoring the recent history of commercial ties between the West and Russia.
While some Trump officials support Ukraine, others are upset with Europe’s continued support of Ukraine. Civilian officials in the Pentagon even questioned an unnamed ally about why it continues to send aid.
Denmark said they would send unarmed soldiers to Ukraine, likely at training centers in western Ukraine, to learn about drone warfare and other Ukrainian experiences. Russia said the Danish soldiers would be legitimate targets.
A Northrop Grumman building exploded in Utah. It was part of a facility that builds solid rocket motors for the government. Not all fires in Russia and the West are the result of sabotage but Russia’s war in Ukraine raises suspicions. The cause is under investigation but targets in remote locations in the US would be harder to access.
At one time, the US dominated the rare earths market but over 40 years China gained a controlling interest in many mines and flooded the market to eliminate rival production. Even if rare earths were mined domestically it is sent to China for processing before being shipped back. Currently, China controls 61% of the world’s rare earth mining and 92% of its processing. As a result of the trade war between the US and China, China cut off rare earth exports to everyone. Civilian and military technologies are dependent on rare earths.
The EU bought 150 billion cubic meters of gas from Russia in 2021. They made a plan to phase out all Russian gas purchases by 2027. They only imported 52 billion cubic meters last year but that was an 18% increase from the previous year. They are considering allowing companies to break contracts with no penalties.
For the first time, the Czech Republic is independent from Russian oil. By increasing the capacity of the Trans Alpine pipeline it no longer has to rely on the Druzhba pipeline.
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Equipment
A Russian report says the technology of Russian drones is at the same level as it was a year ago while Ukrainian drones have significantly improved with aerial repeaters which extend ranges to 20 km, remote detonation and other advances.
Between August 2023 and March 2025 North Korea sent about five million rounds of various calibers to Russia. Of the 11,000 troops sent, North Korea lost between 5-6,000. They earned $20 billion for their aid. In 2023 the North Korean GDP was $23 billion.
SkyFall is a Ukrainian company that produces the Shrike FPV and the Vampire hexacopter (Baba Yaga) that has a 30km range. Back in September it was developing an FPV drone with a 40-60 km range and a 5 kg warhead. Its factory is “a few thousand kilometers from the front line” and produces 4,000 drones a day using 350 3D printers. The drones have automatic frequency hopping capabilities to avoid jamming and the pilot can lock the FPV drones on a target so it will hit regardless of the EW or weather conditions. The target-lock feature can be implemented from as far as a kilometer on a stationary or moving target. They are developing a drone that can take off from water.
Here is a description of ten Ukrainian drone companies.
Ireland is sending at least three of its nine Giraffe Mark IV radar systems, which have been operational since 1970 and have a range of 470 km.
Sweden will also send more RBS70 MANPADS that have shot down helicopters and reconnaissance drones. It is laser-guided with an effective range of 8 km at altitudes of 5000 meters.
Sweden is also sending the Tridon Mk2 air defense system. This is an almost ‘do it yourself’-, definitely ‘quick’-, adaptation of the famous, Swedish Bofors 40mm anti-aircraft cannon (earlier variants of which were pressed into service already durign the Second World War) to modern requirements. The BAE spokesman says a naval version has about a 4-5 km range; this post says it has an effective range of 12 km. It uses 3P ammunition (video) with a proximity fuse that creates a kill box several meters wide, allowing for one-shot, one-kill capability.
HIMARS/MLRS has a range of 84 km with GMLRS or 300km with ATACMS. Next year France will test an MLRS system with a range of 150km that is intended to be an alternative to the US systems. European armies have been buying the US systems, Israel’s Elbit MLRS or South Korea’s Chunmoo. Rheinmetall and Lockheed Martin are jointly developing GMARS with a range of 400 km.
The 15th edition of the NATO Innovation Challenge was won by the French team Alta Ares for “Embedded AI for Recognition, Detection, and Identification”. The team proposed using AI to counter glide bombs with early detection, rapid identification and decision support. It would give troops in the impact area enough warning to take cover and deploy jamming systems. NATO will provide the top three finishers of the challenge with development support.
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The Lima EW system
According to a former German Defense Ministry official, the Ukrainian Lima EW system outperforms any Russian or Western system and he says it’s a breakthrough in electronic warfare. Russia’s UMPK bomb was once considered unjammable but their navigation system is so disrupted by Lima that Russia has to use 8-16 bombs for a single target now (actually, we’ve heard from much higher figures from several Ukrainian contacts, but lets leave it at that).
The UMPK bombs use inertial guidance that isn’t accurate by itself. When combined with satellite signals that update the bomb’s location it is very accurate. When those satellite signals are jammed the bomb drifts off target. The longer it glides without a satellite update, the farther the bomb drifts away from the target for distances of… lest say 50-100 meters.
Why do we say such things?
Well, take example of Zaporizhzhia: Ukrainians in this area were regularly targeted by UMPKs, but a lot of bombs aimed at the city now fall 10-15 kilometers short of it, and they also fail to detonate (probably because they didn’t reach their programmed target coordinates). The reason why is because Lima doesn’t just have jamming capabilities, it conducts a cyberattack on the navigation receiver and provides it with false data, spoofing it to make the receiver believe it is somewhere else.
This digital attack is different from traditional spoofing that slowly replaces a valid navigation satellite signal with a false radio signal that provides false coordinates. If the signal is replaced too quickly or doesn’t meet other criteria that can be detected and the false signal is rejected. It is easier to spoof a Shahed drone that flies relatively slowly but there is less time to spoof a UMPK that can fly as fast as 1900 kph. A digital attack can be conducted much faster.
There is widespread coverage with Lima on the front line and high value targets, such as cities, but there are gaps in the coverage. Malokaterynivka is 15 km south of Zaporizhzhia and it is still being heavily damaged by UMPK attacks. Also, at altitudes of 50 meters or lower, terrain sometimes creates gaps in coverage by blocking the EW signal.
But the danger of the UMPK, which was once an existential threat to cities and the frontline, has now been greatly reduced. Still, in electronic warfare, there is a counter move to every counter move. It remains to be seen if Russia can counter Lima and what Ukraine might do if that happens.
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Guided Bullets
In WW2, the British and Americans scientists building a proximity fuse for artillery shells had to miniaturize the vacuum tube and make it tough enough to withstand accelerations of 20,000gs when being fired, and 5,000gs while spinning in flight. That was long before so-called solid state electronics existed. Over time they were able to produce them at lower costs. Artillery shells have since been designed with laser-homing or GPS and inertial guidance and fins that steer the shells.
Along those lines, efforts have been made to miniaturize and harden electronic and optical systems to create a self-guided bullet. These bullets could theoretically correct the path of the bullet to hit moving targets over long distances. It could even hit a target out of view of the shooter as long as the target was painted with a laser by another operator in view of the target.
Efforts to create such a bullet existed over ten years ago, as explained here. This is a shorter 10-year-old video of just one of the programs. This article discusses the Sandia project that uses a smoothbore rifle with discarding sabot bullets. The smaller size of a bullet allows it to make up to 30 course changes a second, which means the guidance system doesn’t have to be as precise as it is for artillery shells that can make far fewer corrections.
The French-German Research Institute of Saint-Louis (ISL) is transferring their knowledge of guided munitions to create a 12.7mm guided bullet. The current testing phase calculates course corrections externally. If they can reach the objective of performing all computations within the bullet their goal is to make lateral corrections of up to 50 meters at a range of 2,000 meters and hit moving targets at speeds of up to 60 kph.
It is easier to create bigger guided rounds than smaller guided rounds. 155mm guided rounds have been around for a couple of decades and Northrop Grumman has been working on a 57 mm guided round since 2023. The technical challenges and possibly the production costs means it could be a while before a guided bullet becomes a reality.
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Guided Shells
The US Copperhead guided shell calibre 155mm (we’ve mentioned it some 3-4 times over the last year) round was developed in the 1970s and required a laser designator to paint the target. In the 1990’s, Germany developed the SMArt 155mm round that deploys two sub-munitions and uses IR and LADAR to detect and destroy two vehicles within a diameter of 200 meters.. The Swedes and French developed the similar BONUS 155mm shell that has been used. The similarity between the SMArt and BONUS rounds make it difficult to tell them apart when used: Video 1, Video 2, Video 3, and Video 4.
Excalibur was developed in the 1990’s and is an accurate and effective 155mm shell that uses GPS and inertial navigation. In 2018, the US started working on an upgrade to the DPICM shell that used cluster munitions and recognized it needed to work without GPS guidance, a premise that was verified when the Russians started jamming the Excalibur shells. Excalibur-S initially uses GPS for navigation before transitioning to a semi-active laser seeker. It has the added capability of homing in on moving targets and was tested in 2020. In December 2023, Spain agreed to buy the upgraded Excalibur.
The Cannon-Delivered Area Effects Munition (C-DAEM) was projected to have a range of 60 km and will be able to search for targets in a 28 square kilometer area. Submunitions would be fired from the round and were supposed to hit stationary or moving targets. Different rounds would be created for unarmored vehicles/personnel and armored vehicles. It would not need laser or pre-programmed targets and would select the target itself. The development completion date was expected to be 2023.
By 2023, the US was looking at potential producers for C-DAEM and expected low-rate production to begin in the second quarter of 2026. In 2024, they successfully tested the anti-armor round ahead of schedule last month and General Dynamics was chosen to produce it.
The US is continuing to develop precision weapon systems with increasing ranges so they can quickly kill more with less while pursuing higher production capabilities at lower costs per kill. The theory is that the round may cost more but the fewer number of rounds used and the lower wear on artillery, plus decreased enemy capability, may be more cost effective in the long run. In any case, they want to over-match any opponents in a protracted war regardless of cost.
These goals have many technical and industrial challenges and they cannot be met without creating an organizational structure that efficiently utilizes information and capabilities and has excess capacity and redundancy for resilience in a protracted war.
Good stuff as always! Excalibur is always a cool thing to talk about. I was at Fort Sill when they were testing and fielding it. Technically, with a really good FDO and some sneaky math you could actually shoot around a mountain with it. Sort of, the explanation is long and technical, but you could still do it and it was wild.
Sehr geehrte Herr Cooper,
Frohe Ostern!