Videos from Kyiv showed missile trails across the night sky.Īt the current rate of ammunition use – on both sides – the war could come down to who runs short in the air war first, some analysts believe. The attack came from the north, south and east. On Tuesday, Russia unleashed a barrage from several quarters: Kinzhal ballistic missiles launched from fighter jets, Kalibr cruise missiles fired from the Black Sea, and Iskander missiles fired from land, the head of Ukraine’s military said. Some wonder whether exhausting Ukraine anti-air missile stocks is the whole point of the current onslaught. “With a limited number of missiles remaining, Ukrainians will need to hold them for the highest priority targets – Russian aircraft or missiles heading for the most sensitive targets,” the CSIS report says. Those systems have had about an 80% success rate hitting Russian cruise missiles, the CSIS report says.īut Kyiv is fast running out of ammunition for its Soviet-era systems, according to the leaked US documents and the CSIS report. Then there are the weapons Ukraine already possessed before the war broke out, mostly Soviet-era systems that include the S-300 and Buk M1 medium-range anti-air missiles. “Ukrainian leaders have stated that the IRIS-T system has succeeded in 90 percent of engagements,” Ian Wiliams of the Missile Defense Project at CSIS wrote in a report this month, adding that another Western donation, US NASAMS, had a 100% success rate, according to comments last November by US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. These include some of the most-advanced systems available, like the German IRIS-T batteries, and less-advanced ones, like the Hawk anti-missile system, the predecessor of the Patriot. Kyiv has received more short- and medium-range air defense missiles from other NATO countries, according to the CSIS. The US and Germany have each supplied one Patriot battery to Ukraine. The obvious answer, in the Kyiv region at least, is the deployment of the US-made Patriot air defense systems, which arrived in Ukraine last month. So what’s changed in the space of just a few weeks? On that occasion, even Kyiv admits six Kinzhal ballistic missiles managed to elude its air defenses.
Those assessments followed a March 9 onslaught in which Russia launched 84 missiles at major cities across Ukraine. Just last month, leaked US government documents detailed how Ukrainian stocks of Soviet-era medium-range air defense missiles were severely depleted, while even Alexander Rodnyansky, an economic adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenksy, has recently admitted to CNN that his country’s air defenses were “not coping well enough.” Until recently most analysts and even US defense officials simply doubted Ukraine’s air defenses would be up to the job of repelling a sustained Russian assault. That may be an overstatement – US officials believe a US-made Patriot defense system was likely damaged – but even allowing for hyperbole, experts say it’s clear something remarkable is going on. Yet Kyiv claims to have escaped with barely a scratch, denying any of the missiles or drones hit their targets.
This month alone, Russia has launched eight waves of missile attacks on the Ukrainian capital, the latest of them a bombardment in the early hours of Tuesday that involved at least 18 missiles of various types and a swarm of drones.
It’s the big question that has Russian military commanders scratching their heads: What’s made Ukraine’s air defenses so impenetrable all of a sudden?
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