Ukraine is running low on vital supplies for its air defense systems, Kyiv’s military warned, following days of intensive Russian aerial bombardment that has wrought destruction across the country.
Ukraine has enough ammunition for its man-portable air defense systems to “withstand the next few powerful attacks,” Sergiy Nayev, commander of the joint forces of the armed forces of Ukraine overseeing mobile air defenses in northern Ukraine and Kyiv, told Agence France-Presse on Wednesday.
Man-portable air defenses are part of a wider network of defenses and are often used to shoot down the Iranian-designed Shahed loitering munitions that Moscow has launched almost nightly for close to 23 months. They work alongside larger systems such as the United States-supplied Patriot batteries Ukraine first received last year.
Alongside Shahed drone strikes, Russia has repeatedly hammered Ukraine with waves of missile barrages since December 29 that only larger air defense systems can intercept. On January 2, Ukraine said it had intercepted all 10 hypersonic Kinzhal missiles Russia fired at the country’s capital in an early morning attack.
“This is a record,” Ukraine’s top soldier, General Valery Zaluzhny, said in a post on social media. “If the missiles hit their targets, the consequences would be catastrophic.”
Ukraine’s military also said on Tuesday that Russia had launched a “massive” air assault across the country, adding that Kyiv downed 72 missiles of various types.
Ukrainian officials compared the strikes to those on December 29, which Kyiv described as the most intensive Russian strike campaign of the nearly two-year war. Ukraine reported many more incoming missiles in the following days.
Russia is attempting to deplete Ukraine’s air defenses, meaning Kyiv’s priority is keeping them functional with ammunition supplies, Nayev said.
“Of course, we would like more missiles for Patriots and the systems themselves,” he added.
But Ukraine’s air defenses can’t work without interceptor missiles: “In the medium and long term, we need help from Western countries to replenish the missile stock,” Nayev said.
Further aid to Ukraine from the U.S. hangs in the balance. In late December, the Biden administration released the last tranche of military aid, worth approximately $250 million, that Washington can commit to Kyiv without further congressional approval.
Continuing the flow of military supplies to Ukraine has become an increasingly sticky subject for U.S. lawmakers. There is broad support for Ukraine’s war effort, but Republicans wanting tighter security measures at the U.S. southern border have blocked new aid spending for Kyiv.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has already secured the promise of additional Patriot systems for the winter but did not specify how many Ukraine is to receive and from which countries, nor when they would arrive.
Sean Gallup/Getty Images
Considered the gold standard of air defense, the Patriot air defense systems Kyiv already has have proved wildly successful. Ukraine said in May 2023 that it had used a Patriot system to shoot down Russia’s Kinzhal ballistic missiles, also known as “Killjoy” or “Dagger” in Western parlance.
Russia had touted the Kinzhal as an unstoppable hypersonic weapon even the Patriot could not intercept. It was unveiled by Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2018 as part of a raft of “next generation” weapons, and Moscow has said it has a range of up to 1,240 miles, traveling at speeds of up to 10 times the speed of sound.
But Western experts have long said that Moscow’s labeling of the missile as hypersonic is misleading and that air defenses can still shoot down the Kinzhal before it reaches its target.
In October, the British Defense Ministry said the Kinzhal “effectively remains in operational testing, with its performance in Ukraine to date being poor.” The U.K. government said it is still “highly capable on paper,” but “there almost certainly needs to be significant improvement in how Russia uses it” to wield it as designed.
A spokesperson for Ukraine’s air force had said on December 31 that Ukraine’s Patriot had downed 15 Kinzhal missiles throughout the year.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.