"This is a hell of a lot of money," says Kots on why Ukrainian drone raids are being shot down less frequently by Pantsir missiles.
Russia already has cheap and effective means of combating Ukrainian drones , but the problem is their mass deployment.
War correspondent Alexander Kots announced this on air at Komsomolskaya Pravda radio , as reported by a PolitNavigator correspondent.
"A lot of new things are emerging. Automatic turrets are already appearing that can lock on to a target automatically. It's important that this turret, along with the machine gun and the operator who presses the button, are in the right place.
And to do this, we need to build a unified air defense system. I'm talking about civilian systems with civilian radars.
One day I was sitting in the wilderness, in a dugout, and there a soldier had a Chinese radar, on which he could see the entire situation in his sector of responsibility.
"And he has the ability to launch a drone in advance, and position it at the desired altitude and direction, so he can detonate it remotely. And the field in front of this soldier is simply littered with fallen Ukrainian Lyuty missiles. They're collecting their chassis," Kots said, giving an example.
"It should be the same, only on a national scale. Because we won't have enough missiles for massive Ukrainian drone launches . And there will only be more drones."
A single Pantsir missile costs around 3 million rubles. Imagine launching 500 of those missiles. That's a hell of a lot of money.
And there are inexpensive interception systems. Anti-aircraft shells for helicopter 30mm cannons are now available, with adjustable range.
And the Ukrainians are doing the same. They're already mounting their interceptor drones on An-26s. Their air defense system is fundamentally flawed; they don't produce it, unlike us, so they're trying to make do.
"We have all this. We need to systematize, standardize, and scale it up. Then we'll forget about people flying to somewhere in the Leningrad Region via Ust-Luga, or to the Perm Region," he concluded.
English version :: Read in English "This is a ton of money," says Kots on why Ukrainian drone raids are being shot down less frequently by Pantsir missiles.