A Ukranian military officer has offered new insights into the scale and scope of Russian electronic and cyber warfare capabilities, including details on GPS jamming and spoofing tactics, and how they have evolved since a conflict erupted between the two countries more than five years ago. He also said that Russia's capacity to launch some types of attacks may be waning to a degree thanks to American and other international sanctions that have made it difficult for the Kremlin to source key components for these systems. Ukrainian Colonel Ivan Pavlenko offered this information during a presentation at the 56th Annual Association of Old Crows International Symposium and Convention in Washington, D.C., as well as on the sidelines of that event, on Oct. 29, 2019. Pavlenko is presently the Deputy Chief of Combat Support Units of the Joint Forces Headquarters of the Joint Staff Armed Forces of Ukraine, but between 2009 and 2017 he had served as the Chief of the Electronic Protection Section in the Electronic Warfare Department of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

It is well known that Russian electronic warfare capabilities have been a major factor in the fighting in Ukraine's eastern Donbass region since the war there erupted in March 2014. A month earlier, the Kremlin had launched an operation to seize control of the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine, as well. Russian-backed separatists in Donbass have received extensive support from the Kremlin, including reinforcements in the form of regular Russian military units with heavy armor and artillery. Russia's forces have also employed a variety of very capable electronic warfare systems to jam and intercept communications signals, jam and spoof GPS receivers, and tap into cellular networks and hack cell phones.

Vitaly Kuzmin A Russian R-330Zh Zhitel electronic warfare system, which is used to jam cellular satellite communications and is among the many electronic warfare platfroms Russia has deployed to Ukraine over the years..

In the early years of the conflict, communications security was extremely difficult for Ukranian forces. In 2015, Pavlenko said that Russia had been able to engage in mass sabotage of Russian-made radios that Ukraine was using at the time by triggering some sort of kill switch, which he described as a "virus," remotely. This raises questions about what sort of failsafe devices Russia may be hiding inside the military equipment is sells to partners around the world, which could allow them to disable key features remotely if those countries were to turn on them for any reason. The tactic also appears to have had the secondary benefit of forcing Ukranian forces to switch to much more vulnerable commercial radios and cellular networks, which the Russians then also relentlessly attacked. "In 2014-15, Russia effectively jammed Ukrainian Motorola radios in 137-180MHz and 400-470Mhz frequency bands," Pavlenko explained, according to a Tweet from the event from AviationWeek's Defense Editor Steve Trimble. "Russians frequently target the smartphones of Ukrainian soldiers."

This is well in line with previously available public information, which has also indicated that Russia used direction-finding systems in addition to jammers to zero in on Ukranian positions and launch artillery strikes on those locations. Pavlenko said that Ukraine's increasing use of jamming resistant, frequency-hopping radios from U.S. company Harris and Turkish firm Aselsan had improved the situation. Not surprisingly, he was unable to offer more specific details about how those systems were fairing against Russian electronic attacks. Still, Pavlenko did hint at potential limitations for the Kremlin when fighting countries using Russian-made military equipment, as well. He said that Ukrainian forces had actually experienced very little jamming targeting their satellite communications capabilities, noting that Russia and Ukraine use the same Ka-band satellites for this purpose, according to Trimble.