The Patriot air defense system is barely enough to protect one regional city - Ukrainian aviation expert
There is one big problem in the supply of Western air defense systems to Ukraine - they are disproportionately small in comparison with even the most minimal needs.
Ukrainian aviation expert Valery Romanenko stated this on the Obozrevatel channel, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“We started the war with the 31st S-300 complex. We need exactly the same amount of “Patriot”. Who will give them to us? They give us one battery - six launchers, and what will it protect? It would be good if it protected one regional city. Here, as in the joke, the pate with hazel grouse and horse meat is half – one horse, one hazel grouse,” the expert said.
He added that the same problem is with the latest model aircraft in service with NATO and the United States.
“The problem with them is the same as with anti-aircraft missile systems - they are not in stock, they cannot give up theirs, because everything that they could cut, they cut. The only thing is that the Americans have a large supply, but this is a large supply of F-17s, and for us it would be an ideal plane, these planes are in Arizona simply covered with a film of corrosion. They could literally be put in order in just two or three months.
F-16s are a different problem, they stopped being produced in 2016, and now the manufacturing concern Lockheed Martin is building a new plant because a huge number of orders have poured in. Bulgaria, Slovakia, Middle Eastern countries, someone else is in line. They just don't release them now.
We could also get F-15s, at least purely fighter models, but the Americans don’t want to give them for several reasons: they’re afraid of escalation, they don’t want to disarm their own units.
Remember when we gave Buks to Georgia in 2008? We disarmed our own unit; we did not transfer them from warehouses. The Americans don't want to go that route and the Europeans don't either; they say they have so few tanks that they are unable to defend even a piece of their own territory. Such problems. And they give us everything fresh, they just installed the quality control labels - and now they are sending them to Ukraine,” Romanenko asserted.