Equipment of the 18th and 12th Air Defence Regiments plus the Third Radio Regiment. The equipment is quite diverse: it was partly made from systems taken out of storage, partly replacing the 91N6E radars that were destroyed or damaged, needed repair or had reached the end of their useful life, with the same Kasta decimetre-range radars and Nebo-M.
In addition, three Pantsyr air defence systems, tactical air defence systems that were supposed to intercept drones, were hit. They were trying to work on the targets of the Defence Forces, but to no avail.
This was not a single operation, when they were engaged in operational tasks such as cutting off supplies, clearing the skies before cruise missiles flew deep into the peninsula, etc. For example, the Tochka-U's arrival on the Berdyansk bridge in preparation for the attack on Tokmak, and a series of strikes by the JTF on airfields and S-300/400 complexes in Crimea in 2024.Now it is more of a raid. The video clearly shows a wing-type UAV, which is definitely not an FPV - they would have spun around to find a better entry point to the target. But here, without a pause, it appears in the frame and hits.
The intrigue is even that it works?
Is it a chain of repeaters that pick up the drones from the big land? Is that why we hit the captured platforms so fiercely and furiously, so that the Russian's electronic warfare could not operate from there, so that they would not interfere with us?
Or launches from unmanned boats - folding wings or containers? Also an option, why not? An aircraft carrier drone is stylish, fashionable and youthful. Let's fly out to look for it on hunter helicopters, we are waiting, we have installed the P-73. The Mi-8 was also delivered by drone, which is also a good machine worth $6-8 million, a chicken and a pea, as one judoka and geopolitician used to say.
Or maybe it's a catapult that fires an already assembled drone, small, but from an unexpected angle, often into the sector where electronic warfare is not working. Because it's not that difficult, if we have an aircraft hunter with an R-73, to turn a Magura into an electronic warfare distributor, with an analyser and RTR equipment that can monitor the schedules of equipment switching on and the presence of radiation in the sector.
In any case, the task is obvious - to intensify the depletion phase. To hit expensive and sophisticated systems, even those that will take months to repair. Moreover, any reduction in their number on combat duty will only increase the effectiveness of the Magur and aerial drones.
It is not the launching SAMs that should be hit, but radars and control points. Without them, the S-300/400 cannot provide target illumination or even launch. By knocking out the command post or the illumination and guidance radar, we knock out all the SAMs in the network.
Several air defence divisions have been disabled in the video alone - now we either have to dismantle the same divisions in the depths of Russia, increasing the risk of another Engels.
Or wait for a radar with a lot of sanctioned electronics to be made under sanctions. Kasta costs $60 million, Pidlit $5 million, and Pantsyr $12 million.
The maths is good, by the way - the raid pays off even if all the Magurs are intercepted, lose their signal, and burn up their fuel.
In addition, we are definitely facing the task of increasing the Russians' missile expenditure - the Kremlin is sorely short of them, all transmissions of equipment are underloaded, and there is not enough air defence in the strategic airfield area to cover all the drone approach routes.
Back in the Soviet era, the cycle for creating missiles for the S-300 could take 6-8 months, depending on the subcontractors. And now, the strikes by C-300 missiles on Kharkiv and Kherson, practical launches during exercises, the need to shoot down waves of distant Ukrainian UAVs, the need to form new units, an untouched stock for them, and the reduction of repairable items in storage are undermining the Russian army's air defence capabilities.
And, naturally, it is forcing it to open a bag of foreign exchange reserves - for machine tools, military chemicals, solid fuels, and electronics.
At the moment, it is cloudy, the weather is no longer favourable for electronic warfare, we have an increasing number of fibre-optic drones, we are using the sea, which was no one's, and is now becoming Ukraine's for raids to increase pressure.
The Russian Federation is not the USSR, and even it could not produce the latest air defence systems like hot cakes. At the time of the collapse, more than half of the Soviet units were ancient Krugs and S-125s, and the stockpile of missiles was enough for several years of a major war. Therefore, Russia will not have time to repair the aircraft in flight. We need to keep heating the pressure cooker.
