A jammer developed by Ukraine is reportedly making a significant impact on Russian military tactics, effectively disrupting the use of glide bombs.
Russia relied heavily on satellite-guided glide bombs to target Ukrainian regional centers like Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia with high precision.
These weapons, fitted with Universal Planning and Correction Modules (UMPK), a set of guidance systems used by the Russian military to convert conventional unguided bombs into precision-guided munitions, allowed Russian aircraft to release bombs from a safe distance while still striking deep inside Ukrainian-controlled areas.
At the onset of the conflict, Ukraine had few countermeasures to defend against these devastating weapons.
However recent reports including that of SOFX revealed that Russia’s highly destructive glide bombs are being jammed through Ukraine’s improved electronic warfare (EW) systems. Some Russian bombs now miss their targets entirely, sometimes landing in Russian-controlled areas. Russian sources report it now takes up to 16 bombs to reliably hit a target.
A Forbes article citing a member of the Night Watch team, which develops EW systems in Ukraine claimed that a jammer called Lima is responsible for intercepting Russia’s glide bombs.
“Now the Ukrainians not only have countermeasures—some of these countermeasures appear to be extremely effective,” Narek Kazarian, a member of the Night Watch team told the news outlet.
Unlike traditional jammers that simply emit radio noise, Kazarian notes that Lima employs a more sophisticated method: “We use digital interference,” Kazarian explained. “It’s a combination of jamming, spoofing and information cyber attack on the navigation receiver.”
Kazarian reported that after the system was activated, the accuracy of Russian bombings decreased dramatically.
“After the deployment of the EW system, the accuracy of the bombings first decreased and then, realizing the ineffectiveness of this method of destruction and the impossibility of achieving the goal, the enemy stopped shelling regional centers altogether.”
While Ukraine had attributed its recent success to the Lima jammer, military expert Thomas Withington from the Royal United Services Institute told German weekly news magazine Der Spiegel that Ukraine likely uses satellite jamming as a countermeasure against Russian glide bombs.
“Western glide bombs, for example, use an encrypted GPS signal and therefore do not react to other signals,” Withington was quoted as saying.
NATO earlier recognized the urgent need to counter Russia’s glide bombs. Recently, it launched its first 2025 Innovation Challenge aimed at developing technologies to detect, intercept, or neutralize glide bombs.
