Lieutenant General Alexander Luzan, former deputy commander of the air defense forces of the USSR Ground Forces, has opined in Vzglyad newspaper that US air defense systems will not help Ukraine in case of war with anyone, even if the US does deploy them on the Ukrainian territory
This is how he commented on Kiev’s appeal to the US military, which was voiced the day before by the Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Reintegration of the “temporarily occupied territories” Oleksiy Reznikov.
Under the pretext of concern over Russia’s readiness to deploy nuclear weapons on the territory of the “annexed” Crimea, he called on Washington to deploy US air defence (anti-aircraft defence) assets on Ukrainian territory.
“The US Patriot surface-to-air missile system is inferior to the Russian S-300V air defence systems. For our combat aviation of generation 4++, for example, Su-35 fighters, the American SAM also does not serve as an impassable barrier”, – Luzan said.
He explained that this is not because the U.S. was incapable of building more efficient air defenses. Simply the Pentagon has not been confronted with strong aircraft for a long time, so the Americans did not need a very advanced air defense system.
“However, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Reznikov is not an expert in this field. I suppose he simply heard somewhere about the air defense system, did not understand it and told American political analysts about it, just playing for the public”, – the military expert suggested.
He stressed that if Ukraine goes to war “with anyone”, it will be ballistic missiles, not manned aircraft, that will work against it first of all.
Geteral recalled that Patriot is useless against ballistic targets.
“This was shown, for example, by the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ attack on the US military base of Ain al-Asad in western Iraq. Then US air defence systems failed to intercept most of the missiles.”