Ukraine’s air defense forces said they’ve destroyed at least 21 Russian Shaheds with a new American light vehicle that fires guided missiles from its back.
The vehicle, called the Tempest, featured in a video posted on Tuesday by Ukraine’s Air Command for the country’s central region.
The footage showed at least three video clips of the system firing into the night sky, its missile arcing upward to track its target.
“As of now, our crew has destroyed 21 Shahed drones,” said a Ukrainian soldier, identified by Air Command Central as an operator with the call-sign “Shorty,” in the video.
The four-wheeled, off-road buggy is equipped with a dual launcher that appears to be fitted with missiles that look like the AGM-114 Hellfire.
These American-made missiles typically require the assistance of a laser to track their targets and are often fired from aircraft such as the MQ-9 Reaper and the AH-64 Apache.
The Tempest, however, likely uses the Longbow variant, which instead uses radar to home in on targets in a fire-and-forget fashion. The Hellfire Longbow carries a 9-kilogram, or 20-pound, warhead.
The Ukrainian video did not specifically identify the type of missile used. The company that built the Tempest, V2X, is a Virginia-headquartered firm that’s also pitching the vehicle to the US Army.
“This machine keeps the sky locked down,” Shorty said in the air command video.
He added that his crew was previously deployed to Ukraine’s eastern regions, saying that they destroyed “all targets” they attacked there.
Other clips of the Tempest in action showed the buggy maneuvering in open fields, muddy terrain, and on a road.
Mobility is a key need for Ukraine’s fight against Russian Shahed drones. Because these loitering munitions fly at speeds exceeding 100 mph, air defense crews only have a short time after detecting a target to arrive at an ideal firing location and launch.
Ukrainian troops once relied on trucks mounted with machine guns, but had to scramble for other options as Russia significantly increased the number of drones launched and started adapting to fly Shaheds at higher altitudes.
Hellfire missiles vs Shaheds
The sheer quantity of Shaheds that Ukraine often faces means that it needs lower-cost munitions to take them down.
A congressional report from 2021 said that from 1998 to that year, the US spent roughly $10.9 billion, adjusted for inflation, on buying about 87,500 Hellfire missiles. That’s about $123,000 per missile, though that figure would also include costs such as training, launchers, software, and support equipment.
Prices can also vary for different variants of the missile, and the Longbow’s radar guidance likely results in it being on the more expensive side.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian officials estimate that Russia can produce older Shaheds at roughly $35,000 each, though Moscow was believed to likely be making them at $70,000 apiece in 2025.
It’s unclear what the cost ratio is between a Tempest launch and a Shahed or Gerbera, which are decoy drones that Russia deploys to give Ukrainians more targets to attack.
When debuting the Tempest to the US Army in October 2025, V2X said the vehicle is made with commercial off-the-shelf components and can be offered as a stationary, trailer-mounted launcher.
It’s also unclear how many Tempests are deployed in Ukraine. Only one vehicle appears onscreen at a time, and Ukraine is known to openly invite foreign weapons companies to test their products on the battlefield.
Notably, the same clips of the Tempest firing, cropped to conceal the vehicle, appeared in an earlier New Year’s montage published by Air Command Central, indicating that the vehicle has been in Ukraine since December.
Ukraine has increasingly relied on small first-person-view drones that are tweaked to fly extremely quickly and serve as interceptors. While these can cost as little as $2,000 each, they typically also require a human pilot and crew to successfully track, chase, and destroy a Shahed drone.
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