After a year of silence, the Organization for Security Cooperation in Europe’s Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine (OSCE SMM) reported a sharp increase in R-330Zh “Zhitel” GPS jamming activity in eastern Ukraine in 2019.

The OSCE SMM has reported a recent uptick in drone losses in the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine attributed to GPS jamming, which falls within the R-330Zh’s core capabilities and thus pointing to their presence as a likely culprit. The cellular and satellite communications jamming system is only operated by the armed forces of the Russian Federation and has not been recorded this extensively since 2015, so an uptick would also indicate an increase in Russian electronic warfare (EW) activity in the region.

While OSCE SMM monitors documented the system’s presence in eastern Ukraine from the ground, Ukrainian armed forces were able to record the system from the air by means of their improved commercial and military drone capabilities. Despite the R-330Zh’s supposed anti-unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) capabilities, Ukrainian UAVs were able to direct artillery fire against it.

Along with the RB-341 “Leer-3,” the R-330Zh is one of the most prolific Russian EW systems operating in eastern Ukraine. The below graphic from the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense (MoD) shows the omnipresence of Russian EW systems in eastern Ukraine; several independent sources (OSCE, satellite imagery, etc.) noted the R-330Zh at many of these locations.

Map outlining observations of Russian EW systems throughout the Donbas region from 2016 to 2018. (Source: RUSI/Ukrainian MoD/archive)

2019 Sightings

On February 4, 2019, the OSCE SMM to Ukraine reported for the first time in over a year that a R-330Zh had been spotted in eastern Ukraine. The system had been recorded on February 3 while entering a compound in the city of Luhansk. The system was sighted a day later at a training facility near the village of Khoroshe, approximately 36 km west of Luhansk.

The OSCE SMM next reported spotting an R-330Zh near Yuzhna-Lomuvatka, about 60 km west of Luhansk, on March 16. This report also alleged that the R-330Zh was spotted alongside a Tirada-2 satellite jamming vehicle, for which no official photographs have ever been released, thus making it hard to confirm. The Ukrainian Mission to the OSCE and UN in Vienna would later confirm this sighting in a tweet with drone imagery also taken on March 16 that showed similar systems in the nearby town of Yuzhna-Lomuvatka.

The OSCE SMM subsequently reported seeing an R-330Zh on March 27 along with another “undetermined” EW system near the town of Brianka, approximately 46 km west of Luhansk and 15 km northeast of Yuzhna-Lomuvatka.

On March 30, Facebook user Anatoly Stefan Shtirlits, a well-known provider of combat footage from the Donbas region, posted stills from drone video footage showing the R‑330Zh and a 9k33m3 Osa-AKM, a short-range radar-guided air defense system. The DFRLab previously reported on how one of these systems was used to target an OSCE SMM drone but failed due to a tracking error. While the exact date of Shtirlits’ drone images is unknown, it can confidently be assessed to have been prior to March 28, as will be described.

Drone imagery of R-330Zh along with other military vehicles in Hlybokyi. (Source: Анатолий Штефан Штирлиц/archive)

Shtirlits’s imagery was geolocated to the settlement of Hlybokyi, which is situated between Brianka and Yuzhna-Lomuvatka. The relatively quick succession of the March 16 and 27 OSCE SMM sightings in combination with the close proximity of Shtirlits’s imagery suggested that these were the same vehicles seen at different times, as they all occurred within 15 km of each other.