It's nighttime, but you don't want to sleep, do you? And you know what? I truly don't know what to do with this. Why don't you hit the glass and effort to master your mind? How about a smoke? There's no cure for this stress. He's like the wind. And all pilot knows you don't fight the wind. The wind's holding on. You gotta take it. possibly for now, the consolation is that you'll get utilized to it. In time, you'll be fine. He'll become so scared. due to the fact that it's not normal.
There are no average adventures that meet Tomek and Anna's families. Not at all. People should not be faced with specified choices. Like a sophocle election. Tragic. In a human way, in situations where you don't drill, your ass is always in the back and it's always your ass broken. Unfortunately, surviving a life is not plowing. No, I didn't make that up. A russian writer. Fuck him. And his homeland, too. I'm in a hanging mood, and I'm not objective. But, nothing! – as the hero of a very popular Polish fresh erstwhile said. I'm not writing a past book, I'm just helping you last these hard times.
And since neither you nor I can sleep peacefully anymore, I will tell you something very important. So crucial and so apparent that I only now remembered that you request to be told. due to the fact that you don't have those experiences. I'll tell you about the anti-aircraft alarms. What they are, how to behave in their time and how to aid their happiness. due to the fact that standing by the window and staring at the anti-aircraft defence work is not the best option of behaviour if you want to live a small more.
You're most likely wondering, why do you have specified a weird title in the chapter, "Oh fuck! Rocket!"? Well, there's an anecdote involved.
Already in the first days of the full-scale war in Ukraine there were socially created applications for mobile phones that signaled an anti-aircraft alarm. In the first days of the open war in Ukraine, most likely as well as in many places now in Poland, street sirens simply were not, or did not work. Prothesis for this state of affairs has rapidly become applications that, by analyzing your location (remembering the chapter on digital hygiene – ha!), triggered a sound signal on your telephone at the right time, marking the announcement of an anti-aircraft alarm on a given area.
And now you're walking down the street with your cell telephone in your pocket, and this 1 abruptly starts to scream with the siren's sound like a condemnation. It's kind of scary. And no flying at all. So I rapidly converted the standard siren sound into an app for something more “attractive”.
You most likely didn't play planet of Tanks. Or is it? And years ago, truly years ago, due to the fact that more than 10 years ago, he was wandering around You Tube, gaining coverage, specified a short part of game play, in which any exhilarating Polish player tries to avoid a rocket fired at him, shouting at his full throat: “O fucking rocket! Fuck off! Fuck, a waffentrager ferschefindis di cajne panzerkamfwagen!’ That's how it sounds more or little phonetically, and it means what it sounds phonetically, which is equal to nothing. But the voice of the screamer is perfect. perfect for announcing an anti-aircraft alarm on my (or possibly your) mobile chat.
And thus, from the first days of the invasion, my mobile telephone screams at the least expected moments (day and night) full of panic with the voice of a geysmer: “O fucking rocket! Fuck off!’ I think that an anonymous creator of this example would be highly arrogant that his unexpected work had specified an crucial use.
In any case, the faces of the passengers in the Kiev Metro proceeding in addition to the standard alarm notifications coming from my pocket of screams in Polish: “O fucking rocket!” are invaluable. And after the first surprise, there is usually a grin on them: “Mr. “Yes from Poland” – I answer – “and what, that's so good?”
A lot has changed since those first days and the first alarms. It's been 3 years. If you put it like that on the time horizon of planet War II, that would be half. More than half, if you can say so unmathematically. Our war is never over. I don't know if that's half? bigger or smaller? She's on. And the sound of howling sirens and screaming off the telephone of the geysmer “Oh fucking rocket!” continues to be the same as in the first days. In the first days of the war he was not heard so often. Let's give past justice – mass raids on Ukrainian cities as a tool of terrorist influence on the civilian population have emerged since October 2022. It was knightly before. Murdering only where the ft of a neo-Soviet soldier stood. Then, in the face of the ineffectiveness of conventional tactics, it went all the way – beating with drones and rockets from Kharkiv to Lviv.
Be certain that in the event of the war with Poland, the beating of rockets and drones in all the cities of our country will take place on the first day. In Ukraine, the first rocket-drone attacks counted after respective means of aerial assault. On the night of 3 to 4 July 2025, the Russian Federation utilized about 550 drones and rockets, most of which were aimed at the capital, or Kiev. The anti-aircraft alarm continued from 22nd to 9th in the morning with a short, fifteen-minute break (I don't know, why?) about 5am. On the morning of 4 July, Kiev's panorama looked like a photo. 14.
Photo 14. Panorama of the burning Kiev after the night attack from 3 to 4 July 2025. [source: Internet, Инсайдер UA].
Of course, this will not happen in Poland. We have an on-call F-16 pair in the air and 46 more at the airports in active service (at least authoritative data indicates so). And we have a multi-level anti-aircraft defense. It's gonna be okay! What if 800 came in alternatively of 550 missiles and drones? What if 1 600? Russia is rapidly expanding its potential.
Can you sense the irony? Good. There are empirical facts behind this irony. The Israeli “Iron Dome” was “undefeated” until the 12-day war with Iran, erstwhile barefoot fighters from Huti or the Hamas sandalers were releasing into the judaic settlements for a couple, a twelve pieces of basement work fired from the kamaz-based battery of Kassam rockets, capable of flying a fewer kilometers. erstwhile Iran began releasing 100-200 rockets/drons at the same time towards Israel, something was already going through an invincible media dome.
The practice is that with an attack on a scale of more than 300 flying objects, a minimum of 10% of the means of assault will pass. This is my own reflection from the conflict in Ukraine, these figures in the case of Poland or another NATO country may vary (up or down). And all it takes is 1 uncaptured Shahid, which will peculiarly unfortunately hit, for example, the depots of any refinery. We can imagine the rest.
It's not like I'm scaring you on purpose. It's just that the reality is that in the current possible war, there's a 100 percent certainty that any kind of aerial assault means will break through the best designed anti-aircraft defence umbrella. It is only a substance of time needed to identify and "weary" anti-aircraft defence systems or the amount of resources utilized in a one-off attack. What does that mean for an average civilian?
There are respective conclusions – as always –. Let us start with the least obvious: there is no safe place in Poland. all square metre of our land is within scope of the arsenal of aerial assault funds that the Russian Federation already has. This is simply a alternatively depressing and comparatively comforting information. There is no place to hide, which means you don't gotta escape to any mythical “safe place”. There's no specified place. I.e. possibly they are – but they are command centres or shelters provided for the highest state authorities designed in specified a way as to guarantee continuity of the state's action in a situation of war. For you or for me, however, these are completely inaccessible places. So, look at the general conclusion: there are no 100% safe places.
Before we draw further conclusions, however, we request to pay attention to the arsenal that can be utilized against us. So again, a short method lining. I promise, as simple as possible and without getting into unnecessary details. Whoever wants to get lost.
Modern air strikes can be divided about into ballistic missiles, maneuvering missiles and long-range assault drones.
Ballistic missiles match thrown stones. Their characteristic feature is that they are driven only in the first phase of the flight, rising with their engines on a very advanced trajectory, reaching up to a fewer twelve kilometres above the surface of the earth. Ballistic missiles in the first flight phase leave the Earth's atmosphere and after burning their fuel, fly freely like a cast stone, subject in flight only to the force of earth's gravity. They are undirected in flight, reaching powerful cruising speeds of up to respective 1000 kilometres per hour, making them highly hard targets to capture.
So many classical definitions. In practice – as it happens – things look much more complicated. presently utilized by Russia, ballistic missiles are in most cases directed throughout the full flight to the destination, which means they are no longer specified non-to-end-balistic. Like a stone you can control in different ways – from GPS navigation, encrypted radio communications to AI systems based on optical sources of information (possibly any rockets can “see” their targets and automatically correct their flight in real time, although they fly truly fast).
For example, the Iskander M rocket, which is at least 24 pieces in Kaliningrad on 12 mobile battle-ready launchers, has a scope of min. 500 km (maybe up to 1,000 km, depending on the variant), carries a burden of 480 kg to 720 kg (also atomic warheads with scalable power) and is able to scope any place in Poland within about 10-14 minutes of launch.
Ten to fourteen minutes to get friendly satellites to announcement and interpret suspicious movements at launch sites and launch missiles. 10 to fourteen minutes for friendly military analytical centers to feed their systems of observed flight data and receive possible targets. 10 to fourteen minutes to supply this information to Polish crisis management centres and to implement the alarm. 10 to fourteen minutes to resound the alarm and go to the shelters. You see all this happening with a full of 10 to fourteen minutes? How long do you leave the home from the flat door to the entrance door to the stairwell? How long do you have until the nearest shelter? Do you know where he is? Doesn't look good, does it?
All right, I mean, bad. Nevertheless, let us now bow over maneuvering missiles. The basic difference with respect to ballistic missiles is that the maneuvering rocket, as the name suggests, is driven by an engine throughout its flight. There are respective crucial implications from this fact.
It flies slower and lower than ballistics, due to the fact that usually at a ceiling of up to a fewer kilometres, that is, in an atmosphere where there is air resistance. Moreover, many maneuvering missiles have the ability to fly even at a tallness of respective meters, utilizing contour navigation, which is based on the actual sculpture of the site. More simply and simply: a maneuvering rocket (also called wing), years low to be hard to detect for radars, but slower (so that field obstacles can be avoided and fuel utilized during the full flight can be spared).
The scope of maneuvering missiles reaches respective 1000 kilometres, their velocity is usually subsonic and oscillates between 500 and 800 km/h. In the final phase of flight before the target, the maneuvering rockets emergence to a tallness of respective 100 metres to harm the mark as advanced as possible. This guarantees the smallest possible mistake in accuracy, which is easy to imagine. It is much easier to hit the mark with a stone pushed from above than thrown “in front”. In this phase of flight, the maneuvering rocket is the most susceptible to being shot down, due to the fact that it slows down and gains altitude.
Manoeuvring rockets can be fired from all carriers: aircraft, submarines, ships, mobile launchers or stationary launchers. They are smaller than ballistics, and usually carry little explosives. Of course, they are cheaper and thus more widely used. Remember – accountants have a lot to say about conducting wars with both strategical and tactical scope. The balance sheet is expected to match.
The category of maneuvering missiles included Ch-55, which was found in 2023 under Bydgoszcz. As you can see – smaller, slower, weaker in destructive force, but can rewind if she flew unconcerned by anyone through half of Poland and accidentally landed in a place where sports of Natovian institutions are located.
And the drones. There's been a lot about them. due to the fact that it's worth talking about. It's most likely the fastest evolving weapon in the modern battlefield or, more broadly, in the modern armed conflict. Their improvement can be compared to the velocity at which aviation evolved during planet War I. And that is not an exaggeration.
Currently (July 2025) we already have different categories of drones, i.e. pilotless flying cameras (BPLa). From tiny observation-corrosive drones "community" to storm-free FPVs capable of moving from respective hand grenades to specially dedicated anti-tank charges, to dense long-range drones, which are practically non-plot-free tiny aircraft. These include the pilots adapted by the Armed Forces of Ukraine, which are capable of crossing thousands of kilometres over the territory of the Russian Federation or the Iranian Shahida project, already described in item in another part of this guide. Note bene is inactive being developed and improved by Russian designers.
There are besides “wabiki” among the drones, which is frequently forgotten by commenting on the number of attack cameras attacked by Russia Ukraine. The lures are made in the cheapest of possible ways of drones, frequently of plywood and styrofoam, driven by motors for motocos or gasoline saws, whose main task is to fly bluntly ahead and focus attention on anti-aircraft defence systems. These have no way of distinguishing the "real" and armed Shahid from the innocent Gerber from the dictatorship and Styrofoam, loaded with lead plates (Fig. 15).
Photo 15. Captured by the author (and his brother-in-law) of the Gerber kind dron-wabik. Yes, his performance is as sloppy as his appearance in the photograph. But it works. [photo: own].
The cost of producing specified a lure reaches no more than $2,000, of which half of this amount is the most likely imported from China engine (yes, yes, tymachnika bolszaja, but engines to the motokos better mount with left import), based on American know-how (No, ba! It must be decent, like an American!). However, this hard-core plywood, Styrofoam and "duct tape" plan does work to occupy anti-aircraft defence and make costs associated with the dropping of specified “empty” anti-aircraft missiles. It is estimated that with each Russian attack between 1⁄3 and 1⁄2 of all the means of assault utilized are specified decoys, which aim solely to paralyze the number of anti-aircraft defence systems. Nota bene, a beautiful serious Ch-55 maneuvering rocket, found in Poland under Bydgoszcz in 2023 had alternatively a head with explosives just a concrete weight. unusual are these coincidences, aren't they?
