A Poor Man’s Golden Dome - The Atlantic

If you’ve never seen a laser shoot an aircraft out of the sky, the experience can be unsettling. The weapon fits comfortably into the trunk of a car. It makes no noise and emits no light, not even the glowing red beam that’s so familiar from the movies. When a team of Ukrainian soldiers and engineers took me to see their prototype the other day, it seemed easy to use. Almost too easy.

The operator set up the laser cannon on the roof of his pickup truck in the middle of an empty field. It resembles a hobbyist’s telescope with some cameras affixed to the sides. For target practice, one of the engineers launched a small drone, and it flew a few hundred yards away from us, hovering in the gauzy winter sky. The laser swiveled as its cameras followed the target. The operator shouted, “Fire!” Within seconds, the drone began to burn as if struck by invisible lightning, then fell to the ground in a fiery arc.

The Ukrainian model, known as the Sunray, is not the world’s first laser weapon system. The U.S. Navy has one called Helios, which Lockheed Martin developed as part of a $150 million contract signed in 2018. Four years later, the first Helios laser was installed on a U.S. destroyer to defend against enemy drones. The creators of the Sunray, whose existence has not been previously reported, told me they built their laser in about two years for a few million dollars, and they expect to sell it for a few hundred thousand dollars.

Pavlo Yelizarov, the newly appointed commander of Ukraine’s air-defense forces, sees this price differential as a result of the war with Russia. “Many American companies are driven by money,” he told me last month at his office in Kyiv. “For them, it’s a job. They do it. They get paid. We have another component at play: the need to survive. That’s why we are moving faster.”

In recent months, President Volodymyr Zelensky has prioritized the push to deploy Ukraine’s own air defenses as the United States and Europe have failed to provide enough of them. A lot of U.S. weapons are being diverted to the Middle East, where the U.S. needs them for both a possible strike on Iran and defense against retaliatory strikes from Iranian drones and rockets. The Europeans, for their part, are loath to give Ukraine any more of the weapons they might one day need to guard their own people from Russian drones.

The Ukrainian response has been a race to build a bootstrapped version of the Iron Dome, Israel’s short-range air-defense system, which is thought to be the most effective in the world. (Lockheed Martin is now at work on a comparable system for the United States, which President Trump has dubbed the “Golden Dome.”) But the task of shooting projectiles out of the sky—or, as ballistic-missile defense is often described, “hitting a bullet with a bullet”—has bedeviled engineers at least since the invention of ballistic missiles during World War II. Even in the case of Israel, which has nearly 30 times less territory than Ukraine, the construction of an effective air-defense shield took about four years. A single battery of Iron Dome interceptors cost as much as $100 million in 2012.

Ukraine’s arms manufacturers have tried for several years to get the same results on a far tighter budget, and a handful of them took me to see their inventions last week. These include a 3-D-printed interceptor drone, a carbon-fiber clone of Russia’s best air-defense rocket, wheeled robots armed with chain-gun turrets, and more exotic weapons like the Sunray. Taken together, the trajectory of their development suggests that Ukraine may soon be able to neutralize one of the biggest threats to its security: the swarms of Russian drones that continue to terrorize its civilians and destroy its infrastructure.

“The anti-drone dome is not about the future,” Ukraine’s new defense minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, said last month. “It’s about survival today.”

When Yelizarov was put in charge of building Ukraine’s dome, the appointment received high marks in both political and military circles. But his résumé does not make him an obvious fit for the job. Like Zelensky, he spent much of his career in the TV industry, serving as the lead producer of one of Ukraine’s most popular political talk shows. At the start of the Russian invasion in 2022, he dropped that job and began to develop combat drones with some of his friends, pooling their savings to buy components and assembling them inside Yelizarov’s old TV studio.

Their drones’ initial sorties over the battlefield were promising enough to attract the attention of the U.S. government, which sent truckloads of equipment and C-4 explosives to help Yelizarov develop his fleet. The spearfishing enthusiast soon took on a nom de guerre: Lazar, in honor of the biblical Lazarus, and he founded a drone unit known as Lasar’s Group, now part of the Ukrainian National Guard. According to official estimates, drone strikes conducted by Lasar’s Group have destroyed more than $13 billion in Russian military equipment, a kill rate that got Yelizarov promoted in 2023 to the rank of colonel.

Last year, as U.S.-mediated peace talks raised the prospect of a cease-fire, a lot of drone makers in Ukraine began looking for ways to sell their products to foreign clients, and Yelizarov encouraged them. “While the market is hot,” he said, “we want foreign companies to buy stakes in Ukrainian ones and start developing products together.” Such joint ventures could allow Ukraine to produce more of its weapons elsewhere in Europe, ensuring stability of supply if factories inside Ukraine get bombed.

A few months ago, a barrage of Russian drones destroyed the main facility that produces drones for Lasar’s Group, incinerating about $35 million in equipment, Yelizarov said, including a large stockpile of weapons. (The target and damage from the attack have not been previously revealed.) Similar strikes laid waste throughout the winter to the Ukrainian power grid and heating system as temperatures dropped far below freezing.

Still, when he got the offer last month to lead the defense against such attacks, Yelizarov’s first instinct was to turn it down. The timeline seemed unrealistic. Zelensky wanted the new air-defense shield to be up and running by summer. Yelizarov said that Fedorov, the new defense minister, appealed to his pride: “He told me: ‘Look, we can spend a long time watching the football game and criticizing the players on the field. But I’m offering you a chance to get in the game and show what you can do.’”

That task has been daunting, and Yelizarov already looked worse for wear when we met during his second week on the job. He had just returned that day from a meeting with Zelensky, who grilled the new commander about the intricacies of “sky protection.” In his new role as the deputy head of the Ukrainian Air Force, Yelizarov will need to assess the variety of air-defense systems coming out of the domestic weapons industry, organize the best ones under a unified command, and develop ways to choose the most appropriate one to shoot down an incoming threat.

The key to success, he said, would be efficiency. Too often, Ukraine has been forced to launch scarce and expensive foreign missiles to shoot down cheap Russian drones such as the Shaheds, some of which run on lawnmower engines. “Sure, you can use a Bentley to haul potatoes,” Yelizarov said. “But it’s probably not the smartest way to do that job.”

One solution to the problem of efficiency has emerged from a company called Skyfall. It was founded in 2022, during the early months of the invasion, by a young electrical engineer who prefers not to publicize his name for security reasons. His most popular invention is a bomber drone called the Vampire, which proved to be such a menace on the battlefield that the Russians nicknamed it Baba Yaga—“the Wicked Witch.”

In December, during Russian President Vladimir Putin’s annual call-in show, a war reporter for the Kremlin’s main propaganda channel asked why the military had failed to develop its own version of this weapon after nearly four years of war. “We are completely lacking large hexacopters like the Baba Yaga, which the Ukrainian armed forces actively use,” the reporter said. Putin, scribbling on a notepad, admitted to the “shortage” of such technology, and promised that his defense ministry is working on it.

For the team at Skyfall, the exchange served as a vindication, demonstrating Ukraine’s ability to out-engineer the Russians in one of the most crucial weapons in this war. Last spring, when I first toured Skyfall’s factory in Kyiv, its engineers were working on ways to shoot down Shaheds, but its drones could not yet go fast enough to catch them mid-flight. By the time I visited again last week, Skyfall had developed a much faster interceptor, tested it, and put it into mass production. “The problem with supply is solved,” the founder told me during the tour. “We can make as many as the military needs.”

Officially known as P1-Sun, the weapon resembles a large thermos, and has four rotors and about 500 grams of C-4 at its base. The phallic design led its developers, mostly young geeks and gamers, to nickname it Pisun, which means “dick” in Ukrainian. (Some of Skyfall’s competitors refer to it with a note of jealousy as “the dildo drone.”)

Inside the factory, the smell of molten plastic hit me in the face as we entered “the farm,” where row upon row of 3-D printers churned out hundreds of fuselages for the P1-Sun. The drones have already been used to blast more than 1,000 targets out of the sky, including more than 700 Shaheds, according to the company’s estimates. By the end of this year, advances in the P1-Sun’s communication software will allow the Ukrainian armed forces to position the units around the country, ready to launch from a distance whenever radar detects an incoming fleet of attack drones overhead.

The weapons have attracted plenty of interest from foreign clients, and Skyfall recently presented it at arms fairs in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi. “The drone industry in Ukraine today is the biggest industry for investors,” Zelensky told students on Friday at the Kyiv Aviation Institute. This year, he said, Ukraine will open 10 “export centers” in Germany, the Baltic states, and other parts of Europe, expanding the market to many of the approximately 450 companies that produce drones in Ukraine today.

None of them has yet made any real technological breakthroughs. But they have learned to mass-produce weapons of brutal efficiency with the cheapest techniques and components available. For some of the players in this business, the advances have felt dangerously fast. “We have opened a Pandora’s box that terrifies me,” the founder of Skyfall said. The P1-Sun costs a little more than $1,000 and can reach heights of more than 30,000 feet. “Imagine if it hangs up there in the path of a civilian airliner,” the founder said. “Nobody would even know who did it.”

As the war enters its fifth year, Ukraine sees no alternative to unleashing these weapons into the world. Its reliance on Western hardware has left Ukrainians unprotected. Among the main priorities for the new air-defense system will be to secure troops and supply lines in the war zone, and to defend people living closest to the front. In the southern cities of Kherson and Nikopol, for instance, Russian drone units have begun to use pedestrians for target practice, hunting them on the streets in what Ukrainians call a “human safari.”

Both cities sit directly on the front line, across the Dnipro River from large formations of Russian troops. During my most recent visit to the area, in 2024, the then-mayor of Nikopol, Yevhen Yevtushenko, told me that its residents usually run errands on rainy days, because enemy drones tend to hunt in fair weather. “Our best means of shooting them down is with these missiles we’ve been getting from abroad,” Yevtushenko said, citing the German launcher known as the IRIS-T. “That’s a problem, because nobody is going to use those expensive rockets to shoot down a little drone.”

The dilemma seemed insurmountable at the time. But Ukrainian technology has caught up faster than either of us had expected. None of the weapons would be capable of shooting down Russia’s advanced ballistic missiles, which only the U.S.-made Patriot batteries have proved capable of reliably defeating. But when it comes to the cruder drones and rockets that Russia flings at Ukrainian cities every day, the many tinkerers of Ukraine seem much closer to a solution than they were just a year ago. “It can be done, and it needs to be done,” Yelizarov said at the end of our interview. “Because we don’t have any other choice.”

The night after he took up his new job, the Russians launched another wave of drones and cruise missiles at Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure, cutting off power and heat in the capital during one of the winter’s coldest nights. The following morning, Yelizarov saw a post on social media demanding to know why the new head of air defenses had not stopped the barrage. “I’d been on the job for less than a day, and already I was being called a failure,” he said with a smile. “I understand. People want results now. They want them yesterday.”