With each new atrocity in Russia, the West has sent new waves of more modern and powerful weapons to Ukraine. The latest are anti-aircraft batteries called Nasams, made in the US and Norway, and Iris-T, made in Germany. The idea is to try to change the course of the war by protecting the population of cities and saving the country’s electrical and water infrastructure from constant Russian missile attacks.
The Nassams (National Advanced System) Air-to-Air Missiles) is a battery of six short- and medium-range missile launchers (approximately 50 km) capable of destroying missiles. cruisers, drones and aircraft. Washington has promised to deliver two batteries in the coming weeks and another six in the near future.
The Iris-T SLM is a German missile battery, similar to the Nassams, but so modern that it has not yet been tested in combat. It is formed by at least three missile launchers capable of hitting targets at 40 km away and is considered the state of the art of this type. of weaponry. One is already in Ukraine and the other is due next year.
“At the beginning of the war, we asked our Western allies to close the skies,” he told the War Games column. , Serhii Bratchuk, spokesman for the Military Administration of Odesa, Ukraine.
He referred to the request that the Ukrainians made to NATO (Western military alliance) to create a no-fly zone over the Ukraine. The idea was to prevent Russia from using missiles and military aircraft, but the request was not accepted – because combats between NATO and Russian pilots could suck NATO into the conflict and trigger a new world war.
“But now things have changed. We are asking them for modern anti-aircraft and anti-missile defense systems, so that we can defend ourselves,” Bratchuk said.
“Right now, Ukraine is not just by defending ourselves, or defending Europe, we are protecting the whole world against Russian aggression, including Brazil, and that’s why this support is so crucial and important,” he said.
Critics of Ukraine and its allies claim that NATO would have provoked the war by expanding towards countries that Russia believed to be its area of influence. These often compare the current scenario to the Cuban missile crisis, when in 1962 the then Soviet Union began installing missiles on the island near the United States.
Contu However, the missile crisis was resolved diplomatically and did not result in a war between powers. In 2022, Moscow opted for the military route to resolve what it considered aggression.
But this is a limited view of the process. In an essay published in 1962, Russian President Vladimir Putin already outlined his expansionist intentions to bring Russia’s borders to regions that were part of the country in its imperial era, between the centuries 18 and 20.
In the essay, Putin talks about the supposed right to protect Russian citizens in territories that today belong to countries like Ukraine, Moldova and Kazakhstan.
But tsarist Russia it totally or partially dominated territories that today belong to countries such as Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Poland, Ukraine, Finland, Moldova, Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and even Alaska. In other words, it is not known how far Putin wanted to go until he ran into Ukrainian and Western resistance.
The evolution of arms shipments
Without belittling the bravery of the Ukrainian soldiers, it is possible to say: yes, this is also a kind of proxy war, where Russia and NATO face each other indirectly.
Even before the invasion, in 24 In February, Western technology companies helped the Ukrainian government to transfer their data stored in
data centers (computer centers) for equipment spread across Europe and the United States – the so-called cloud. Thus, the first bombings that hit public buildings in the country were not able to stop transport systems, financial and strategic areas for the functioning of the country. This was one of the first aid shipments from the West.
When tank columns headed for Kyiv in February, after the invasion began, Ukraine received modern bazookas (M72) and the so-called Javelins – portable rocket launchers capable of destroying Russian “tanks” with relative ease. Russian attack helicopters were countered with Stinger and Starstreak portable surface-to-air missiles , also sent by the United States and the United Kingdom.
But successive Ukrainian requests to close the skies were ignored. Plans to transfer Polish fighter jets to Ukraine were abandoned in the face of Russian threats of escalation of the war to other European countries.
After suffering successive casualties, Russian troops withdrew from the north of the country without being able to take Kyiv at the end of March. murders and torture revealed as more than 180 towns and cities were liberated caused revulsion in the West. This increased the appetite of Washington and its allies to supply Ukraine with new and more potent weapons.
A red line, previously unthinkable to cross, was widened with the deployment of tanks to Ukraine and Soviet-designed anti-aircraft batteries that belonged to NATO countries, in addition to artillery pieces, naval missiles and kamikaze drones.
At the beginning of the war, Ukrainian weapons – and even the uniforms of soldiers – were 72% inherited from the Soviet period. Today, Ukrainian forces look much more like standard NATO armies, but with a mix of weapon types that will cause a maintenance and logistical nightmare in the future.
From April, the Ukrainian forces Russian forces turned to the Donbas region in the east. The numerical superiority of Moscow’s artillery provided rapid advances and a sense of hopeless defeat for Ukraine. The Russians threw showers of grenades from a distance and the Ukrainians couldn’t fight back. Its fighters could no longer even see the Russians, who fired the grenades from a distance.
The response of the West was to extend the arms frontier even further. Artillery pieces equal to Russia, the so-called American Triple Sevens, began to arrive in Ukraine.
But the weapon that turned the game around was the American Himars M142 (acronym for High Mobility Artillery Rocket System). About 20 of them would have been sent to Ukraine. They are more modern artillery weapons than those used by the Russians. With their high accuracy, they allowed the Ukrainians to shoot down enemy batteries, ammunition depots and command posts located more than 70 km away. The tables began to turn.
Thanks to Western intelligence information, the Ukrainians launched a major counteroffensive in the northeast of the country in September, liberating virtually the entire province of Kharkiv and advancing to reconquer territories taken by the Russians. in Luhansk.
This counteroffensive took vast regions in a few weeks thanks to a German artillery tank called Gepard. Advancing alongside conventional armored vehicles, it provided anti-aircraft protection for the rapid Ukrainian maneuver.
Russia responded with a mobilization of more than 300 ) thousand recruits and with massive missile attacks on cities and infrastructure for the generation and distribution of electricity and water from 10 of October.
Ukraine says that 40% of its electrical structures were destroyed and systems of scheduled blackouts began to be implemented to save energy. Only last Thursday (3), more than 4.5 million people were left without electricity after Russian attacks.
It is in this context that the shipments of Nassams and Iris-T emerged: to avoid that the population be punished with bombings of cities and the lack of electricity and water in the harsh European winter.
Until then, Ukraine had S-type anti-aircraft defenses-300 (similar to those used by Russia). They are formidable for taking down medium to long-range planes, but not the ideal weapon for containing cruise missiles. Often, fighter pilots took off on near-suicide missions to try to shoot down Russian missiles before they hit cities.
The new American and German anti-aircraft batteries will be used to defend against these missiles. According to a Ukrainian government survey, Russia has launched more than 4.500 cruise missiles against Ukraine since the beginning of the war. It has become common in Ukrainian cities to hear warnings of air strikes and then the sound of explosions – which could be the missile being shot down or hitting its target.
In addition, there is the threat of kamikaze drones, Shahed type, sold to Russia by Iran. They are small planes loaded with explosives equivalent to three artillery shells that maneuver through the air until they hit their target. About 2.500 were traded with Russia and so far at least 180 of them have been released. Ukraine claims to have shot down around 300.
The defense against drones is done with all kinds of artillery, from the most advanced to portable anti-aircraft missile launchers.
To defend critical structures for power generation and food distribution for domestic consumption and export, Ukraine has used, among other resources, Gepard armored vehicles, aimed at air defense. The problem is that the ammunition for these armored vehicles is running out. And that’s where Brazil is involved.
Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov appealed to the Brazilian government and people to send this type of ammunition to Ukraine to defend its electrical structure and food distribution logistics. According to him, only Brazil and Switzerland have enough of these ammunition for immediate help.
The problem is that Brazil’s weak point is anti-aircraft defense. The country only has short-range equipment and depends almost entirely on Air Force planes to fulfill the role. Other than that, the country doesn’t want to look bad with Russia for not having fertilizer supplies cut.
Full defense?
Even if Ukraine got enough ammunition from Brazil and the Nassams and Iris-T systems would it be completely protected from air attacks?
Not necessarily. The challenge of air defenses is to deal with a large number of missiles and drones acting at the same time. Thus, they can undergo a process called saturation. Russia appears to be suffering from a shortage of missiles and drones, but has struck supply deals with Iran.
In addition, Moscow has hypersonic missile technology. To date, there are no reports that missiles of this type have been intercepted by any known anti-aircraft defense.
In theory, anti-aircraft batteries would also not be able to protect Ukraine against the use of tactical nuclear weapons ( destruction capacity limited to one-tenth or half of the destructive power of the Hiroshima bomb). These weapons can be fired not only from hypersonic missiles, but also from artillery shells and in large quantities.
In other words, it is currently not possible to prevent a nuclear attack with anti-aircraft defenses, but rather with nuclear or conventional deterrence and political pressure.
Thus, the new shipments of armaments are much more focused on solving an immediate problem in Ukraine: preventing the population from suffering even greater suffering with bombings and the lack of of energy during winter.