For experts it is a formidable defense system, but field results show that it is also vulnerable to some old Western missiles. Three days ago, Ukrainian military forces hit Russia’s S-400 air defense systems in Crimea, near Dzhankoi, with a missile attack during the night. The Russian S-400 is considered one of the most advanced air defense systems in the world, but during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine several units were destroyed, even using older Western weapons that it should be able to handle. For analysts, this shows that it is not infallible and that the possibilities of neutralizing it are concrete: “The system is clearly very effective – they say – but it has some weaknesses that Ukraine has been able to exploit”.
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Attacks
The head of Rosoboronexport, the Russian state military company that oversees the majority of Russian military exports, in February called it the “best long-range air defense system in the world.” However, while losses have been relatively rare, especially compared to other systems such as Russian tanks and armored vehicles, the system has not always lived up to expectations. The Institute for the Study of War, the US think tank, points out that the attack would signal that Russian air defenses in Crimea may be suffering from “systemic tactical failures”. There are indeed precedents: Ukrainian intelligence announced that an S-400 system was damaged within Russian borders in a drone attack in September, while last April in Crimea four S-400 launchers «were destroyed or seriously damaged.” And the ones that hit were older weapons than the S-400s, which therefore should have been able to neutralize. The Russian Telegram channel VChK-OGPU, citing sources from the Russian police and military agencies, said that Atacms, tactical ballistic missiles developed by the United States in service since 1986, were used in the attack. Fredrik Mertens, analyst at the Center for Hague strategic studies, explains to Business Insider that the S-400s appear to have “difficulty intercepting ballistic missiles”, contrary to what the US-made Patriots have shown they can do. For George Barros, a Russian analyst at the ISW, said this week that the problem for Moscow could worsen: «The new authorizations granted by some allies to allow Ukraine to use Western-supplied weapons to strike military targets in Russia will put its S-400s and other air defenses, those that were once beyond Ukraine’s range, are at risk.”
Advanced system
The S-400, produced by Almaz-Antey, was developed in response to President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), as Star Wars notes. The S-400 program has been in development since the 1980s and, as Insider Over writes in an in-depth article, has apparently undergone considerable evolution over time, interrupting the traditional tie between Russian and Western defense systems. «Until recently, each Russian system had a direct and unique Western counterpart, and vice versa: well, the S-400 comprises three completely independent missiles, only two of which are truly new, and the most widely publicized of the new missiles may not see never operational deployments”, asserts Insider Over. The S-400 was developed as an upgrade to the S-300 series of surface-to-air missile systems. The system entered service in April 2007, and the first S-400 was deployed in combat in August 2007. Russia has established four S-400 regiments to defend national airspace in the Moscow region, Kaliningrad and the Eastern Military District. The S-400 presents itself as the most advanced mass-produced air defense missile system in the world, it can shoot down targets moving at almost double the speed of American systems. It can engage with twice as many targets: it locates a target at a distance of 600 kilometers and can destroy at a distance of 400 kilometers. It is capable of locating an aircraft at 180 kilometers and an enemy missile at 100 kilometers, shooting down targets flying from 10 meters up to 30 kilometers, while Patriot PAC-3 destroys the lowest target at a height of 50 meters . Beyond the technical reasons, Insider Over explains, the reason for the success of the Russian defense system lies in its relatively low price: it is estimated around 500 million dollars compared to a range of 1/3 million dollars for the equivalent American, more expensive for collateral maintenance costs. But now even the shield provided by the S-400 shows its fragility.
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