It was meant to be the Russian “wonder weapon,” but it turned out to be just another example of Vladimir Putin’s military over-promising and under-delivering.
Russian President Vladimir Putin attends the Supreme Economic Eurasian Council at the Grand Kremlin Palace on Thursday in Moscow.
That all changed when Ukraine received U.S.-manufactured Patriot PAC-2 and PAC-3 air defense systems in April. The PAC-3, the latest version of the venerable American system, was originally developed as part of America’s Strategic Defense Initiative, nicknamed “Star Wars” by its critics, first introduced in the early 1980s by President Ronald Reagan to counter ballistic missiles.
During the May 16 attack, which directly targeted the Patriot system, part of the platform suffered “minor” damage, according to U.S. officials, that was repaired within a day. The Kremlin, of course, has maintained the fiction that all its missiles successfully hit their targets.
Putin’s claims relied on confusion over the definition of “hypersonic” and also the conflation of the Kinzhal with the newer generations of hypersonic weapons. Hypersonic cruise missiles and hypersonic glide vehicles have the ability to maneuver — to evade air defenses, for example — at speeds in excess of Mach 5, something the Kinzhal cannot do. This makes new-generation hypersonic weapons much more difficult to intercept than traditional ballistic missiles traveling at hypersonic speeds.
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