FLIAR FIGHTER Ukrainian Air Force jets punish work, Juice says. “You have to be ready to leave at any time, in all conditions,” said the pilot, who asked to be identified by his call sign. When the alarm sounds, Juice only has minutes to grab his gear, jump into the cockpit, rev up. MIg-29 and takeoff. Because the Russians often attack at night, he wears his flight suit to bed. Worse, however, is spending hours in the skies chasing missiles or drones only to have each one elude you. “Then after landing you open your smartphone and you see explosions in Kyiv, or explosions in other cities, and you couldn’t save those lives,” he says. “Or you land at your base and there’s no power there because a Russian cruise missile has destroyed a power plant.”
On October 31, as Russia launched a swarm of missiles against Ukraine, Juice was in the air again. Flying near a major city (he can’t tell which), he repeatedly locked onto a Russian cruise missile. There was a problem. The Soviet era R-27 missiles carried by his aircraft are unable to track their target on their own. Instead, they require the aircraft to keep it in a radar lock until impact. If the lock fails, the R-27 risks looking for other targets, including buildings. “That’s why it’s too dangerous over a city. You are responsible for all lives on the ground,” Juice says. He had a few good chances, but he never shot. Juice relayed his target to nearby ground air defense, landed his plane, and hoped for the best.
In the past month alone, Russian cruise missiles and Iranian-made Shahed-136 munitions, or suicide bombers, have killed two dozen people and damaged up to 40% of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. But the country is getting a lot better at knocking them out of the sky. On October 10, almost half of the missiles and drones launched by Russia against Ukraine evaded the country’s defenses; Explosions rocked Kyiv for the first time in months. Less than a month later, Ukraine claims to have shot down more than 80% of the drones and missiles heading towards it. Of the 55 missiles Russia launched at Ukraine on Oct. 31, the day Juice was jammed, 45 were intercepted, according to the Ukrainian Air Force.
The new weapons of the Western allies are one of the reasons. At the beginning of October, Ukraine received an advance IRIS–J Germany system. Three more are on the way. The one deployed has so far shot down all projectiles in its path, the Ukrainians say. A S-300 battery delivered earlier this year from Slovakia was also remarkably efficient. America says Ukraine is about to have two NASAMS systems, developed by Kongsberg, a Norwegian aerospace company, and Raytheon, an American company; he is trying to expedite the delivery of six more. Ukrainian officials tentatively suggest the former may already be on the ground. “Who knows? Maybe they’re here,” says Denis, an air defense officer who oversaw NASAMS training of a group of Ukrainian operators in Norway.
Ukrainian officers say they have learned to predict where drones and missiles are fired from and the routes they may take, and to retool their own defenses accordingly. Sometimes the Russians try to confuse Ukrainians by launching missiles from different locations or programming them to fly in circles, says Yuriy Ignat, an air force spokesman. “And we try to move our air defenses to mislead them,” he adds. “It’s also an art, to be in the right place at the right time.” Lives are at stake every time. Outside the cafe where the interview took place, in the western town of Vinnytsia, a crater and the wreckage of an office building and a concert hall marked the spots where three Russian cruise missiles struck during the summer, killing 28 people.
The newly arrived weapons have had an impact, but they are too few, according to Ukrainian officials. Soviet-era equipment forms the bulk of Ukraine’s defenses. “We are fighting with weapons from the last millennium against weapons produced two years ago,” says Mr. Ignat. Ukrainian radars have trouble tracking cruise missiles. His BUK-M1 missile launchers are devilishly difficult to maneuver and labor intensive. “You have all these old indicators, monitors, hundreds of buttons and screens,” says Ignat. “The risk of human error is high.”
This is not the case with the new systems. “The first time I sat in the NASAMS command post, it only took a few minutes to understand how the system works,” explains Denis, the air defense officer. It took only a few weeks to train Ukrainian operators in Norway, which is remarkable for such a program, he says. But the biggest advantage the new weapons would offer Ukraine is a chance to shield parts of the country. Currently, instead of a single air defense network, Ukraine has a hodgepodge of systems that cannot exchange data. Systems like the BUK-M1 or the S-300 can only fire at the target that appears on its own radar. But NASAMS and IRIS–J are interoperable. A target detected by one can be destroyed by the other, although each launcher can only engage targets about 40 km away
Even as Ukraine repairs its defenses, new threats are surfacing. Ukrainian officials said they are aware of Russian plans to acquire Fateh-110 and Zolfaghar ballistic missiles from Iran, and ship them by air to Crimea and by sea to Russian Caspian ports. “We know that arrangements are already in place,” says Vadym Skibitskiy, deputy head of Ukrainian military intelligence. He and others acknowledge that Ukraine has no effective protection against Iranian missiles, which strike targets at much higher speeds than cruise missiles or drones, or similar Iskander missiles that Russia has. already used in Ukraine. Mr Skibitskiy says the Russians launched 25 Iskanders in October. Ukraine was only able to intercept three. The country is also defenseless against the Kinzhal hypersonic missiles that Russia has mounted on some of its fighter jets.
So far, Russia’s use of these missiles has been limited only by scarcity. “The Russians are desperately short of ammunition,” said a Western official. Mr. Skibitskiy estimates that there are only 120 Iskanders left in Russia. Other sources put the number of Kinzhal at around 40. With its stockpiles replenished by the Iranians, however, Russia could redouble its attacks. Now more than ever, officials in Kyiv say, Ukraine needs weapons capable of shooting down ballistic missiles, like the US Patriot system. They also want longer range rockets like America’s ATACMS, which they hope to use to strike command centers hundreds of miles behind enemy lines. “The best protection against these missiles is to destroy them where they are launched”, explains Mr. Ignat. America refused to provide ATACMSfearing that it could be used on targets inside Russian territory.
Juice says Ukraine can’t do much with old guns. The country’s aging warplanes, including Soviet-made ones MIg-29 and Su-27 fighters even fight against Shahed drones, which have a small radar section and move as fast as a passenger car. Without modern jets, the Ukrainian Air Force cannot compete with the Russian Air Force or its missiles: “We have a lot of highly skilled pilots and ground crew, but our equipment is not not good enough.” But at least Juice got some good news when he landed after the Halloween Russian barrage. A ground system shot down the missile that had eluded it in the sky.■