Ukraine Losing Patience: Give Us The Damn Weapons

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Oliver JJ Lane

The West should hurry up and hand over the “damn” missiles Ukraine demands, their foreign secretary says, remarking: “We need air-defence systems on the frontlines”.

An essential role of the Ukrainian state since even before Russia’s re-invasion in 2022 has been cajoling and even begging the West for more military equipment, but these calls have occasionally tripped into a more demanding mien. That time has rolled around again with one of the nation’s top politicians making strident demands to help stop the bombs falling.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, perhaps the final remaining senior member of Volodymyr Zelensky’s government to regularly wear a suit and tie rather than the near-ubiquitous olive green in public, said in quotes distributed by Ukrainian state media: “Give us the damn Patriots.”

The remarks came in an interview with Politico, and Kuleba explained his demand, speaking of new Russian weapons that were harder to intercept. The answer, he said, was to deploy more advanced air-defence weapons on Ukraine’s frontiers to shoot down the aircraft dropping the bombs, rather than the weapons themselves.

He said: “…If we had enough air defence systems, namely Patriots, we would be able to protect not only the lives of our people, but also our economy from destruction… You cannot jam [the new bombs]. It just falls on your head and destroys everything… We need air-defence systems on the frontlines”.

But such demands may be more easily made than met. The Patriot system, while highly effective, is also extremely expensive and sophisticated, to the point where producing new units to give to Ukraine without leaving large gaps in the West’s own air defence has a lead time of something like two years. There is a Patriot shortage, in effect: the United States only has 60 batteries and these are used to protect its presence all around the globe. Every system redeployed may leave a gap, and they are in such demand now the government can no longer spare unused sets for public display at airshows, as it once did.

Each Patriot battery costs well over a billion dollars and each interceptor missile it fires costs $4 million or more.

Patriot systems in Ukraine already have been the subject of a war of words, between claims and counter claims by Moscow and Kyiv that they have been effective or ineffective, or even that they have been taken out by Russian strikes. Even from the first days Ukraine begged for more Patriot missile batteries, pointing out Ukraine is the largest country in Europe and has a lot of air to defend.

On the actual weapons Ukraine is struggling to defeat — triggering the latest demand for billions more in advanced weapons — Kuleba said they were “massively use upgraded aerial guided bombs”. This likely refers to GPS kits applies to traditional ‘dumb’ bombs of the sort dropped by aircraft going back to the Second World War and beyond, a cost-effective and fast way to upgrade a large stock of obsolete but still deadly munitions held in reserve.

That Russia was using such bombs, which typically comprise of a set of folding glide-wings and a GPS-guided tailfin to direct the munition in flight with a reasonable degree of accuracy was reported as long ago as April 2023, when it was claimed they may have accidentally dropped a malfunctioning one on their own city.

Conceptually, the weapon is not dissimilar to the crude but effective Vietnam-era GBU Paveway and Ukraine has its own 45 mile range version in combat too, deployed against Russia. The kit-converted GPS-guided JDAM-ER bomb was the subject of one of 2023’s Pentagon Leak files, which claimed Russia was having limited success in jamming its guidance system. Russian GPS jamming has been a subject of remark in recent months as it becomes more prevalent in Eastern Europe, and even prompted an official complaint by the British government after an executive jet carrying its Defence Minister was impacted by Russian jamming.

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