Russia has fewer and fewer air defence assets to cover military facilities, including airfields. The shortage of air defences may continue to grow.
Navy spokesperson for the Armed Forces of Ukraine Dmytro Pletenchuk said this on television, Ukrinform reports.
Commenting on strikes on drone launch sites near the Hvardiiske airfield in occupied Crimea and on several Pantsir air defence systems, Pletenchuk noted that such attacks indicate a gradual reduction in Russia’s air defence capabilities.
According to him, some military facilities in Russia, including airfields, may have no air defence cover at all or be protected by only one or two Pantsir systems. Russians concentrate far stronger defences near the residences of their leadership.
“In the Russian information space, this kind of information periodically (surfaces – ed.) – some facilities, even of a class such as a military airfield, have no cover at all on the territory of the so-called Russian Federation. Somewhere they have one Pantsir, somewhere two. Of course, this is not Valdai, where you can count them by the dozen. Accordingly, there is a shortage,” the spokesperson said.
He suggests that the lack of air defence systems will only intensify. Each destroyed Pantsir unit creates a gap in Russia’s air defences and weakens the protection of the sites it was covering.
“Each such gap means that after the air defence is destroyed, the next thing to be destroyed will be what it was covering,” Pletenchuk explained.
The spokesperson added that efforts to destroy Russian air defence systems will continue, as this is important for carrying out other combat tasks.