German-Made Ukraine Skynex Shoots 11 Russian Shaheds, 1 Missile At Once

The Ukrainians are showing western countries how to most effectively deploy and use their expensive weapons systems. 

Shooting down 11 Shahed drones and a cruise missile from one Skynex air defense system at one site in a single engagement demonstrates a level of Ukrainian skill and mastery to which NATO can only aspire right now. JL

Wes O'Donnell reports in Medium:

A Ukrainian German-made Skynex system shot down 12 Russian targets in a single engagement: one cruise missile and 11 Shaheds. It is a short-range, gun-based air-defense battery that networks together a radar, a command-and-control node, and up to four 35mm Oerlikon Revolver Gun Mk3 cannons, tied in with electro-optical trackers and radar-guided targeting. A standard Skynex “system” has four guns spread over 1–2-acres. Each round is programmed to burst 10 to 40 meters ahead of the target, ejecting a cloud of tungsten sub-projectiles. The drone then flies into that cloud. Each round costs a fraction of a surface-to-air missile, and a single system carries a deep magazine. Skynex lets Ukraine kill the cheap threats cheaply.

A German-made Skynex system shot down 12 Russian targets in a single engagement: one cruise missile and 11 Shaheds.

This stellar crew, commanded by an officer identified only as Andrii from the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen Anti-Aircraft Missile Regiment, has accounted for two cruise missiles and around 35 Shaheds in total. We’ll get back to Andrii in a minute.

But about a third of that tally came in one night, which tells you the defended site was aggressively targeted by Russian spam. (We don’t have info on the specific site, and I probably wouldn’t reveal it if I did know for OPSEC reasons.)

Ukraine’s air defense against Russian mass is revealing the usefulness of what’s called layered air defense. In my time in the military, there was never a need for Patriots, and mid-range systems like Hawk or IRIS-T, and electronic warfare to jam what you can, and gun-based systems like Skynex… (or even the simple “technical,” a pickup truck with a .50 cal in the back), all combined.

Sometimes we’d have Patriot cover because the threat required it, but for the most part, US air superiority kept us relatively safe from most threats.

We did occasionally have C-RAM (counter rocket artillery and mortar) systems for insurgent mortar threats, which is that R2D2-looking monstrosity, the Centurion land-based Phalanx system. But Russia and now Iran, have revealed that the future of war is cheap mass.

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The author enjoying the benefit of air superiority plus C-RAM

And for cheap mass, no one system is a cure-all.

Moscow attacks with a Sears catalog full of smut: Shaheds. Gerberas. Kh-101 and Kalibr cruise missiles. Ballistic missiles. Decoys. Reconnaissance drones. Glide bombs. The occasional hypersonic bullshit. If it flies, buzzes, glides, or ruins your sleep, Russia has probably launched it at a Ukrainian civilian apartment building.

But as far as the gun-based systems go, Skynex is one of my favorites.

The system is a short-range, gun-based air-defense system built by Rheinmetall, first introduced in 2021. A complete battery networks together a radar, a command-and-control node, and up to four 35mm Oerlikon Revolver Gun Mk3 cannons, tied in with electro-optical trackers and radar-guided target handoff.

A standard Skynex “system” has four guns spread out over a small, 1–2-acre patch of land.

One of four gun modules in a Skynex system. Courtesy Rheinmetall

The search radar spots the target, the command node decides which threat matters most and assigns it, the gun’s own radar and electro-optical sensors refine the track, the fire-control computer calculates the shot, the ammunition gets programmed as it leaves the barrel, and then the shell bursts in front of the target and throws a cloud of high-speed tungsten into its path.

Those last two steps, the special ammo, are the Disney magic.

AHEAD ammunition, the trick that brought cannons back

AHEAD stands for Advanced Hit Efficiency and Destruction, and the concept is elegant; like a lightsaber over a crude blaster. Rather than relying on a shell physically striking a small, fast drone, each round is programmed to burst 10 to 40 meters ahead of the target, ejecting a cloud of tungsten sub-projectiles.

The drone then flies into that cloud, which, frankly, seems quite unpleasant.

AHEAD ammo. Rheinmetall

This solves the hardest problem in shooting down small flying targets, which is that small flying targets are extremely hard to hit. AHEAD changes the assignment from “place one perfect bullet on a maneuvering drone” to “build a wall of metal where the drone is about to be.”

A Shahed isn’t small, but a lot of battlefield UAVs are, and a 35mm cannon throwing a programmable shotgun blast is a far better tool against them than a conventional steel projectile trusting only geometry and luck.

The Mk3 hits out to about 4,000 meters, fires roughly 1,000 rounds a minute, carries 252 ready rounds, and operates remotely with its own tracking radar and sensors.

Rheinmetall CEO Armin Papperger’s said in November 2025 that Ukraine operates four complete Skynex systems, each reportedly delivered with the full complement of four gun units, a command post, and a radar. The first pair arrived in early 2024 at a cost of €182 million, with all four in place by late 2025.

Going back to the idea of layered air defense, within the lowest gun tier, you have several flavors. The technicals I mentioned can roam around looking for targets. Same with the Gepards and Ukrainian Soviet-era Tunguska.

The Skynex, though, can’t move. The role is point defense.

Actually, I made a video about Skynex for my YouTube channel about five months ago, when all of Ukraine’s Skynex systems became operational. Here’s the video if you’re interested: 

Skynex guards specific high-value locations. Papperger’s own comments point to the defense of power plants and critical infrastructure in western Ukraine, which makes sense given the Russian campaign against the grid over the winter months.

Technically, the delivered systems are truck-mounted for positioning, so they’re not completely immobile… but they’re designed to protect fixed sites: power plants, substations, air-defense nodes, logistics and repair hubs, command locations.

Why the lower layer matters so much

Thinking about this in terms of future NATO doctrine, layered air defense means you build overlapping rings so each incoming threat gets engaged by the cheapest possible system that can reliably kill it.

We should all be thanking Ukraine for passing on this lesson without us having to learn it the hard way: a future shooting war.

Roughly, Ukraine’s stack runs Patriot and SAMP/T at the top for ballistic and the hardest threats; IRIS-T and NASAMS in the middle for cruise missiles, aircraft, and drones at range; and Gepard, Skynex, mobile fire teams, electronic warfare, and Ukraine’s now-famous interceptor drones down low where the cheap stuff tries to slip through.

The goal is forcing every Russian weapon to survive multiple chances to die before it reaches the target.

Think of it as locking the front door, locking the back door, setting the alarm, owning a dog, (not a Husky, they’re terrible guard dogs) and keeping a baseball bat by the bed. Any one measure can fail. The stack is the point.

Skynex earns its keep because of the economics.

A Patriot interceptor is far too valuable to spend on a Shahed unless the defended target absolutely demands it. IRIS-T is excellent, but missile stocks are finite and moderately expensive. Ukraine cannot win a years-long air-defense war by answering every cheap drone with a missile that costs more than the drone, the truck that launched it, and possibly the village it came from.

AHEAD rounds aren’t free, but each one costs a tiny fraction of a surface-to-air missile, and a single system carries a deep magazine. Skynex lets Ukraine kill the cheap threats cheaply and save the premium interceptors for threats that genuinely require them.

The new era of air defense asks whether you can afford to keep killing that target every night for the next four years. Gun systems help Ukraine win that math, which is the same reason Ukrainian crews have loved their Gepards since 2022.

The cruise missile is the underrated part

Let’s not gloss over the cruise missile in that engagement. Papperger confirmed back in November that Skynex has knocked down Kh-101 and Kalibr cruise missiles in Ukraine, not just drones. And now, this most recent engagement, adds another.

A 35mm gun killing a cruise missile is kind of a big deal… It demands detection, a clean track, correct engagement geometry, and a fire-control solution that puts the AHEAD burst directly in the missile’s path during a VERY short window.

Because with only a 4-kilometer reach, Skynex is a close-in, terminal-defense weapon. This means the cruise missile has to be extremely close to hitting its target by the time Skynex engages. It’s the last jaw of the trap, not the first.

If Skynex is hitting cruise missiles, it means the higher layers failed for whatever reason; they could have run out of interceptors, didn’t get a clean track at the right time, or were overwhelmed by decoys. Whatever the case, Ukraine’s primary cruise-missile defense lives in the medium and upper layers. Skynex catches what gets through, at the last minute.

As great as the Skynex is, Ukraine only having four systems is a bit of a limitation. The country is enormous, and Russia strikes cities, power plants, substations, rail nodes, airfields, and defense industry across the entire map.

Four Skynex systems can cover a handful of critical sites very well. They can’t cover a nation. Skynex helps plug specific holes, and that’s genuinely valuable, but it’s clear Ukraine, hell NATO also, needs many more.

Also, the technology story has a person inside it. Ukrainian Sich Riflemen Anti-Aircraft Missile Regiment Skynex crew commander Andrii defended Chernihiv early in the invasion, fought in Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia, served in the Kursk operation, was wounded, and later learned to fight with a sophisticated German air-defense system in combat after picking up the basics from troops trained abroad.

No Skynex classroom instruction…

Often the classroom is a firing position, the final exam is a Shahed swarm at 3 a.m., and the grading rubric detonates. The country’s air-defense success runs on radars and missiles and guns, but it runs just as much on infantrymen, artillerymen, and wounded veterans mastering Western kit under fire.

And I think that’s remarkably Ukrainian.

So, there’s a lesson here aimed well beyond Ukraine. NATO militaries spent decades underinvesting in short-range air defense on the comfortable assumption that they’d own the sky.

Ukraine has exposed that assumption as dangerously optimistic. Drones, cruise missiles, and loitering munitions are now central to modern war, which means every base, airfield, depot, port, and command post needs layered protection it mostly doesn’t have yet.

A Skynex crew defending a Ukrainian power plant is writing a procurement recommendation for Europe in live ammunition. Ukraine is grading NATO’s assumptions with Russian drones, and the marks so far suggest a lot of homework went undone.

I’m not a Rheinmetall shareholder. I don’t get paid by the company to write about their products. So I say this as merely a concerned citizen: We need a manufacturing boom for lowest-layer air defense. You can see signs of increased production in Europe but it’s still moving too slow.

That 12-target engagement is a clean illustration of what this war keeps teaching: The sky gets defended by layers and the bottom layer might be the most critical.