Drones have pushed armored vehicles off the roads to Ukraine's front line, a Ukrainian brigade commander told RBC-Ukraine. Denys Perch, who commands the 107th Territorial Defense Brigade, says the drone-saturated belt has grown so deep that pickups no longer reach forward positions. The one enemy weapon his jammers can't touch is the fiber-optic drone.

The war has become a contest over who can pull people off the battlefield fastest, as cheap drones make any human movement near the front a target. Ukraine keeps out-inventing Russia at the front, but Russia copies each advance and floods the line with it at state scale.

When armor becomes the target

Until recently, armored vehicles still drove supplies to logistics hubs near the front. That is now almost impossible. Perch says that when a large, armored machine appears, Russian forces treat it as a prize target and swarm it with dozens of drones and munitions. Perch would sooner park his armor than seat soldiers inside it.

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A kill zone that keeps widening

On the busiest sectors, Perch says, the kill zone—the drone-ruled strip around the contact line—now runs 15 to 20 kilometers deep. Some positions take three days to reach on foot. Where troops once drove most of the way and walked the last stretch, they now walk it all.

Robots take the drive

Under Perch, the brigade climbed, by his account, from around 22nd to third among Ukraine's Territorial Defense forces on the military's strike-results leaderboard, the home-guard units now fighting on the front. Ground robots—unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs)—do the work that armor cannot. They haul supplies and evacuate the wounded, though the robot often can't be brought back. His brigade runs over 1,500 logistics missions a month by heavy bomber drones alone, and still more by first-person-view (FPV) drones and robots. Russia hunts those bombers, he says, with interceptors that scramble the moment they hear one take off, so his crews mix high and low flight to slip past. Perch expects robots to move from supply runs into combat, hitting Russian troops in their rear.

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The drone his jammers can't touch

Both armies now field fiber-optic drones—machines guided by a hair-thin glass thread instead of radio. No signal means nothing to jam. Ukraine learned to block radio and digital drones, cutting their controls and video, Perch said. The glass-fiber ones his electronic warfare cannot reach, because there is no radio link to attack. His brigade still has no counter to them, Perch said, and he wants a technical fix that stops them.

The radio that makes Russia's strike drones resistant to Ukrainian jamming is a Chinese-made part sold openly, and the company that makes it has escaped the sanctions hitting the rest of the drone supply chain, the OSINT group Frontelligence Insight found. The part, a mesh radio modem, has been pulled from downed Russian drones even as Western and Ukrainian sanctions expanded to cover the engines, navigation, motors, cameras, and chips around it.

Russia's war on Ukraine now runs on drones built largely from Chinese parts—a flow China keeps open to Moscow while restricting the same goods to Kyiv.

The part that isn't on any list

The modem is the XK-F358 mesh radio made by Shenzhen Xingkai Technology Co., Ltd. of Guangdong. It sells openly online. The company's Made-in-China storefront lists it at $8,100 to $9,000 apiece, and Serhii "Flash" Beskrestnov previously put the price near $7,000.

Ukraine and its partners have sanctioned Chinese suppliers of drone engines, navigation receivers, motors, cameras, and chips—one Ukrainian round aimed explicitly at parts for drones built to bypass electronic warfare—but not the radios.

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Recovered from downed drones, and hard to jam

Ukraine's Defense Intelligence photographed an XK-F358 recovered from a downed Geran-5, and Beskrestnov photographed another taken from a Gerbera, Militarnyi reported on 19 January 2026.

The modem uses COFDM modulation and a mesh design in which each unit relays traffic for the rest, so packets reroute automatically when a node drops.

The same modem also turns up under a second name—HX-50, in a more industrial variant—and its use is no experiment: it spread onto Russia's Shahed-136/Geran-2 strike drones from July 2025 and reached serial integration by early September.

The network keeps working after losing roughly 80% of its nodes and can link drones across more than 100 kilometers, or up to 600 in relay chains, according to Beskrestnov, a Ukrainian defense adviser who has examined the recovered units. That is why conventional jamming struggles against it: an attacker has to suppress every node at once rather than break a single link.

What sanctions cover, and what they skip

Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council (NSDC) has sanctioned Chinese makers of navigation receivers, motors, cameras, and chips. The US Treasury designated Xiamen Limbach and Redlepus in October 2024, the EU added Shenzhen Minghuaxin in June 2026. No maker of radio or data-link modems appears among them.

None of the four sanctions regimes that have pursued Russia's Chinese drone suppliers—the US, EU, UK, and Ukraine—lists Shenzhen Xingkai, a direct check of each register by Euromaidan Press confirms.

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The gap cuts both ways. Ukrainian battalion commanders and industry sources put the share of parts in a standard Ukrainian FPV drone—batteries, motor magnets, fiber-optic cable—at up to 65% Chinese-made, and Ukraine buys from Shenzhen too.

Cutting one supplier, then the next

Tatarigami, who founded Frontelligence Insight, argues the fix is to extend controls beyond individual firms to the entire chain—down to the optical fiber, the reels it ships on, and the machines that make it. Fiber-optic drones already make up about 60% of Russian FPVs in key sectors, Euromaidan Press reports. The record on firm-by-firm designation is discouraging: after Washington hit Xiamen Limbach, Beijing Xichao took over the engine shipments, Reuters found, and Kupol's Garpiya order climbed from 2,000 drones in 2024 to more than 6,000 this year. But among all component categories in a Geran drone, the one that enables jam-resistant control is the only one absent from the registers.

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What controls can reach, and what they can't

Xingkai also markets the modem for civilian work—mining, firefighting, maritime. And as the Xichao case shows, cutting off one company rarely halts the flow.

China's foreign ministry claims it knew nothing of the parts exports, says it controls dual-use goods under its own law, and rejects sanctions it calls baseless.

The harder problem is that the same civilian electronics feeding Russia also stock Ukraine's drone lines, so any workable control has to reach named military buyers without severing the dual-use trade Kyiv still needs. And sanctions may not decide this contest at all: Ukraine is already testing electronic-warfare methods built to break the very mesh networks these radios create.

Frustrated by Ukrainian electronic warfare, Russia transformed its drone arsenal to be harder—or impossible—to jam.

Most of Russia's tiny first-person-view drones now send and receive signals via jam-proof fiber optic cable instead of wireless radio. For heavier one-way attack drones that travel too far for fiber optics, the Russians have mostly switched to jam-resistant mesh radio networks made up of many interconnected senders and receivers.

In both cases, China is key. Chinese companies sell Russian companies the optical fibers and mesh modems that the Russians install in their drones. In other words, Beijing is the critical enabler in Moscow's ongoing aerial aggression.

That's the unsurprising yet sobering conclusion that Tatarigami, the founder of the Ukrainian Frontelligence Insight analysis group, reached in a recent investigation.

It's not enough for Ukrainian forces to shoot down or otherwise defend against Russian drones, or to fight back with their own drones. To win the drone war, Ukraine and its allies must "step up pressure on Chinese manufacturers," Tatarigami wrote.

As the drone war over Ukraine ramped up in 2022 and 2023, most Russian FPVs were wireless models. And most heavier one-way attack drones navigated via satellite. Both classes of drone could be jammed. A cottage industry of Ukrainian electronic warfare producers sprung up. Each firm offered some variation of a radio noisemaker that can ground or misdirect wireless and satellite-guided drones.

The jamming worked. Combined with kinetic defenses—guns and missiles—and add-on protections such as mesh, cages and netting, the jamming blunted the impact of Russia's drone arsenal. But the Russians adapted. The turning point came in the spring of 2025, when Russia's elite Rubicon Center drone group led the counterattack against Ukrainian troops occupying parts of Kursk Oblast in western Russia.

Rubicon's fiber optic FPVs wreaked havoc on Ukrainian forces in the Kursk salient, damaging or destroying hundreds of trucks and other vehicles in the span of a few weeks. Starving for supplies and in danger of being cut off, the Ukrainians retreated.

But the Russian adaptation was just beginning. The Russians are now launching 10,000 FPVs a day. And in certain key sectors, 60% of the FPVs were fiber optic models, according to Tatarigami. The Ukrainians can shoot down these drones and block them with armor, nets and earthworks. They can also strike at the Russian FPV teams before the Russians can launch their FPVs.

But there's one thing the Ukrainians can't do: they can't jam the drones.

Unjammable drones

Jamming continued to work against many one-way attack drones that must travel hundreds or even thousands of kilometers—too far for optical fiber. Another turning point came in February, when Elon Musk's Starlink bricked Russia's thousands of smuggled and stolen satellite terminals, some of which Russian forces used to control the approximately 5,000 Geran attack drones they launch every month.

The Starlink shutdown compelled Russian developers to accelerate the transformation of the one-way attack drone force. "Russia's second adaptation was mesh networking, routing data through mesh modems to keep communications alive across both short and long-range drones," Tatarigami explained.

It's possible to jam a mesh radio network, but it's hard. Every drone in a given network is a node. It's not enough to jam a few of them; you have to jam all of them.

If there's a constraint on Russia's switch to fiber optics and mesh networks, it's that Russian industry can't produce all the necessary hardware. "Unable to meet domestic demand, Russia turned to China," Tatarigami wrote.

The Washington Post reported Chinese optical fiber shipments to Russia growing from 119,000 miles in May 2025 to 328,000 miles that August. China sent Ukraine 72 miles the same month. For mesh networking, the Russians came to depend on XK-F358 modems from China's Shenzhen Xingkai Technology.

Ukraine's overstretched air defenses can't shoot down every Russian attack drone. Ukrainian troops and vehicle crews can't hide from 10,000 Russian FPVs a day. To defeat Russia's jam-proof drones, Ukraine and its allies must cut off the supply of Chinese parts, Tatarigami stressed.

They should extend export controls to modem-makers and producers of optical fiber, reels for the fiber and equipment associated with fiber production. "The recommendation is to expand sanctions beyond individual firms to the entire supply chain," Tatarigami advised.

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