Electronic Warfare

Ukraine's electronic warfare had deflected GPS-guided Russian munitions for three years, forcing Moscow to engineer around it. On 7 March the Kharkiv Regional Prosecutor's Office identified the weapon that struck a five-storey apartment block, killing ten people, as the Izdeliye-30, a subsonic cruise missile purpose-built with jam-resistant satellite navigation, its first confirmed use against a residential target .

The same fortnight showed the volume side of the contest: Russia flew 8,828 kamikaze drones in 24 hours on 2 March, roughly triple its 2025 daily average, then 9,616 on 17 March . Saturating jamming and interception at that scale, rather than defeating it outright, is now Russia's preferred route past Ukrainian electronic warfare.

Ukrainian counter-drone crews, trained through three years of nightly Shahed barrages, deployed to Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and a US base in Jordan within a week of President Zelenskyy's 2 March offer to help any country facing Iranian drones .

The expertise travelled faster than any hardware sale: within days the UAE had requested 5,000 Ukrainian interceptor drones and Qatar 2,000, priced at $1,000-$2,000 each against roughly $13.5 million for a single Patriot round . electronic warfare know-how, not just drones, is now Ukraine's most exportable wartime asset.

Ukraine builds interceptor drones for $1,000-$2,000 apiece against $4-6 million for a single Patriot round, a cost gap that only widens as saturation drone and missile tactics spread from the Russia-Ukraine front toward the Gulf .

By 8 March, mounting Gulf demand for cheap interceptors was pushing Kyiv to weigh lifting its 2022 arms-export ban altogether, arguing that export revenue would fund domestic air defence independent of Western aid . Whichever side wins the underlying jamming-and-interception cost race decides whether cheap defence or expensive precision sets the future price of war.