Again rubble on the ground, another Russian hypersonic missile – Ukraine is regaining the sky bit by bit with its air defense.
Kharkiv – The “miracle” for Russia has not materialized again, but Ukraine is wondering: about the vulnerability of the hypersonic missiles much praised by Vladimir Putin. Evidence is accumulating that the “miracle weapons” in the Ukraine war remain a failure. The user “John Ridge” has now published a video on The video is said to have been taken on the night of February 1st and shows men walking around wreckage on the ground with flashlights.
“John Ridge” comments that Ukraine has always wrongly denied that its technology, some of which dates back to Soviet times, is powerless against Vladimir Putin's pioneering rocket technology. Yurii Ihnat, the spokesman for the Ukrainian Air Force, recently commented Newsweek, he sees signs that Russia's miracle weapons are more vulnerable than initially feared. Because of its high speed, the hypersonic missile has greater penetration and destructive power. These weapons reach a speed of up to ten times the speed of sound, i.e. around 12,000 kilometers per hour. They carry up to 480 kilograms of explosives or a nuclear warhead.
The idea: hypersonic missiles as the spearhead of the Russian invasion
According to Russian information, the new type of rocket has a range of up to 2,000 kilometers. This would mean that most major European cities could be reached for such weapon systems within ten to 30 minutes. In 2016, the air-launched Kh-32, originally designed as an anti-ship missile, entered service with Tu-22M3 bombers. Russian political scientist Konstantin Sivkov praised their properties, which in his opinion would significantly change the balance in oceanic and maritime theaters of war, as the magazine praised them Navy Recognition quoted. Russian journalists of the magazine Great war However, the rocket was described as multifunctional and could therefore also be used successfully against ground targets.
Successful use confirmed Great war. Accordingly, Tu-22M3 bombers took part in the Ukrainian war almost from the first weeks and carried out various operations. In particular, they attacked Ukrainian forces on the territory of the Mariupol Azov Steel plant. The first reports of the use of guided missiles by such bombers came from the British Ministry of Defense in early July. They thought they knew that Russian aviation had used Kh-22 and Kh-32 anti-ship missiles.
The reality: Hypersonic missiles are Putin's biggest flop
However, this technology was actually intended to demonstrate Russia's technological advantage over the West. The supposedly recent launch of a hypersonic missile is seriously damaging the nimbus of the miracle weapon, as the US magazine recently reported Newsweek had reported. Putin's much-vaunted hypersonic missile in all its variants appears to be falling short of expectations in Ukraine as Moscow continues its winter long-range bombardment of Kiev and other major cities. Russian forces have regularly used hypersonic missiles, which Putin described in 2018 as one of Moscow's “invincible” weapons, to destroy Ukrainian cities and infrastructure targets across the country during their two-year invasion of the neighboring country.
Author Stefan Troendle has Putin's “miracle weapon”. Südwestrundfunk bluntly: “This allegedly undetectable Russian precision weapon is, above all, a propaganda weapon. Because a rocket that supposedly flies at ten times the speed of sound and can also be equipped with nuclear warheads is initially intended to spread fear.” Ukraine seemed powerless to counter this terror against the civilian population for a long time – the rockets switch to a steep dive in the final approach phase making them difficult to detect for enemy radar.
The future: There is a lot of Russian junk flying in the air over Ukraine
However, the Patriot anti-aircraft missiles have increasingly better chances. According to Kyiv Post Ukraine's successes with modern technology are clearly visible: According to them, Ukraine has been able to shoot down around a third of all Kinschal fired into the country since February 2022. Again Focus As recently reported, engineers at the Ukrainian Research Institute for Forensic Expertise have long been in the process of extracting secrets about their weak points from the wreckage of launched hypersonic missiles.
“What we see in the use of Russian so-called high-precision weapons is that there is a lack of accuracy,” says Andriy Kultshitskyi, the head of the institute. As an example of this, he cites the shelling of Kiev at the beginning of January, in which a rocket hit next to an apartment block near the main train station, killing four people. “If they state a target accuracy of seven to ten meters and the rocket then hits at a distance of 50 to 100 meters, that means that there are production problems in the Russian industry.” This doesn’t necessarily have to do with missing components – the Russian defense industry is still powerful.
Lots of mass, little class. At the beginning of January, a Kh-32 struck a field in the Sumy region in northern Ukraine on the border with Russia, says Kultshitskyi. “It just fell out of the sky and broke apart.” (Karsten Hinzmann)
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