Ukraine’s newest strike weapon drifts into Russia on the wind
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KYIV, Ukraine — Ukraine is developing a missile that launches from a balloon at the edge of the stratosphere, built to fly through Russian jamming — one of the newest weapons in Kyiv’s growing mid-range strike campaign to pressure the Kremlin into pulling back its forces and returning to the negotiating table.The balloon-born missile, DART, drops from a balloon at 12 to 18 kilometers and runs on satellite guidance until it falls to about 6 kilometers, where its navigation cuts out and a solid-fuel engine carries it along a fixed course, according to its creators at the Ukrainian company Center of Innovative Technologies Program.Once the navigation shuts off, Russian jammers can not pull the missile off target.The company built DART to drop from a balloon rather than fire from a plane or a launcher as a cheap, silent and electronic warfare-resistant vehicle to carry guided weapons deep into Russia.Its roughly 10-kilogram warhead scatters conductive graphite filaments designed to short out Russian power grids, according to Militarnyi, though it has not yet cleared Ukrainian military codification.“Balloons are actively used by the Defense Forces of Ukraine mainly as support platforms and as means for medium and deep strikes,” retired Col. Viktor Kevliuk, a 35-year veteran of the Ukrainian Army now with the Kyiv-based Center for Defense Strategies, told Euromaidan Press last month.“They are inexpensive, inconspicuous on radars, can hang in the air for a long time and carry a payload,” Kevliuk said.Ukraine has already floated more than 1,000 of them into Russia, he said.Now Kyiv is using those balloons to launch a guided missile. They ride the prevailing west-to-east winds deep into Russia and have drifted as far as Moscow, where air defenses tracked them at an altitude of about 10 kilometers during a strike last September.The debut comes at a turning point in the war. Ukraine has clawed back more ground than it has lost for the first time since its 2023 counteroffensive