It’s a good article. But the reality is that the Russian missiles making headlines don’t meet the specs of the article. Ukraine is shooting them down just fine using decades old technology.
It is not publicly known whether this is true.
The Ukrainians claim they shot down 6 of 6 Kinzhal missiles over Kiev in one night with a Patriot battery. In the available videos of the event, all that can be seen is that a few dozen air defense missiles were fired, and that something got through and struck the general location where the air defense battery was.
A very healthy dose of skepticism is warranted about claims made in wartime by interested parties.
Note also that they purposefully forbid videos of air defenses to avoid showing where air defenses are.
At least one Kinzhal was confirmed shot down earlier before the wave of 6 or so.
> Note also that they purposefully forbid videos of air defenses to avoid showing where air defenses are.
This has not prevented videos from leaking, as in this case.
> At least one Kinzhal was confirmed shot down earlier before the wave of 6 or so.
Independently confirmed, or claimed? This gets to my initial point, that one should be extremely skeptical about unverifiable claims made by both sides.
The best case you can make for Russia is that the Kinzhal developers actually did commit treason but in a way that was unrelated to the Kinzhal missiles not being effective which is… laughable
The governments of both countries are being "selective" about the truth and imposing censorship by force. Which makes sense at times of war!
Nobody here should take anything released by the involved parties (and their sponsors) as gospel. It's war. War is about deception.
What is the purpose of arresting your missile scientists for treason? What’s your best case interpretation?
The problem is both, and Ukraine is arresting people who film them. It's martial law, both countries are at war and truth suffers (understandably).
> What is the purpose of arresting your missile scientists for treason? What’s your best case interpretation?
I don't know, I would guess:
- They said something about the Khinzal that downplays the importance of the weapon.
- They said something that would help Ukraine better counter them.
- They said something against Putin or the military invasion.
What they very likely didn't say is that the Khinzal is a hypersonic maneuverable weapon, which is the point of TFA you're commenting about.
They’re getting arrested because they promised Putin an unstoppable weapon and now he looks like a dumbass.
It's part of the reason why the initial invasion went so terribly; Putin's analysts told him Kyiv would bend over immediately, and that the public would welcome them as liberators.
Putin smells so much of his own farts that he bought it completely. The analysts were then shocked when Putin said "Okay, invasion today"
"Article 353. Planning, Preparing, Initiating, or Waging War of Aggression
1. Planning, preparing, or initiating a war of aggression - is punishable by deprivation of liberty for a term of seven to fifteen years.
2. Waging a war of aggression - is punishable by deprivation of liberty for a term of ten to twenty years."
When in modern times has an aggressor ever framed the aggression in terms different from a righteous defense?
As things are, if he's still alive by the time regime in Russia changes, that will probably be (one of) the law he will be prosecuted under.
You are jumping to wildly unsupported conclusions.
Any of my guesses is more likely.
"This enables the missile to penetrate through all existing and projected air defense systems and deliver a nuclear or conventional warhead over a distance in excess of two thousand kilometers" - [1]
Either he overhyped it, or he was misled.
[1] - https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/defense/2018-03-02/p...
This doesn't conclusively demonstrate that; an intercepted missile or drone can still easily go kaboom when the pieces hit the ground. The footage has a building between the explosion and the camera.
> Independently confirmed, or claimed?
There's at least photos of an apparently-downed Khinzal. There are no photos yet of a destroyed Patriot.
Doesn't look much like anything one of us could recognize though. We are not experts.
More importantly, even if it is a downed Khinzal, it doesn't matter for the article, which is about hypersonic maneuverable weapons, which the Khinzal is not. So the initial post in this thread is wrong.
Articles about it cite said experts analyzing the photos.
It pays for Ukraine to claim they are easily downing Khinzals and minimizing their own casualties/hits. I don't blame them for this, misinformation and demoralizing the enemy is key. The Russians are doing the same on their side. Both apply military secrecy and censorship on their own camps.
"Expert" opinion shouldn't be taken as non-biased here, either.
Yes, fog of war exists. Yes, both sides are going to misdirect and misinform for a variety of reasons, both good and bad. We won't know quite a few facts until after the war when the history books are written, and we won't know some of them ever.
Anyone inclined to see the air defense video as proof of a Patriot being taken out is exercising motivated thinking. Anyone inclined to take Ukrainian claims to having downed everything is doing the same thing. Right now, what we can safely conclude is a) Ukrainian air defense seems thus far to be fairly effective and b) Russian Khinzals don't appear to be a game-changer at this time.
I didn't ask for experts, I said no-one here is one. I also said who knows what the wreckage is? If you ask pro Ukraine experts, they'll say it's a Khinzal. If you ask pro Russians, it's a bomb fragment or whatever.
More importantly, this doesn't tell us anything about hypersonic maneuverable weapons. We already know the Khinzal isn't one. Yes, the Kremlin is making a fuss about their hypersonic weapons capability, part of their infowar campaign. TFA explains that hypersonics are nothing new and that they can be countered.
> a) Ukrainian air defense seems thus far to be fairly effective and b) Russian Khinzals don't appear to be a game-changer at this time.
No, I cannot "safely" conclude anything about either, and neither can you. Both seem likely, but "likely" and "true" are so hard to say in this war were everyone is lying through their teeth.
It can be very difficult for radars to track objects coming in from a high angle of attack and low angle of attack simultaneously, so IMO the failure to intercept makes more sense from that perspective as well.
The article explicitly states, one paragraph later than the beginning, that "about half of that is just plain wrong".
The author also explains the hypersonic missiles are nothing new, that they are old tech, and that the real threat would be maneuverable hypersonic missiles, which the Khinzal is not. The Khinzal is ballistic.
So when the author writes of the threat of maneuverable hypersonics, and you say "The non-ballistic variety that Russia claimed was unstoppable [...]", you are both speaking of different kinds of weapons with different capabilities. The Khinzal is old tech for which there are counters. The author is speaking of newer tech for which there are fewer counters.
> These are specifically designed for ballistic threats, which are common, and their extreme effectiveness is precisely why Russia and China have invested in something else.
And
> Russia used hypersonic missiles against Ukraine” — alarming! The average member of the public, as well as many policymakers, now understand that these things are dangerous because they are just too fast to shoot down. Clearly something needs to be done… (sarcastic)
It really ought to make clear explicitly in the article that the missiles it referred to in the beginning are NOT what it spends the rest of the article discussing.
It confused me at least. Because, without doing further research, I assumed the Kinzhals must not be ballistic because they’re indirectly referenced in an article about maneuverable missiles!
It doesn't mention the Khinzal by name, true.
But whatever. Semantics at this point.