About the SourceThe recent Pentagon leaks showed Ukraine’s possible defense missile shortage. Trent Telenko, an American military expert and retired US Department of Defense civil servant, analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of Ukraine’s air defense system and investigated how dire the missile shortage could be. According to Trent Telenko, the Ukrainian defense missile shortage may help Russia’s air forces to gain superiority in the Ukrainian sky unless Ukraine is supplied with Western fighter jets. Euromaidan Press publishes his analysis in full, with permission.
Ukraine started the war with a minimum of 20 S-300 (18 SA-10 and 2 SA-12), nine Buk M1 (SA-11), two reactivated S-125 (SA-3), and one reactivated 2K12 Kub (SA-6) medium-range surface-to-air missile batteries. A Ukrainian journalist (editor in chief of Defense Express) by the name of Serhii Zhurets in late 2016, citing parliamentary disclosures, estimated the remaining Ukrainian war stock of surface-to-air missiles (SAM) as follows:
- 5V55/S-300PS and PT (SA-10A/B) rounds at almost 3,000;
- 9M82/83/S-300V1 (SA-12A/B) at 800 (Ukrainian media speculated that the Air Force of Ukraine had the bigger 9M82 in stock);
- 9M38M1/Buk M1 (SA-11) at 1,300.
Many of the 5V55 supersonic surface-to-air missiles were lost in the opening week of the war. At least two or three S-300PT/PS missile system batteries were destroyed in February-March 2022. One S-300PS missile system was destroyed escaping Berdiansk (Zaporizhzhia Oblast, southeastern Ukraine), another unserviceable S-300PT missile system battery in Zhytomyr (Zhytomyr Oblast, northern Ukraine) was caught at its base, and one S-300PT was claimed killed in the Kharkiv area (eastern Ukraine).
The Oryx site lists 10 Flap Lid radars used by the Air Force of Ukraine S-300s as visually confirmed as destroyed. However, one Flap Lid pictured on Oryx might be a known Russian 5N63S from occupied Crimea, and others looked like repeat photos of the same systems at different times and angles.
Other contemporaneous to Zhurets’ Ukrainian sources gave a number of 10,000 to 12,000 missiles for twenty legacy SA-3 Goa/S-125 surface-to-air missile system batteries in mothballs, but only two batteries had been restored to service by February 2022, a significant number of these missiles were exported, and it was reported but not visually confirmed that both operational S-125 batteries were lost in the South in the opening week of the full-scale Russian invasion. Ukraine also had 20 batteries of the 2K12 Kub mobile surface-to-air missile system (NATO reporting name: SA-6 GAINFUL) in mothballs. Still, some were exported, and only one battery was considered operational in February 2022.
The Ukrainian 2K12 surface-to-air missile system could only shoot the 9M9M missile. Early pre-invasion videos showed some 9M9M cooking off in depot fires, but it was not reported how many of them were destroyed. The Soviet logistical practice was to stock one round per rail in a battery plus one or more sets of reloads. So, Ukraine may have 20 air defense missile batteries with 480 9M9M missiles. Or more if multiple sets of reload were stocked.