Ukrainian defense industry is working to create analogs of X-101 and Kalibr missiles
Ukraine’s defense industry is currently working on developing its own cruise missile, similar to Russia’s Kalibr and X-101. This was reported to The Economist by unnamed sources among the Ukrainian military.
In a large article, the journalists analyze the attacks of Ukrainian missiles and drones on Russian military targets in the occupied Crimea. Recently, they have become much more frequent, and the most high -profile episode was the attack on the main headquarters of the Russian Black Sea Fleet in occupied Sevastopol on September 22.
“Amid Ukrainian claims that they killed the fleet commander and 33 other officers, the Russian authorities even started to activate air raid sirens, something they had previously tried to avoid. After a year and a half, Vladimir Putin’s war has come to Crimea for real,” the newspaper writes.
Listing the recent high-profile strikes by the Ukrainian Armed Forces on targets in Crimea, The Economist notes that the destruction of ships, headquarters and weapons depots in Crimea is not an end in itself. These are aids to two more important efforts: weakening Russia’s military capabilities in the occupied south of Ukraine, where the Ukrainian army’s land counteroffensive is underway, and unblocking Ukraine’s critical maritime trade.
The authors of the publication note that at the beginning of the full-scale war, Russian ships were in a threatening proximity to Odesa, and today they hardly ever enter the northwestern part of the Black Sea.
“The Ukrainians have adapted to becoming a mosquito fleet [using naval drones, missiles and artillery]. It’s a classic sea blockade strategy that others have used against the [British] Royal Navy in the past,” says John Foreman, former British defense attaché in Moscow and Kyiv.
Ukrainian-made maritime surface drones and cruise missiles Storm Shadow and SCALP provided by Western partners have already played an important role in this fight. Ukraine’s own Neptune missiles also proved themselves in this war when they destroyed the Russian fleet’s flagship, the Moskva, but Kyiv is working to further improve them.
“The big change is that we have new missiles and intelligence. As soon as we have a target, we can hit it, we do exactly that,” an unnamed representative of the Ukrainian General Staff told reporters, adding that Ukraine now wants to get an analog of the Russian Kalibr and X-101.
Security expert Hanna Shelest told the publication that Ukraine will not have too much trouble with this, as it was a “missile superpower” in the past and had several “crazy world-class” missile projects. They were mothballed due to lack of funding and sometimes due to deliberate sabotage. Some of these projects have now been dusted off.
“It usually takes about a decade to build a new rocket, but bringing old prototypes to market will be much faster,” writes The Economist.
Strikes on Russian occupiers in Crimea
British intelligence has noted a sharp weakening of the combat capabilities of the Russian Black Sea Fleet after a series of Ukrainian strikes on ships and headquarters. According to British military experts, the Russians are still able to patrol their own coastline and fire missiles at Ukraine, but the aggressor is no longer able to continue wider regional patrols and to carry out a de facto blockade of Ukrainian ports.
Commenting on one of the successful strikes in Crimea, when they managed to destroy an “analog network” S-400 air defense system, NSDC Secretary Oleksiy Danilov said that the Ukrainian army used a “new product”. That is, the Russian complex was hit with a Ukrainian missile, not the one provided by our Western partners.
