Questions about Ukraine’s air defense? Ask them for our next episode of ‘This Week in Ukraine’
We need your questions for the next episode of “This Week in Ukraine.” The topic is the work of Ukraine’s air defense.
To send in your questions, you can leave them in the comments below, message us on Patreon, or email community manager Brooke at brooke@kyivindependent.com. We look forward to hearing from you!
Episode 7, “Why Russia relies on private militaries, like Wagner, for its war effort” is linked above. The episode is available on YouTube and on listening platforms, with your questions starting at 23:40.
Comments (12)
Have many Russian civilians left Crimea fearing Ukrainian air strikes?
Can Ukrainian planes bomb Russian ships in the Black Sea?
Are there any plans for air defense in the coming offensive? Will ground forces have mobile AA units such as Gepards accompanying them?
Yes, this is the notion of 'Combined Arms.' You can google it for more information. The basic principle is that a military force integrates all of its different capabilities together as a single fighting force. Together they are much more effective than working individually. The challenge is that it is very complicated to figure out how plan a mission to best use all of the individual assets. Then, it is even harder to keep track of them during the chaos of mission execution. This one of the reasons that "The West" is not in any particular hurry for Ukraine to start the counter offensive. The UAF are not just sitting around smoking. They are training hard to operate as combined armed maneuver elements with follow on security elements. The Ukrainians will execute when they feel they are ready.
Is modern air-defence systems like Iris-T (German) or now Patriot the reason, why Russia's Air Force hasn't really dared to attack Ukaine with an all-out bombardment? from your reporting it seems Russian planes hardly break into Ukrain's air-space inside the un-occupied areas
The notion you are asking about is call 'Air Superiority.' You can google it for more information. The basic idea, and one of the biggest surprises' of Putin's war on Ukraine is that Russia was unable to get air superiority over Ukraine. Aircraft are expensive so Russia limits their exposure in contested airspace. The other day, when Ukraine shot down two jet and two helicopters that were still over Russian airspace caused quite a panic.
Given the recent speculation on Lukaschenko's health, I'd like to know your thoughts on whether the people of Belarus might try restarting their protest and opposition movements again? Thank you for all your amazing work!
Notice how he got sick after his visit to Russia.
If anyone is interested in an introduction on how the MIM-104 Patriot works, there is a great resource on Ryan McBeth's YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDJgQErMSdA . A key thing to remember is that these systems do not act independently. Instead, they need to be networked together with other intelligence gather systems such as AWACs planes, ISR drones, and even satellite assets. Detections , Identifications, and decisions must happen with minutes, if not seconds, in order to assign the best asset to shoot down the incoming threat. This becomes especially complicated considering the cost of these weapons. Each patriot missile costs $3-4 million per shot. It would not take long to run out of money shooting patriot missiles at cheap Iranian drones at $20,000 apiece. So, once identified, more inexpensive systems such as Gepard anti-aircraft guns are assigned to take out the cheap drones. These decision have to happen within minutes of detection.
Thank for this really good information. I had no idea how the Patriots were so interlinked with other systems.
How many of the hypersonic missiles are left in the aggressor's inventory? In January you reported 43 -- how many now?
So incredibly happy about the performance of the air defense today. Congratulations and Slava! The most surprising was that the supersonic missiles could be intercepted! Has Ukraine moved the state of the art forward here on interception?