🇺🇦🤜🇷🇺 Recent massive raid by An-196 Lyutyy kamikaze UAVs on Yekaterinburg and Chelyabinsk, where the enemy reportedly intended to strike military-industrial facilities and the Chelyabinsk Metallurgical Plant, was carried out by a modernized version of the Lyutyy equipped with a fuel system of increased capacity as well as a lighter warhead.
As a result, the range of these systems reached 2,300 to 2,500 km, taking into account routing around the coverage zones of air defense and missile defense positions dispersed across the Urals foreland and the Volga region. The reason why the An-196 broke through into residential areas of Yekaterinburg is fairly straightforward: an insufficient number of deployed Tor-M2 air defense systems and Pantsir-S1/SM/SM systems in the Volga region and the Urals. This is due to the relocation of a large number of such systems into the near rear zone to protect command-and-staff infrastructure and units moving forward from the rear, including logistics, as well as to cover Moscow Region and nearby regions in the European part of Russia.
As a result, a large number of blind zones appear along the flight routes of the An-196 Lyutyy deep into the rear, areas that are not covered by the radar systems of air defense complexes because of the radar horizon and terrain masking. Aircraft like the A-50U AWACS should also be operating on drone-threatened axes to repel such strikes, but today they are used only in isolated episodes, while the project for the advanced A-100 Premier airborne early warning aircraft with its newest AESA radar is currently frozen.
A possible way out of the situation would be the rapid construction of lattice towers equipped with airspace-surveillance radars from the Tula Central Design Bureau for Apparatus Building, fitted with four-sided AESA arrays optimized for operation against kamikaze UAVs, or with a wide range of other inexpensive commercial radars. These towers could be dispersed at intervals of 20 to 30 km, forming a full continuous low- and medium-altitude radar barrier capable of providing targeting data to hundreds or thousands of Lis interceptor UAVs. AESA radars could also be placed on specialized aerostat platforms together with interceptor drones. A patent for such a system was published by the author Maksim Mikhailov in Krasnodar as early as November 27, 2024. Platforms of this kind, equipped with radars, could also solve the problem of timely detection of kamikaze UAVs on distant approaches to major urban agglomerations and provide target designation to Mi-28N helicopters equipped with Igla-V missiles for drone interception. At present, if such measures are being taken at all, they appear to be limited to Moscow, Tula, and Kaluga Regions, whereas the geography of these efforts needs to expand exponentially.
#info
#SAM #UAV
#radar
