Drone downed in Zagreb is not Ukrainian – adviser to defense minister | Hacker News Reader

Drone downed in Zagreb is not Ukrainian – adviser to defense minister

ua.interfax.com.ua

40 pointsmudro_zboris35 comments

It landed in an area of Zagreb called Jarun. There’s also a place in Ukraine called Yarun. I think someone entered Jarun on Google Maps, selected the wrong place and entered the coordinates without looking.

More worrying is that no detection system has seen it.

[deleted]

They aren’t saying it didn’t crash in Croatia, they’re saying that the similarity of names (identical Cyrillic) may be the reason why it landed there: A soldier didn’t verify the correct Ярун address.

Even more confusingly, they're both written "Ярун"—making this the most likely scenario in my eyes.

I don't think that's it champ. Croatians don't have the "Я" letter.

Croatians didn’t fire it, champ. It’s Ярун for both in Russian.

That spelling is valid in both Russian and Ukrainian

> It landed in an area of Zagreb called Jarun. There’s also a place in Ukraine called Yarun.

That might be a multiple comparisons issue. Yarun (Ukraine) is a quite small town, and if not Jarun (neighbourhood) you could have tested against a bunch of street names / shop names / etc that are located around the crash. In the end you'll always be able to link something around the crash site to anything in Ukraine.

Finally, is this drone even controlled using coordinate input?

edit: Seems I was wrong on the one of my points, now removed. Similar name in Cyrillic.

Being it a reconnaissance drone, why did it crashed in Jarun? I could expect this behaviour from a loitering munition, but a reconnaissance drone should come back to its airbase after completing its activity.

If the "operator entered the wrong coordinates" hypothesis is correct, the distance between the base and where the drone ended up might have been much greater than the distance between the base and the intended target, which could mean the drone didn't have enough battery and/or fuel to get back.

That doesn’t really make sense. It wouldn’t necessarily or even likely have crashed at its destination as it should have returned to base once it reached those coordinates and completed its mission. And even if it were programmed to loiter until it was out of fuel (which… why?), the drones are supposed to land with a parachute so it wouldn’t have just crashed and exploded. The name coincidence is only interesting if you assume it crashed in a specific place of interest as opposed to randomly along its course. It’s much more likely and common for someone to fat finger in coordinates with a small, random error like flipping a sign or swapping digits. Flipping the sign on latitude or longitude fools the drone’s GNC system into targeting a destination that is on the opposite side of the planet and the system just flies in a straight line in that direction until it runs out of fuel. It’s the same failure mode as googling the wrong coordinates but a more commonly occurring category of user error.

It did deploy parachutes. It’s almost exactly 1000 km away which is the range of the drone. There was no explosion so they assume it ran out of fuel. Keep in mind this is 1970s tech, not some advanced ai drone. The chances of hitting a city instead of some countryside are pretty slim.

Rogue drone flew off on its own?

I recall in Afghanistan US had fighters whose job it was to shoot down drones in that had flown off course and couldn’t be corrected / controlled.

Kinda wild to have a rouge robot patrol…

https://youtu.be/lokKpSrNqDA?t=53s

> Kinda wild to have a rouge robot patrol…

Red scare, indeed.

I don't trust either Ukraine nor Russia in this matter. I can see Ukraine using it for surveillance and the drone going haywire. I also can see Russia using it as SAM bait but the drone flying off all up to Croatia.

I am confused how it managed to go through two NATO countries skies for over 600 KM in a state of heightened alert.

>I am confused how it managed to go through two NATO countries skies for over 600 KM in a state of heightened alert.

Being small, having a low RCS, and flying low enough to evade radar, means that most states probably had difficulties tracking it accurately. Romania claimed they saw it on radar for only 3 minutes. [1].

https://www.hotnews.ro/stiri-defense-25428132-drona-ucrainea...

Pretty much like any low-flying missile does it.

Russia invested in Kalibr missiles so heavily for this exact reason.

> I can see Ukraine using it for surveillance and the drone going haywire.

I can imagine that 1980's equipment is trivial to jam these days for most armed forces.

That too, if it lost contact with the command post it would probably just go until it ran out of fuel.

There could be two factors, but one is much more interesting than the other.

- NATO is on a heightened state of alert, but that doesn't mean they will go around shooting down aircraft. It may have been observed on its trajectory, but not intercepted or simply not shot down.

- There has been repeated video of Ukrainian flown Byaktar drones conducting direct line of sight air strikes against large Russian air defense such as the BUK system. There is a possibility that low-observability features in drones are good and cheap enough that low cost drones are temporarily immune to alerted air defense. This could be due to both economics where the air defense missile costs to much to use it against a drone (less likely) or the air defense isn't designed to target small low-observability objects (more likely).

A Byaktar drone costs ~1 million dollars, you can buy 3-4 of them for the cost of the US Navies SM-6 missile for air defense.

It might also be a false-flag operations by the Russians to create problems in relations between the EU and Ukraine.

It's supposedly a Tu-141, a 80's reconnaissance drone supposedly used by both Russia and Ukraine.

edit: Not in active use by Russia, retired 1989 (however it is likely Russia still posses them).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-141

I thought these things were part of history by now.

As far as I can tell Russia doesn't use them anymore only Ukraine does, however it's war and who knows what attics/basements they are cleaning out.

Oh, for f**k's sake. Of course it's not - it's Soviet-made and operated from Odesa. Technically correct, but looks like another drone was launched into Crimea and shot down by russian air defense. And yeah, these things are ancient like the pyramids.

I mean, why would Ukraine launch a drone westwards, anyway?

More likely the Russians are using old hardware, because the new stuff was all propaganda and doesn’t actually work - and has supply chain dependencies in the west, and can’t be replaced.

South-westwards(?), more than 500km in the wrong direction. But accidents do happen, of course.

The Tu-141 has a range of about 1000km, so presumably 2000km one way. Draw a 2000km line form Zagreb through pretty much anywhere in Ukraine and you end up a little way over the border into Russia. Seems pretty obvious what could have happened and not terribly surprising. The surprising thing to me is that it crashed in a city center vs the countryside. edit: Though the Jarun/Yarun both spelled "Ярун" theory would totally explain that.

> The Tu-141 has a range of about 1000km, so presumably 2000km one way.

1000km I've seen around refers to range of flight, not mission range, so no need to double it.

edit: Removed some speculation.

Then that would point toward a Ukrainan likely making the Ярун mistake. I suppose they'd be even more prone to not checking the country and assuming it's the one nearby/in their country.

Ukrainians are more prone to be aware there were two cities with similar names than Russians. By way of example, people who live in Washington State know that cities named Vancouver exist in both Canada and Washington and that you do have to be careful which one you pick even though one is much larger and better known. Washington State residents may of course still make the mistake, but they are FAR less likely to do so than someone who grew up in the Eastern US or Mexico who had no direct personal experience or awareness of the duplicate naming prior to clicking on a search result. Russian troops come from all over Russia. Ukrainian troops come from Ukraine. Proximity-based awareness of the potential for confusion will be far higher on average for the Ukrainians.

> Russians are using old hardware, because the new stuff was all propaganda and doesn’t actually work

Maybe it works but it's ludicrously complex and expensive for them to manufacture, plus it's unproven reliability in combat means it's safer and cheaper to use what's been thoroughly tested.

It's strange seeing your neighborhood mentioned in the hacker news :) (Jarun), luckily no one was hurt

Suddenly war is not that far away

No-one is pointing out the obvious: it was trying to defect.

It wasn't so much downed, as it fell.

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