Transcription
Kamikaze ground robots. Ocean-going blue water naval drones. Vintage aircraft reconfigured into drone motherships. FrankenSAM hybrid air defense systems. The list of military innovations that Ukraine has devised during its war against Russia is truly impressive – and keeps expanding.
From brand-new hi-tech systems to breathing new life into antiques, the country keeps finding new ways to take the fight to its much larger foe. As Ukraine intensifies its campaign of medium- and long-range strikes in the territories occupied by Russia and deep inside the Russian heartland, it’s been experimenting with ways to increase the range, stealth, and deadliness of these strikes. And now they’re looking to the past – World War I, specifically – to discover an ingenious way to repurpose an old technology. Balloons. Only now, Ukraine is using them as drone motherships. The technology is smart, practical, and looks like it’s going to be a serious thorn in the side of Russian air defenses. Here’s how Ukraine is using balloons as drone launchers, and why it’s such a killer idea.
In recent weeks, Russian logistics in the occupied territories have become a gauntlet for drivers. The M14 and H20 highways that connect the occupied territories of Crimea and Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, and Luhansk oblasts with the Russian mainland have become extensive kill zones. Sophisticated new Ukrainian drones like the advanced, semi-autonomous Hornet and B-2 have been picking off Russian armor, fuel tankers, military trucks, and more, seemingly at will. Ukraine would obviously like to expand this kill zone even deeper into Russian territory. But they’re limited by the range of these mid-range drones, typically up to around 125 miles. So, the Ukrainian military has been exploring ways of extending the range by transporting drones like the Hornet deeper into Russian-controlled territory before launching them. And one of the most promising ways turns out to be via helium balloons, a cousin of the hot air balloon.
Recent footage shows Ukrainian developers testing a balloon-launched Hornet. The helium-filled balloon lifted the 4.6-foot-long Hornet roughly 27,000 feet into the air before automatically releasing it. The Hornet then stabilized itself autonomously and began gliding, eventually landing around 26 miles from the launch point. What’s more, the Hornet reportedly still retained 95 percent battery charge when it landed. In practice, that means that after gliding for 26 miles, the drone still retained the ability to fly for almost its entire range using its onboard motor. That changes the game. The exact operational range of the drone is still classified, but it’s estimated to be about 93 miles while carrying a nine- to 11-pound total payload. But if you launch it from a balloon and let it glide before engaging its engine, its range is extended greatly. In the right conditions, it could even double. That would greatly expand the kill zone in which Ukrainian drones can pick off Russian logistics and stationary targets. The deeper these raids can reach, the weaker Russian forces will be as they attempt to launch assaults across the gray zone. And if the winds are favorable, balloon-borne Hornets could reach much further still. By exploiting wind direction and altitude, the balloons could travel much further before releasing the drones, and the released drones could then glide further before engaging their motors for the final descent. The release process is reportedly automated and can be triggered based on a preset altitude, geo-fencing parameters, or a timer, all without any direct operator involvement. Throw a Starlink terminal into the mix and the range is extended even further – and that’s exactly what Ukraine is doing. Hornets have been observed with mounted Starlink terminals for several months already. The terminals provide them with precise real-time maneuverability and visual targeting right up to the moment of impact. Now, the combination of balloon launch at high altitude, automated release, gliding, and Starlink guidance means that the range of the Hornet could theoretically be extended indefinitely.
But even at shorter ranges, the balloon-launch method provides another major benefit to Ukrainian operators. More power when it really matters. Because it spends much of its flight gliding when balloon-launched, the Hornet can conserve most of its power for complex maneuvers as it approaches its target, and/or to rapidly increase its speed during the final phase of the strike. That should increase its explosive power and make it considerably more difficult to bring down.
Now, as mentioned earlier, Ukraine has also been experimenting with other methods of launching drones from the air. These include launching from larger drones or from aircraft like the aged AN-28. But compared to these other systems, balloons offer another extremely useful advantage on the electronically saturated battlefield of 2026. Greatly reduced detectability. The Hornet already generates a very small radar cross-section and a negligible thermal signature while the engine is off. The balloon’s radar cross-section and thermal signature are just as small, if not smaller. So, the combination of balloon and Hornet is extremely difficult for Russia to detect, including during the gliding phase. A drone-laden balloon could feasibly ghost silently far beyond Russia’s frontline radar and sensors before unleashing its Hornet, catching the Russians further in the rear completely off-guard. But even if the balloon is detected, at that altitude it’s far from easy for the Russians to bring it down - let alone before it releases the Hornet. Because at 27,000 feet, it’s exploiting the gaping hole in some of Russia’s anti-drone defenses. Those defenses are layered, with effectiveness strictly defined by altitude. Machine guns and autocannons dominate below roughly a mile, with interceptor drones like the Yolka [YOL-kah] increasingly used up to around three miles. Higher than that, at this point, Russia only really has expensive surface-to-air missiles from air defense systems like the Pantsir, Tor, S-300, and S-400. If they can lock onto the balloon – a big “if,” as we’ll see a little later – they’ll probably be effective at bringing the Hornet and its balloon-carrier down. But at a massive cost compared to the balloon/drone combo.
Those missiles cost a pretty penny. It’s as difficult to get an actual cost for Russian missiles as it is for all their other gear. The combination of that legendary Russian lack of transparency, constant upgrades to the missiles even within the same batch, and exaggeration by Western media will have that effect. But they’re estimated to cost between $100,000 and several million dollars each, depending on the specific missile and system. By contrast, a single Hornet is estimated to cost between $5,000 and $15,000. As for the balloons, off the shelf, they cost anywhere from $450 to $1,200 each.
Now, you can’t use standard weather balloons to carry a Hornet, which has an 8.8- to 11-pound warhead and a total launch weight of roughly 33 pounds. The balloons typically used for scientific and meteorological purposes are too small. They weigh up to around 70 ounces and are only able to carry a payload of a few pounds. Ukraine needs larger, sturdier models of up to 176 ounces that can handle the Hornet’s weight without bursting at too low an altitude. Fortunately, they’re fairly widely available commercially, although likely not readily in the increasing quantities that Ukraine requires. Even more fortunately, as we’ll discover a bit further on, a Ukrainian manufacturer has stepped in to fill the gap.
The balloons also ideally need to be filled with helium, which adds to the cost. Lifting a 33-pound payload requires roughly 530 to 635 cubic feet of helium at launch. That should provide the extra buoyancy needed to reach the desired ascent rate of 13 to 16.4 feet per second. At the beginning of the year, the price of helium was steady at around $300 per 1,000 cubic feet, meaning each Hornet lift would cost less than $200 in helium. Today, that price has doubled, and it could get worse. The most glaring supply chain bottleneck caused by the U.S. and Israel’s Operation Epic Fury attack on Iran has been in energy – i.e., oil and natural gas. Iran’s extended closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the U.S.’s efforts to break Iran’s blockade have caused tanker traffic through the world’s busiest energy logistics route to slow to what can generously be described as a dribble. Wild price surges in both commodities have followed, with the trend distinctly upwards. Governments and consumers are being hit hard as prices rise and supplies dwindle. But it’s not only oil and gas products that have been throttled to the point of suffocation in the Gulf. Supply of their by-products – like helium and ammonium-based fertilizer – is also increasingly constrained. As a result, helium prices have doubled, which means problems for the program even if the impasse in the Gulf is resolved tomorrow.
So, Ukraine might be forced to switch to hydrogen if supplies keep dwindling and prices keep rising. On the face of it, that doesn’t seem like such a bad thing. Hydrogen provides around 8 percent more lift than helium. For a 33-pound payload, that would allow Ukraine either a smaller balloon envelope or a higher altitude capability with the same size balloon. Hydrogen is also much, much cheaper, and no war in dusty, distant lands is likely to change that. It can be produced on-site via water electrolysis using standard electricity or easily procured in large quantities, eliminating reliance on vulnerable global supply chains and reducing gas costs to negligible levels. The drawback is that it’s also much more dangerous. Hydrogen has the widest explosive/ignition mix range with air of all the gases except acetylene. It’s highly combustible and can auto-ignite with low ignition energy. Hydrogen flames are also difficult to see, complicating the process of putting a hydrogen fire out. While it’s much less dangerous in open areas because it rises rapidly and disperses before ignition, you do have to be a lot more careful handling it. Especially when filling a balloon carrying a highly explosive warhead.
But whichever gas Ukraine uses to fill its balloons, the total cost of the balloon plus gas plus Hornet is going to be in the $8,000 to $20,000 range. Compared to $100,000 to $2 million for a Russian interceptor missile, the gulf in cost speaks for itself. And it’s much quicker to make Hornets and balloons than to make a missile. That means as Ukraine scales up production and refines its operations, it’s going to quickly become as unfeasible for the Russians to bring them down this way as it is for Ukraine or the U.S. to bring down Shahed drones with Patriot or Iris-T missiles. If it isn’t already. Russia’s air defense missile stock is already believed to be seriously depleted.
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Put it all together, and the balloon-launched drone seems like a solution that fits the problem so well that you wonder why no one’s ever thought of it before. Well, as the old saying goes, “necessity is the mother of invention.” Having had the first major war in the age of hi-tech warfare imposed on it, Ukraine has been compelled to find innovative solutions and rise to the challenge over and over again.
To be fair, China has also been experimenting with balloon-launched drones – albeit at a different technological tier and for different purposes. Footage from late 2024/early 2025 shows that China has successfully tested high-altitude balloons as a platform for launching hypersonic drones such as its MD-19 and MD-2. These balloons are much larger than the ones Ukraine is using and lift the drones to near-space altitudes – roughly 12.5 to 18.5 miles - before release. Rather than leveraging the altitude to increase the range of mid-range drones, the intention here is to give these ultra-high-speed, longer-range drones a significant head start in altitude and potential energy before they ignite their engines. Chinese research institutes have also demonstrated the capability to deploy swarms of gliding micro-drones from a single large balloon. That’s similar to how Ukraine is using balloons with the Hornet, but again using a much larger balloon. In the Chinese tests, a balloon with a 330-pound payload capacity released dozens of small, GPS-guided gliders designed for distributed sensing or saturation attacks. That’s 10 times the capacity of the balloons Ukraine is using. The extra size gives the Chinese balloons much greater capacity, but with the trade-off of making them much more visible and thus easier to bring down.
That said, it might sound counterintuitive, but bringing down a helium or hydrogen balloon isn’t as easy as it looks. These aren’t thin rubber party balloons that can be popped with a pin or cat’s claw. The concept behind both is identical – the balloon is a sack filled with a highly buoyant gas that keeps it in the air. But professional balloons like the ones used by Ukraine and China are typically made from very thin, flexible material like latex, polyethylene, or Mylar. You’d think that since these materials are still distinctly on the thin side, they’d be relatively easy to bring down with a strafe of machine gun fire from a fighter jet. But that’s not necessarily the case. It can be tricky to bring them down, even with precision air-to-air missiles. You probably recall that Chinese spy balloon that drifted over the U.S. a few years back and caused a major media frenzy. It was eventually sent tumbling to Earth by an air-to-air missile fired from a U.S. F-22 Raptor jet. But back in 1998, Canada fired around 1,000 rounds of ammunition into a weather balloon and still failed to destroy it. It turns out the thin material of the balloon doesn’t detonate most fuses used in anti-aircraft missiles. And chopping a balloon with a cannon or machine gun at high altitude won’t bring it down – at least not rapidly. Due to the small pressure difference at high altitude, the gas will be released very slowly. The balloon will fall eventually, but it might take days. By that time, the footage of the consequences of its released drone’s impact will probably be plastered all over the internet.
Of course, no system or technology is perfect, and balloons come with their own set of challenges. For starters, they’re at the mercy of the wind. Ukraine can only use them when the wind is blowing towards the intended target, whether that’s in Crimea or Moscow. That seriously limits the range of targets available at any given time. There’s no point launching a balloon towards Crimea if the currents are going to take it into the Black Sea – or blow it straight back at you.
Now, the wind patterns between Ukraine and Russia are highly seasonal and regional, with the flow shifting between westerly – i.e., toward Russia – and easterly/northerly – i.e., toward Ukraine or south - depending on the month and latitude. Fortunately, the wind largely favors Ukraine. From October to March, Atlantic cyclones drive air masses from Europe across Ukraine into Russia. That means balloons launched from cities like Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Sumy – north of the Voyekov Axis – would naturally drift towards Moscow, Rostov, and central Russia. South of the Axis – a climatological boundary that divides Ukraine into two distinct wind zones – the prevailing wind is towards the occupied territories and Ukraine. There’s only really a window for Ukraine to launch balloons towards Crimea in the fall, when the winds are typically westerly. But the pattern reverses in late spring and summer. Opportunities for launches from Northern Ukraine are probably going to be few and far between, since the prevailing winds are generally northerly or north-easterly, blowing from Russia toward Ukraine. However, in Southern Ukraine along the steppe and coast, northerly and north-easterly winds prevail, pushing air south toward the Black Sea and Crimea. So it’s likely we’ll see balloon-launched attacks from the north towards central Russia through the fall, winter, and early spring, while Crimea and the southern occupied territories get hammered the rest of the year. That said, the patterns aren’t quite the same 27,000 feet up as they are on the ground. Up there, winds are generally stronger and more consistently westerly year-round due to the jet stream. So maybe launches from both sides of the Axis to locations all over Russia will be feasible all year round.
Now, you may be wondering how on Earth Ukraine came up with the idea to use balloons to launch drones in the first place. It likely wasn’t too much of a stretch, because they’ve been making good use of them for other purposes throughout the war. The most common use case for balloons in Ukraine has also been the most common use case for balloons ever since militaries first started using them over two hundred years ago: Aerial reconnaissance. To this day, observation balloons fill a unique niche as an elevated observation platform to monitor enemy movements. The technologies they employ might have evolved hugely over the centuries, but the basic benefit observation balloons provide remains the same. Their first recorded military use was during the French Revolutionary Wars. At the Battle of Fleurus [FLER-oos] in 1794, the French Aerostatic Corps used the tethered balloon L'Entreprenant [Lahn-truh-pruh-nahn] to spot Austrian troop positions, contributing to a French victory. The technology quickly caught on, as did the balloon’s name. During the American Civil War in the early 1860s, the Union Army Balloon Corps operated seven hydrogen balloons - including The Intrepid, named after an earlier French reconnaissance balloon. The balloons provided real-time intelligence via telegraph and directed artillery fire with unprecedented accuracy, marking the first organized use of aviation in warfare. But World War I was really the “golden age” of military ballooning. Both sides deployed thousands of tethered observation balloons along the Western Front. They were so critical that shooting them down became a primary mission for fighter pilots, and observers in the balloons often bailed out with parachutes when their balloons were ignited by incendiary bullets.
Today, Ukraine’s observation balloons play the same role, but with electronics instead of humans – with or without parachutes – doing the observing. Ukraine makes widespread use of tethered balloons – also known as aerostats – as airborne repeaters to overcome Russian electronic warfare, or EW, jamming. In essence, the balloons lift tactical radios to altitudes of 1,640 to 3,280 feet, extending secure communication ranges between ground units to beyond 60 miles. This allows commanders to control FPV drones and coordinate artillery even in deep valleys or urban areas where line-of-sight is blocked. Because the relay is airborne, it is less susceptible to ground-based jamming that typically disrupts low-lying signals. That can make a critical difference on the ground. During Ukraine’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk region in 2024/2025, for example, these balloons provided the only stable communication link for retreating Ukrainian units when ground networks were saturated or jammed.
Ukraine also uses tethered balloons as persistent “eyes in the sky” for target triangulation. Equipped with direction-finding antennas, they can triangulate the location of enemy UAV operators by detecting their control signals from up to 56 miles away. This allows Ukrainian artillery to target the pilots rather than just the drones. Ukraine also uses drones for target triangulation. But unlike battery-powered drones that must return to base within hours, tethered balloons can loiter over a sector for up to a week, providing continuous video feeds and thermal imaging to monitor Russian troop movements and logistics hubs.
Balloons can also handle heavy-duty EW and signals intelligence tasks that drones are too small to handle. For example, they can carry heavy sensors that intercept Russian radio communications and radar emissions, feeding data to artillery units for counter-battery fire. But Ukraine doesn’t just watch the Russians with balloons. They’re also using them for active EW. Some are equipped to broadcast spoofed GPS signals or jam Russian glide bomb guidance systems, degrading the accuracy of Russian airstrikes over key cities. Others are equipped with radar reflectors, creating “ghost targets” that mimic the signature of an aircraft or cruise missiles. That forces Russian air defense crews to fire those expensive missiles we discussed earlier at empty sky, revealing their positions and depleting their stockpiles. For nothing.
As you can see, the humble weather balloon can be an extremely useful tool in the hands of an enterprising army. Ukraine has reportedly launched over 1,000 of them into Russian territory for a variety of purposes since the fall of 2025. With the prospect of thousands more to come – now featuring Hornet-launching variants – locking down the supply chain is becoming increasingly vital. Fortunately, as mentioned earlier, a Ukrainian company has stepped up. Aerobavovna is described as the “first and only" Ukrainian company to mass-produce military aerostats. It reportedly supplies the bulk of Ukraine's tactical balloon supply. Founded by Yuriy Vysoven, the firm’s balloons utilize lightweight polymers and are designed for deployment in just five to 25 minutes. It makes balloons to meet most of Ukraine’s different requirements, including models that are large enough to lift the Hornet. Whether Aerobavovna will be able to cope with the demand remains to be seen. But if Ukraine continues refining and perfecting this solution, the firm is unlikely to be the “only” one making tactical balloons for the Ukrainian military for much longer. We will, of course, be observing developments and hopefully be able to report on balloon-launched Hornets in combat soon. Subscribe to the channel so you don’t miss it. If you’re interested in other Ukrainian innovations, check out this video about how they’re building a robot army. Thanks for watching.