Ukrainian army destroys Russia’s rare Svet-KU electronic warfare system

Since February 2022, the Ukrainian military has targeted many rare Russian systems on the battlefield, and recently the Defense Forces destroyed a mobile Russian electronic warfare system RB-636 Svet-KU, Defense Express reports.

The footage of the destruction of the system was posted on Twitter by Yaroslav Oliynyk, Advisor to the Minister for Strategic Industries, who notes that the Russian system was found behind the occupiers' lines and that the enemy did not expect the Ukrainian Armed Forces to be able to destroy it there.

This is the first visual confirmation of the destroyed RB-636 Svet-KU electronic warfare system since the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. As noted in open sources, Ukrainian aerial reconnaissance aircraft managed to hunt down the vehicle, after which it was hit by a GMLRS missile fired from HIMARS.

Along with this episode, the Russian occupiers lost at least two such vehicles in total - the Ukrainian military took one such electronic warfare system as a trophy back in March 2022.

At the same time, the invading Russian army used such a vehicle even before February 2022. According to InformNapalm, the Svet-KU electronic warfare system was spotted in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine in 2016, 2019, 2020, and 2021.

The RB-636 Svet-KU electronic warfare system was adopted by the Russian army in 2012, and it is unknown how many of these machines have been supplied to the Russian army as of today.

The system is designed to assess the electromagnetic situation, search, detect and analyze radio emissions, as well as determine the location of their sources.