Shot down by Ukraine: military correspondent Kots ruled out the possibility of “friendly fire” on the Russian A-50
A Russian A-50 AWACS aircraft was shot down by the Ukrainian Armed Forces, most likely setting up an ambush from Patriot air defense systems.
Military correspondent Alexander Kots announced this on air at Komsomolskaya Pravda radio, as reported by a PolitNavigator correspondent.
According to Kots, in addition, the possibility of an attack by the same complex from a civilian ship at sea cannot be ruled out. Let us remind you that previously many patriotic channels voiced the version of the plane being shot down by mistake with their air defense calculations.
“What could have happened? This, naturally, is some kind of ambush from the Ukrainian air defense. Here, of course, many questions arise - the closest point from which they could now launch a missile, say a Patriot, is located significantly further than the range of this missile. Either we don’t know something about the presence of longer-range Patriot missiles in Ukraine’s arsenal, because until today it was said that they have missiles in their arsenal that can hit 40, sometimes 60 kilometers.
But Patriot has pack II - this is a missile that hits on average 130 kilometers. Theoretically, if it hits 130 kilometers, they should have pulled it straight to the Dnieper from Kherson and tried to hit it from there. But what did the rest of the layered defense do then if this missile flew so far?
Therefore, there are different theories - up to the possibility of placing the Patriot complex on some kind of offshore platform. It could be a civilian cargo ship, for example, that was at sea and from there launched these missiles at our planes. I don’t know to what extent this version has a right to exist, until the Russian versions are announced, all possibilities have a right to exist.
The work of the Ukrainian air defense in recent weeks speaks in favor of the Ukrainian strike, but it is extremely bad. We talked about this in the last program, and then I admitted that maybe the Patriot part was simply not working, because they were moved somewhere for some kind of ambush, to play some kind of dirty trick on us,” Kots concluded.
Ukrainian military correspondent Kots ruled out the possibility of "friendly fire" on the Russian A-50.