Putin’s most feared missile downed with a song

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/11/21/putin-most-feared-missile-downed-song-ukraine-kinzhal/

Ukraine’s forces jam signals on ‘invincible’ weapons with song satirising Russian propaganda

An electronic warfare team is jamming satellite signals on Russian weapons and replacing them with a song that parodies Russian propaganda.

Night Watch, the group operating the technology, claims to have brought down 19 Kinzhal missiles – described by Putin as “invincible” – in the past two weeks.

The team told technology website 404 Media that it is using a song and a redirection order to knock the “next-generation” missiles, which carry a 480kg payload and cost around £7.7m each, out of the sky.

Kinzhals and other guided munitions rely on the GLONASS system – Russia’s GPS-style navigation network using satellites – to find their targets.

Night Watch developed its own “Lima” jamming system that replaces the missiles’ satellite navigation signals with the Ukrainian song “Our Father is Bandera”.

When the song begins, the Lima system feeds the incoming missiles a false navigation signal, tricking them into believing that they are flying over Lima, in Peru, so that they attempt to change their trajectory.

Travelling at a speed of more than 4,000 miles per hour, however, the missiles become destabilised by the abrupt and unexpected change of course.

Night Watch said they developed the system after discovering that the Kinzhals used a controlled reception pattern antenna (CRPA), an antiquated type of technology for resisting, jamming and spoofing.

The team told 404: “They had the same type of receivers as old Soviet missiles used to have.

“The airframe cannot withstand the excessive stress and the missile naturally fails. When the Kinzhal tried to quickly change navigation, the fuselage of this missile was unable to handle the speed … and, yeah, it was just cut into two parts.

“The biggest advantage of those missiles, speed, was used against them.”