Lima EW

Lima EW is a ground-based electronic-warfare system built by Cascade Systems , a Ukrainian firm focused on denying satellite navigation to the weapons that rely on it. The system entered service in 2024 and fills a distinct slot in Ukraine’s layered air defence: rather than firing at an incoming threat, it corrupts the guidance solution the threat is flying on, so the warhead lands somewhere other than its target. Cascade positions it against the systems that most punish Ukrainian cities and infrastructure — Iranian-designed Shahed-136 one-way attack drones, and Russian standoff weapons including the Kh-47M2 Kinzhal air-launched ballistic missile, cruise missiles, and satellite-guided glide bombs.

The technical premise is jamming and spoofing across the major global navigation constellations — GPS, GLONASS, Galileo and BeiDou — with the goal of leaving a receiver either without a fix or, worse for the attacker, holding on to a false one. Cascade advertises effective coverage out to roughly 370 kilometres, a deployment time under four hours, and an activation time under one minute, with autonomous operation that does not require a human operator in the loop once emplaced. Those figures are the manufacturer’s; independent verification is limited by the tempo of the war and by the operational sensitivity of Ukrainian EW placements, and none of the structured teardown material that would confirm the specific software-defined radio front end, transmit power, or antenna arrangement has been made public.

Ukraine is the only publicly identified operator. Cascade markets Lima explicitly on its performance against the Shahed and Kinzhal, and Ukrainian officials have repeatedly credited GNSS interference with the fact that a substantial share of Shahed strikes miss their stated targets and end up in fields or open ground. Attributing any given miss to any given emitter is not something the open record supports, but the broader picture — that Russian precision munitions with GNSS-aided guidance now regularly land off-aim inside Ukrainian airspace — is widely reported by Western defence press and by monitoring groups tracking impacts.

Lima sits inside a wider Ukrainian shift toward electronic and cyber effects over kinetic intercepts. The economics are unforgiving: a Patriot round costs several million dollars, a Shahed a few tens of thousands, and no interceptor magazine matches the scale of a nightly drone barrage. A system that degrades the attacker’s navigation across a wide arc, quietly and without expending ammunition, is the answer that scales — and it is the class of tool Cascade is building to.