Ukraine’s newest strike weapon drifts into Russia on the wind

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 about 7 to 11 miles and runs on satellite guidance until it falls to about 4 miles, 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 22-pound 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 6 miles 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, a shift the Institute for the Study of War has linked to Ukraine’s emerging drone dominance over Russian technology across land, sea and air. That edge has begun to reshape Kyiv’s leverage at the negotiating table, drawing American interest in its battlefield technology as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy presses a mid- to long-range strike campaign that sends cruise missiles and one-way drones as far as over 600 miles into Russia, what he has branded the country’s “long-range sanctions” on Moscow’s war economy. Balloons are a cheap way to reach into that same fight. They can drift over a hundred miles on the wind before they release anything, then hand off to a drone or a missile that flies hundreds more, stacking the two ranges to put a strike far deeper than either could manage alone. Ukrainian forces have used military balloons in the past, most often for surveillance or as decoys. The cheap, wind-borne balloons can bait Russian defenses into firing million-dollar S-300 and S-4…