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Russian S-300 missile system. Photo/Radio Free Europe
The British Defense Ministry said the open-source images show the wreckage of a 1980s American US-15 Kent cruise missile, which appears to have been shot down and its warhead may have been replaced with ballast.
Defense officials said an unresponsive system would still cause damage, but was unlikely to achieve a reliable effect against its intended target and could be used by Moscow as a decoy to divert Ukraine’s air defences.
“Whatever Russia’s intentions, this improvisation highlights the degree to which Russia’s stockpiles of long-range missiles are depleted,” the British defense official said in an assessment that usually highlights Kiev’s gains and Moscow’s losses. NewsweekSunday (27/11/2022).
There have been many reports that Russia is facing dwindling stockpiles of missiles, despite the uncertainty surrounding the state of Moscow’s arsenal.
On Tuesday, Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov said that Russia has used up about 80% of its modern missiles and that it has only 13% left of its stockpile of pre-war-launched Iskander missiles.
Meanwhile, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said on Wednesday that Russia’s reliance on high-volume fire before maneuvering on the ground was depleting its ammunition stockpile.
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Mark Cancian, senior adviser for the national security program at the Washington think tank’s Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), told Newsweek that, even before the war, Russia didn’t produce many missiles. This has been further reduced by the sanctions in effect since then.
He said Russia’s largest remaining inventory is the S-300 anti-aircraft missile system, which isn’t very accurate when fired from the surface to the ground, so it makes sense for Russia to use the latter.
