Drone footage from Ukraine’s Odessa area close to the village of Hvardiiske has confirmed the destruction of the Ukrainian Air Power’s few remaining S-300PS air defence techniques in a precision strike by a Russian Iskander-M ballistic missile system. The S-300PS was thought-about among the many world’s main air defence techniques on the time of the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, though its capabilities have been far surpassed by the revolutionary S-300PMU that started to enter service in Russia in 1992. Ukraine’s place as a fourth line of defence towards a attainable NATO assault on the Warsaw Pact led the Soviet Armed Forces to pay attention appreciable portions of superior tools on its territory, together with a very massive arsenal of S-300s and different air defence techniques. A number of variants of the S-300, alongside complementary shorter vary BuK-M1 techniques, shaped the core of what was broadly thought-about Europe’s most succesful surface-to-air missile community earlier than the beginning of full scale Russian-Ukrainian hostilities in February 2022.
Though formidable, a significant constraint of the Ukrainian air defence community has been its lack of ability to interchange both elements misplaced in fight, or missiles expended throughout operations, as Soviet manufacturing was closely concentrated in Russia. The problem of great shortages started to be raised as early as November 2022, when the Ukrainian Air Power warnedthat the lack to obtain extra missiles for the S-300 and BuK techniques was set to finish the service’s capacity proceed to function them successfully. Leaks of secret paperwork from the U.S. Division of Defence in April 2023 confirmed that there have been rising considerations inside the Pentagon relating to the state of the Ukrainian Air Power’s surface-to-air missile community as a result of more and more severe shortages. With European NATO members that had previously procured S-300s from the us donating all their very own techniques to Ukraine, the exhaustion of those provides led the United State and its Western European allies akin to Germany and the Netherlands to make massive scale donations of the American equal to the S-300 system, the MIM-104 Patriot.
Alongside Ukraine’s S-300s, Patriot air defence techniques delivered to the nation have been singled out for strikes byIskander-M ballistic missilesystems, and have suffered excessive fight attrition charges because of this. Strikes utilizing the techniques have been confirmed by video footage to have destroyed Patriot batteries, radars and command automobiles a number of instances, with the primary confirmed destruction of a Patriot system on February 23, 2024, whereas a subsequent strike destroyed one other system close to the Sergeevka locality the next month. New footage in July 2024 confirmed the destruction of two Patriot batteries within the Odessa area. On August 11 three extra batteries and an AN/MPQ-65 radar have been reported destroyed in Iskander-M strikes.
Commenting on the Iskander-M’s capabilities which made its assaults extraordinarily tough to intercept, Ukrainian Air Power official spokesman Igor Ignat noticed on Might 26: “The Iskander missiles carry out evasive manoeuvres within the ultimate section, thwarting the Patriot’s trajectory calculations… As well as, the Iskander can drop decoys able to fooling Patriot missiles.” The techniques have additionally been used for precision strikes on a variety of different excessive worth targets, together with personnel concentrations and fighter plane. They’ve additionally persistently performed an essential position in efforts by the Russian Defence Ministry to single out Western lively responsibility personnel and contractors working inside Ukraine’s borders for focusing on.
