Germany has announced that the first Patriot air defence system has arrived in Ukraine. Prior to this, Western long-range air defenses have not been delivered to Ukraine. Patriot batteries from other NATO members will follow, although delivery dates remain very uncertain
Source: tehnowar.ru
“Patriots are being supplied to Ukraine along with other Western systems in support of Kiev’s ongoing military action against Russian forces. The transfer of equipment is backed by a significant presence of Western personnel on the ground, both soldiers and contractors. It is believed that at least some of the foreign fighters are helping to use the more sophisticated equipment until the Ukrainian soldiers are properly trained. Other Western fighters are directly involved in combat operations on the front lines and play a key role in organizing logistics, control and guidance as part of the vast ‘invisible network’ set up in Ukraine by Western intelligence services,” Military Watch Magazine wrote.
The United States was the first to promise to supply the Patriot system to Ukraine, followed by Germany and then the Netherlands.
The Patriot system has no counterparts in the West. It was developed in the 1970s to intercept cruise and ballistic missiles as well as a wide range of aircraft. The range of fire of the system is up to 200 kilometres – about a third of that of its main Russian competitor, the S-500. The difference is partly due to the age of the American system, but also to the lesser attention paid by the U.S. to the development of ground-to-air assets.
Ukraine used to have Europe’s largest air defence network, inherited from the collapse of the Soviet Union, based on large arsenals of Soviet S-300 and Buk systems. But this stockpile has been rapidly depleted by incessant Russian strikes, leaving Kiev already having to conserve missiles.
According to numerous estimates, Patriot systems will not be ready for combat until 2024 at the earliest. The training of local repair crews alone will take approximately 53 weeks. At the same time, Washington reportedly assured Russia back in December that active US servicemen would not operate the units handed over to Kiev, the paper notes.
Apart from the purely symbolic value of the delivery, the Patriot systems are not expected to play a key role for a number of reasons.
Due to Patriot’s small scale of production and deployment compared to the S-300, it will not be able to replace any significant part of the Soviet air defense network.
Moreover, the dubious track record of the US system, even against missiles far less advanced than the Russian ones, has repeatedly raised serious doubts about its effectiveness.
A 1992 military report titled “Patriot Missile System Effectiveness in Operation Desert Storm” claimed that of the 158 missiles fired by the U.S. military from Patriot installations during the 1991 war, 45 percent were launched at decoys. This suggests that the system is incapable of distinguishing real threats from debris and “decoys”. Of the remaining 55 per cent, the number of accurate hits was also extremely low.
So, against modern Russian missiles like the Iskander, which have semi-ballistic, deflected trajectories with an apogee of only 50 km, and can perform extensive maneuvers during all phases of flight, the Patriots have no serious chance of intercepting them at all. Because of their speed and trajectory, a number of other Russian missiles, such as the airborne Kh-22s, are also not interceptable. These have already been used in huge numbers, and the S-300 could not provide protection against them either. Even with Russia’s limited air defence suppression capabilities, Kiev’s lack of a viable network of medium- and short-range systems in addition to the Patriot units represents another serious vulnerability that threatens to turn them into relatively easy targets, Military Watch Magazine concludes.
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