Recently, the Ukrainian army discovered a surprising modification on a captured Russian Geranium-2 suicide drone, which not only attracted the attention of Ukrainians, but also brought new revelations to the global military community. It turned out that the Russians installed a Ukrainian 4G** card on the drone and used civilian mobile base stations to assist in positioning, so as to achieve precision strikes on the battlefield in Ukraine.
After disassembling the drone, Ukrainian forces discovered that the Russians had added an external component to the Geranium-2 drone, which contained a small amount of explosives and a small modem with a 4G SIM card installed. This SIM card belongs to the Ukrainian company Kyiv Star**, which also means that the Russians have taken advantage of Ukraine's civilian mobile communications network on suicide drones used to strike Ukrainian targets.
This approach is undoubtedly an innovation of the Russians after facing the realities of the battlefield in Ukraine. As both Russia and Ukraine are improving their ability to interfere with each other's satellite navigation signals, drones may not be able to accurately reach the target airspace due to navigation interference. Therefore, the Russians have chosen to use civilian mobile base stations for assisted positioning, thus solving the problem of drones being unable to navigate accurately due to interference.
Although this approach cannot completely replace the professional satellite navigation system, in areas with a high enough density of base stations, its positioning accuracy can reach 50 meters, which is enough for the auxiliary positioning of UAVs. And Russia chose the SIM card of the Kyiv Star company because the company is the largest mobile operator in Ukraine, and its base stations are all over Ukraine, especially in various cities, which are densely distributed, which is enough to meet the needs of the Russian army on the battlefield in Ukraine.
However, there are certain risks associated with this practice. The Ukrainian army can adjust the deployment of air defense** to respond to Russian drone attacks by monitoring the fast-moving SIM card and tracking the location of the drone. However, this approach requires close cooperation between the telecommunications department and the military, as well as the monitoring of the location of a large number of users, which may have certain difficulties in practice.
In the future on the Russian-Ukrainian battlefield, we may see more suicide drones produced by the Russian military-industrial sector and more sophisticated, but also installed with Ukrainian civilian ** cards. It is even possible to see that the Russian army has installed electronic surveillance systems on these UAVs, transmitted data such as information about the Ukrainian army's air defense system through civilian mobile communication signals, and even coordinated multiple sorties of UAVs to locate Ukraine's air defense system.
In general, a series of modifications of the Russian army using the Geranium-2 UAV undoubtedly proves a truth: the battlefield is always the best teacher. The Russian and Ukrainian armies are all at war and are Xi war again.