Kyiv, Ukraine – As Washington’s Middle Eastern allies use US-made Patriot air defence systems to shoot down Iranian missiles and drones, Ukraine is about to face a dire shortage of ammunition for them.
Experts have told Al Jazeera that Russian President Vladimir Putin is sure to exploit the shortage of pricey guided missiles the truck-mounted Patriots launch at machinegun speed to down his pride and joy, Russia’s ballistic missiles that he once declared were “indestructible”.
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The Patriots were developed in the 1970s to down Soviet missiles whose modifications Russia still rains on Ukraine.
Their supply to Ukraine began in 2023 and was initially limited to several batteries stationed in the capital, Kyiv. The location of the systems was constantly changed to protect them from Russian attacks.
The Patriots “have undoubtedly been the most important defence element, especially for cities with more than a million residents, Kyiv in particular, even though they couldn’t intercept all Russian missiles,” Nikolay Mitrokhin of Germany’s Bremen University told Al Jazeera.
But a shortage underscores a deeper problem – poor defence of Ukraine’s infrastructure, including power generation and transmission stations, against Russian strikes, he added.
With or without the guided missiles, Ukraine’s energy infrastructure is “doomed,” because even though Russia would not dare strike Ukrainian nuclear power stations, the Patriot systems cannot protect all key transmission lines, he said.
“The key question is how to stop Russia from manufacturing and using missiles, not about how many more guided missiles or Patriot systems Ukraine needs,” he concluded.
The Patriots utilise advanced radars to detect targets flying at supersonic speeds and launch their guided missiles with the sound that resembles super-fast electronic beats – up to 32 missiles per minute.
But the noise – along with thunderous shockwaves that follow split-second, sun-bright explosions – made Ukrainians feel safe during harrowing, hours-long Russian assaults that have targeted civilian areas and involve hundreds of drones and dozens of missiles.
Within weeks after their deployment, the Patriots intercepted Russia’s Kinzhal (Dagger) intercontinental ballistic missiles that are launched by supersonic fighter jets and fly in the Earth’s stratosphere.
The interceptions disproved Putin’s earlier claims that the Kinzhals made any Western air defence systems “useless”.
The safety, however, came with a hefty price tag – each Patriot guided missile costs several million dollars, and their manufacturing never exceeded more than 900 units a year.
‘Tomorrow’s problem’
Some 800 guided missiles have been used to repel Iranian aerial attacks within just three days after Tehran began raining its missiles and drones on almost a dozen nations, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Thursday.
“Ukraine has never had this many missiles to repel attacks,” Zelenskyy said, reiterating his readiness to dispatch Ukrainian experts and drone interceptors to help Gulf nations counter the attacks.
The shortage of guided missiles is, however, not immediate and may occur in several weeks.
“This is not today’s problem, this is tomorrow’s problem,” Volodymyr Fesenko, head of the Kyiv-based Center for Applied Political Studies (Penta) think tank, told Al Jazeera.
But the problem may become catastrophic.
In recent days, Moscow stopped attacking Ukraine with drones and missiles – a sign of amassing them for massive raids in the near future, Fesenko said.
“Russia’s most obvious actions would be to bleed Ukraine’s stock of Patriot missiles dry to inflict maximal damage on us through massive missile attacks,” he said.
Kyiv already faces a less critical problem with the shortage of missiles for Western-supplied F-16 fighter jets that proved effective in downing Russian missiles.
“The problem is less critical, but also vital for us,” Fesenko said.
Ukraine has experienced a shortage of Patriot missiles before.
Last summer, when the US and Israel struck Iranian nuclear sites, the Pentagon stopped the Patriot missiles’ supply as it was “auditing” its own stocks.
The suspension of Patriot interceptors and HIMARS multiple rocket launchers left Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, including thermal power stations and transport hubs, more vulnerable to Russian attacks.
Russia’s tactics of indiscriminate aerial strikes have been tried and tested over the past four years.
Moscow starts an air raid with drones and decoy drones to make Ukrainian air defence units use as many Patriot missiles as possible.
It then launches several more waves of attack drones and ballistic and cruise missiles.
As to upcoming attacks, “the question is that this time, it won’t be energy infrastructure, but whatever other targets the Kremlin will want to choose”, Kyiv-based analyst Igar Tyshkevych told Al Jazeera.
He referred to devastating attacks on energy and central heating facilities that left millions of Ukrainians without power and heat this winter, triggering health problems and deaths from hypothermia.
Russia already targets sites unprotected by Patriots: Military expert
Meanwhile, Israel and the European nations that pledged to transfer their stock of Patriot missiles to Ukraine are reluctant to do so now.
“Considering the general instability, I don’t think that many nations will open up their stock and pass it on to us,” Tyshkevich said.
Since the supplies of Patriots began, the US-Russian technological battle has kept raging on, according to the former deputy head of Ukraine’s general staff of armed forces, who for decades specialised in air defence.
“There is a confrontation in engineering,” Lieutenant-General Ihor Romanenko told Al Jazeera.
“Russians change something, Americans together with our experts change something else, because remaining on the old [technological] level means losing the battle before it begins.”
Russian engineers “modified software making the [Iskander-M] missiles able to manoeuvre mid-air, and the modernisation largely complicated the operation of the few Patriot systems that we have to destroy them,” Romanenko said.
The Patriots, however, have not become a Ukraine-wide aegis against the Russian strikes.
Ukraine has fewer than a dozen batteries, while Kyiv said it needed at least 25.
Russians “already know that we have but a few Patriot batteries against their ballistic missiles, so they were hitting the sites that had not been covered by the Patriots, or where they had not been deployed,” Romanenko said.
Luckily, Ukraine has an alternative.
A handful of French-Italian SAMP/T systems with solid-fuel anti-aircraft missiles have been deployed to Ukraine since 2023 and showed the advantages of their radars and “engagement logic” with high-speed targets.
While a Patriot battery requires up to 90 support servicemen and takes half an hour to deploy, SAMP/Ts require about a dozen.
But their ability to down modified Russian missiles will have to be battle-tested, Romanenko said.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s increasingly daring drone and missile strikes deep inside Russia destroy or damage their arm depots and plants producing drones and missiles.
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