Leer-3
Russia's flying cell-tower attacker — a command truck plus Orlan-10 drones carrying a payload that mimics a GSM base station to locate phones, jam cellular networks and blast fake SMS at enemy troops and civilians. Electronic warfare and psychological warfare in one airborne package.
Russia's flying cell-tower attacker — the RB-341V Leer-3 — pairs a command truck with Orlan-10 drones carrying a payload that impersonates a GSM mobile base station. From the air it can find and locate phones, harvest subscriber data, jam cellular networks, and — its signature trick — push fake text messages straight to enemy soldiers' and civilians' handsets. It fuses electronic warfare with psychological warfare in one airborne package, and has been a fixture of Russian operations in the Donbas and the full-scale war.
Overview
Leer-3 is a drone-borne cellular electronic-warfare and signals-intelligence complex. Rather than a ground jammer, it lifts the EW payload into the sky aboard Orlan-10 UAVs, which loiter over enemy territory acting as airborne IMSI-catchers and fake base stations. Per DFRLab and the US Army's ODIN, the system can disable cellular networks across a radius of several kilometres and let Russian forces blast fake SMS messages to subscribers in range. KyivPost notes it can also detect troop concentrations and pull contacts from phones within range. That triple capability — jam, exploit, and message — is what sets Leer-3 apart from a conventional jammer: it is as much an information-operations tool as an EW one.
Development
Leer-3 was fielded in the mid-2010s and revealed in Donbas around 2016, per InformNapalm. It is built around the Orlan-10, the workhorse Russian reconnaissance drone produced by the Special Technology Center (STC) in St. Petersburg, which carries the Leer cellular EW payload; the wider complex integrates that air segment with a ground command post. Russia has folded Leer-3 into the new electronic-warfare battalions it has been adding to motorized rifle divisions, with commanders citing improved reconnaissance and faster information collection. As GlobalSecurity records, the Orlan-10-based RB-341V has been progressively modernized since its introduction.
🔒 The rest of the Leer-3 file is for BattlePolicy Pro members. Stop here and you miss the part that actually matters: how it performs and where it falls short, its combat record, how it stacks up head-to-head against its real counterparts, the complete specifications table, and our analysts’ procurement, supplier and assessment notes. Unlock the full file with BattlePolicy Pro →