Watching from the screens of their monitors and televisions how Russian aircraft in Syria bomb humanitarian convoys and entire cities, especially inquisitive people ask the question: “What stopped the Russians from bombing Ukrainian cities, in particular Kyiv, starting in the spring of 2014?” .
Depo.ua tried to find the answer to this question.
The most common version of why Putin did not give such an order is the factor of pressure on him from the world community - they say that the United States and Western European countries would not forgive him for such a step and the consequences for him could be more global than economic sanctions.
Another version says that Putin did not need either Kyiv or Ukraine as a whole - his main goal was to distract the country, which had finally thrown off the shackles of the bandit regime of Yanukovych and was about to join the family of free European nations, forcing it to think about artificial solutions instead of development the created problem of Donbass separatism.
But the most interesting is the third version, according to which Putin was stopped by the presence in Ukraine of a highly automatic and one of the most powerful air defense systems in Europe. Volunteers from the “Come Back Alive” project recently wrote in detail about this air defense system.
“Incredible but true, since 2012 (!) the Virage system has been deployed in the country. Without delving into numbers and technical calculations, this is a unified control system that includes both detection systems and launchers throughout the country. Our radars they scan the territory of Russia 200 km beyond the border and see what is happening there. “Adult” missile air defense systems are deployed throughout the country and are on alert, ready to open fire. The unified air defense system is, roughly speaking, a “sort of Internet”, a data exchange network, which allows missiles to be aimed from near Kyiv at aircraft spotted by radar somewhere near the Sumy region.
The system is largely secret, but we know that it exists, gentlemen, the Russians, probably even better than us mortals, know that it works. That is why and only why, faced with the likelihood of critical losses during the first attempts at airstrikes, the Russian Aerospace Forces are driving an old aircraft carrier across the sea, bombing hospitals in the city of Aleppo, but not poking their nose into Ukraine,” the volunteers write.
Depo.ua tried to find out what kind of secret and cool “Virazh” system this is? After all, you must admit, all this sounds quite fantastic - while the bandit regime of Yanukovych purposefully destroyed the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the air defense system in some strange way not only survived, but also remained in a state of “one of the best in Europe.” And even if this is so, then a completely logical question arises: where was this air defense system when the Russians transferred their “little green men” to Crimea by military helicopters in March 2014?
As we managed to find out, in fact, not everything is so joyful and optimistic in this area, although the air defense troops have traditionally always had the best funding among all others, and took care of them as much as possible.
Thus, volunteer Marina Komarova wrote back in January of this year that we now have an outdated existing system for managing and alerting units.
“Brigade air defense control posts, division command posts (CP) and battery command posts often fail (their electronic equipment is physically outdated, its repair is not rational) and do not meet modern requirements for organizing and maintaining air defense. Namely: the time of transfer of information from higher The command post (be it target designation or combat control) is too large. And given the modern means of air attack of the Russian Federation, our combat vehicle in such conditions will receive target designation AFTER the completion of the enemy airstrike," Marina described the current state of Ukrainian air defense.
“That’s why the automatic warning system “Virage - Tablet” was adopted. The “Virage” system was installed at the air defense control point of brigades and, in the best case, division command posts. Notification, control and target designation of batteries and platoons, individual combat vehicles, riflemen - anti-aircraft gunners, as before, are carried out only by radio or wired communication. But in this case, portable radio stations do not cover the control distance. To solve this problem, the Virazh developers have proposed the latest control and warning system, namely: providing a link from the platoon commander to the commander of the combat vehicle anti-aircraft squad, a squad of anti-aircraft gunners with a radio modem of the Ruta-DM_2400 mod A type, which transmit information over a distance of up to 5 km (field tests have been carried out) to a tablet computer. At the same time, we get a compact, highly mobile, high-speed information workstation for both the anti-aircraft gunner and commander of any unit. And that’s it – the air defense system is deployed, adjusted and working with 100% efficiency,” Marina Komarova explained on her Facebook page.
We also managed to find an article by the editor-in-chief of Defense Express magazine Sergei Zgurts, dated 2009. In it, Mr. Zgurets writes that almost all air defense systems (anti-aircraft missile systems) that are in service with the Ukrainian army have worked out the established deadlines before major repairs, and development enterprises, manufacturers or repair enterprises that could carry out repairs of anti-aircraft missile weapons There was no new park with a closed production cycle left in Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In such conditions, the military leadership of Ukraine decided that the most optimal way to maintain the combat effectiveness of anti-aircraft missile weapons is to master the restoration and modernization of the S-300P air defense system at domestic facilities. The integrator of this activity was the state enterprise Ukroboronservis, which, in cooperation with enterprises of the defense department, was able to restore the combat effectiveness of four divisions of the S-300 air defense system within a year, but at the time of writing, it had restored only three: two for the Ukrainian army, and the third for sale to Kazakhstan . The reason was banal for those times - the defense department did not have the money to pay for this work.
Mr. Zgurets also notes that the all-weather mobile medium-range anti-aircraft missile system S-300 was created in the 80s to protect the most important administrative, industrial and military facilities from enemy air attacks, including attacks by cruise missiles and ballistic missiles. tactical missiles. The complex had a record short and, at the time of writing, the best deployment time in its class - 5 minutes. He also had the advantage of mobility and the ability to get out of the way of an attack “in front of the very nose” of the enemy and quickly prepare for battle in a new position. The S-300PS self-propelled complex was put into service in 1982 and was equipped with 5V55R missiles, which made it possible to destroy enemy tactical aircraft at a distance of up to 70-75 km.
“It was the S-300PS air defense system, modern systems in the Soviet air defense umbrella, that mainly entered service with air defense units stationed on the territory of Ukraine,” notes Sergei Zgurets.
Taking all this into account, it can be assumed that in terms of hardware, Ukraine actually inherited perhaps the best air defense system in Europe of its time and, at least as of 2009, did not “squander” it. And in terms of software capable of managing this “hardware” to meet the requirements of today, the Virage automatic warning system was adopted relatively recently. Therefore, everything seems to fit together.
However, again, the question regarding Crimea during the events of the stormy spring of 2014 remains unanswered. One of the most common versions here is the lack of political will among the then government leadership. Although we may well never know how it really was - any information that concerns the air defense system is traditionally classified and is leaked into the public domain in very meager quantities.
Lukashenko said that Putin does not need Donbass
[media=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCtHc3hd_QE]
