by DAVID AXE
Desperately short of long-range surface-to-air missiles and with no easy way to fill the gap, Ukraine is at the mercy of Russia’s ballistic missiles as the weather grows colder and reliable access to electricity and heat becomes a matter of life and death for millions of Ukrainians.
All that is to say, the coming winter “will likely be the hardest” since Russia widened its war on Ukraine in February 2022, according to German missile expert Fabian Hoffmann and his co-writer, Kyiv-based analyst Anastasiia Lapatina.
It’s not just that Ukraine is effectively out of its best air defense missiles. At the same time, Russia has diversified its own stocks of land-attack missiles and increased the supply.
More Russian offensive missiles. Fewer Ukrainian defensive missiles. “We don’t know exactly how difficult the coming months will be for Ukraine, but forecasts look bleak,” Hoffmann and Lapatina wrote. “Russia, it appears, is determined to make living in Ukraine as difficult as possible for the civilian population.”
The crisis has loomed for months. In February, the United States launched a war of choice on Iran. As Iran fired back with ballistic missiles and one-way attack drones, the United States, Israel, and various Persian Gulf countries began launching Patriot surface-to-air missiles at an unsustainable rate.
Before the war on Iran, U.S. forces had around 2,300 PAC-2 and PAC-3 missiles for their Patriot batteries. Just two months into the war, the Americans had fired no fewer than half of the multi-million-dollar missiles, which are some of the only air defense munitions that can swat down cruise missiles, drones, and ballistic missiles.
Missile-maker Lockheed Martin is ramping up Patriot missile production from just 600 missiles annually to 2,000, but the expansion takes time. And even with more components, more factory space and more workers, there’s the problem of time. It takes nearly four years from payment for Lockheed to deliver a PAC-2 or PAC-3.
For Ukraine, that’s a problem.
Read the rest at Euromaidan Press.
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