By Rostyslav Averchuk
Lviv (EFE).- Russian air defenses remain a primary target of Ukraine’s long-range attacks on both occupied territories and Russia as Kyiv seeks to increase the effectiveness of its strikes against the enemy’s military infrastructure and energy sector to force Moscow into genuine negotiations.
The “Phantom” unit of Ukraine’s Military Intelligence (GUR) claimed on Monday that it has struck three principal elements of Russia’s air-defense network in occupied Donbas, including a command post of the advanced S-400 system, releasing a video of each attack that happened in the last two weeks.
As of Friday, Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) and other units hit a port and military base in Novorosiysk in Russia’s Krasnodar region; a source in defense forces who spoke to several Ukrainian media outlets over the weekend and provided a satellite image of the aftermath said at least four S-400 launchers, the most sophisticated in Russia’s arsenal, and two radars were destroyed.
“Each destroyed system creates a hole in the defense that Ukrainian drones and missiles will definitely exploit,” the source said.
Making the war hurt
Raising the cost of the war for Russia has long been a cornerstone of Ukraine’s strategy, despite the shortage of its own long-range weapons and restrictions imposed by foreign partners on the use of Western-supplied ones.
Ukraine’s systematic hunting of Russian air defenses is expected to make its aerial campaign progressively more effective, even though it has so far failed to halt Russia’s advances in eastern and southern Ukraine.
“Air-defense systems are among the most complex military equipment and cannot be produced quickly in large quantities,” Oleksandr Kovalenko, military analyst with the Information Resistance Group, told EFE.
The weakening of Russia’s air-defense umbrella forces Moscow to reach for the stock of outdated Soviet-era systems and prioritise what it protects.
Every successful Ukrainian strike either pulls systems away from the front line (where they shield troops from aircraft and drones) or leaves another strategic asset more vulnerable.
Given the vast size of Russian territory, full coverage is impossible; most defenses concentrate around Moscow, St Petersburg, the frontline, and key military sites, analysts said.
It leaves oil refineries and the broader energy sector increasingly exposed, raising hopes that cumulative losses will become intolerable for the Kremlin and much of the Russian population.
So far, only those directly involved in the war (primarily soldiers and their families) have felt its impact, yet this is bound to change this winter as Ukraine has finally started striking Russia’s electricity grid, Yevguen Dykyi, a Ukrainian army veteran and military analyst, told the UNIAN news agency.
“The more ordinary Russians feel the consequences of the war their leaders started, the less they will support or tolerate it,” he underlined.
Missiles still needed
Weakening Russia’s air defenses is only part of the equation.
Although Ukrainian long-range drones, launched in dozens almost every night, have become more effective since the summer, their destructive potential remains limited compared with missiles, which can carry explosive payloads 10 times as large, Oleksiy Melnyk, a military expert at the Razumkov Center, told EFE.
Ukraine seeks to ramp up the production of its own Neptune and Flamingo missiles, some of which have already been used against Russian targets, according to Kyiv.
Ukrainian military experts consider a modification of the former to have been used in Friday’s strike against Novorosiysk, following a video of the Neptune launch posted by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on the same day.
However, reports of their use remain scarce, suggesting output has not yet reached the scale necessary to tip the scales in Ukraine’s favour in the long-range war, with more trials and more investment needed.
In such circumstances, receiving United States Tomahawk and German Taurus missiles, so far denied by Washington and Berlin, as well as additional British Storm Shadow missiles, is essential to increase Ukraine’s chances of convincing Russia to sit at the negotiation table, Melnyk stressed. EFE
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