- Ukraine is testing laser weapons for use against Russian targets, a Ukrainian commander said.
- Vadym Sukharevskyi told RFE/RL that laser weapons are now hitting targets at “certain altitude.”
- Lasers are likely best suited to countering drones, military analysts told BI.
Ukraine is testing laser weapons to target Russian drones and other aircraft, a Ukrainian military official said this week.
Colonel Vadym Sukharevskyi, the commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that Ukraine was developing several new military technologies — including laser weaponry.
He said that the technology was being developed to counter Russian aerial drone or UAV attacks, specifically those using Iranian-supplied long-range Shahed drones, which have a relatively low-altitude flight path.
“Laser technologies are already hitting certain objects at a certain altitude,” he said.
This is the first time Ukraine has claimed to have deployed the weapon in tests. Sukharevskyi offered no details about where the weapon had been used, and Business Insider was unable to verify his claims.
Militaries around the world are increasingly looking to develop laser weapons.
Last year, the UK released images of its DragonFire weapon being test-fired. China, the US, and Israel also have laser weapons in the works.
At an event in Kyiv last year, Sukharevskyi said that a laser weapon named Tryzub was being tested by Ukraine and was capable of shooting down targets at an altitude of around 1.2 miles.
“It truly works, it truly exists,” he said.
James Black, assistant director of the Defence and Security research group at RAND Europe, told BI that it was plausible that Ukraine was beginning to deploy high-energy laser systems in a limited, largely experimental way, but that “there are enduring technical, logistical, and operational challenges to deploying such systems at scale.”
He said that questions remained around how to integrate the weapons with air defense systems and other military operations, how to ensure sufficient energy for them, and how to use them in adverse conditions like bad weather or smoke.
Nic Jenzen Jones, director of Armament Research Services, said that laser weapons made with commercially available technology need to be trained on their target for a longer time to disable them, making them more useful against slower-moving vehicles.
“Fast-moving aerial targets — such as fighter aircraft and many types of munitions — will be less susceptible to such a weapon,” he said.
But military analysts say that laser weapons, which work by training a powerful laser beam onto the target to disable it, may offer an effective way of countering drones.
“There is a growing interest across global militaries in novel low-cost-per-shot ways of countering UAVs and other aerial threats,” Black said.
However, he added that the weapons are not a “silver bullet,” saying their main use would likely be to “engage lower-value or lower-altitude targets such as cheap UAS, saving expensive missile interceptors for the more challenging targets.”
