Feb 24, 2024
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
According to Ukrainian magazine Pravda, the missile the Ukrainian air force used to shoot down a rare Russian air force A-50 radar plane on Friday wasn’t an American-made Patriot, as many observers assumed.
No, it reportedly was an ex-Soviet 5V28: the missile component of the S-200 air-defense system.
In retrospect, it should have been obvious that something other than a Patriot shot down the A-50. The lumbering radar plane was around 120 miles from the front line in southern Ukraine when it plummeted to the ground. Where a Patriot usually ranges no farther than 90 miles, a S-200 can hit targets 150 miles away or farther.
We already knew the Ukrainians had reactivated some of their aged S-200 batteries—out of 16 the Soviet air force once maintained all across Ukraine—because they’ve been lobbing them at targets on the ground in occupied Ukraine, and even in Russia itself.
We didn’t know the Ukrainians were firing the brutish missiles at aerial targets until this week.
But the development makes sense. The S-200 isn’t the most accurate air-defense system in the world. It’s certainly less accurate than the Patriot is. But what the S-200 lacks in finesse, it makes up for in sheer power.
The eight-ton 5V28 “is a honking big missile with a really heavy and voluminous seeker space,” wrote Trent Telenko, a former quality auditor with the U.S. Defense Contract Management Agency. The 5V28 packs a massive, 500-pound warhead.
The Soviet Union developed the S-200 in the early 1960s specifically to target U.S. Air Force heavy bombers. Ukraine finally retired the air-defense dinosaurs more than a decade ago owing to their relative cumbersomeness—they’re heavy and bulky and difficult to transport—as well as the high cost of upgrading them.
But an upgrade was on the table. Before the current, wider war, the Ukrainian government considered reactivating some S-200s and retrofitting them with the same new seeker Ukrainian industry had developed for the smaller S-125 air-defense system.
Given the reasonably good accuracy of the resuscitated Ukrainian S-200s in the surface-to-surface role, there’s a good chance Kyiv’s engineers have installed a better seeker in the 5V28: either the S-125’s new seeker or some other model. Whether that same seeker might work in the surface-to-air role is an open question.
Regardless, the Friday shoot-down was a return to form for a classic missile the Soviets specifically designed for killing big, slow planes. An A-50 is nothing if not big and slow.
Now, the billion-dollar question: how many 5V28s does Ukraine have left? The Ukrainian air force may have possessed hundreds—even a thousand—missiles when it last retired the S-200 around 2013.
But big, chemical-filled missiles don’t last forever. So it’s possible the Ukrainians got fresh batches of 5V28s from their allies who still operate the S-200. The Poles, maybe. Or even the Bulgarians.
Follow me on Twitter. Check out my website or some of my other work here. Send me a secure tip.
“But big, chemical-filled missiles don’t last forever. So it’s possible the Ukrainians got fresh batches of 5V28s from their allies who still operate the S-200. The Poles, maybe. Or even the Bulgarians.”
I think that Dave meant the solid-fueled rocket boosters with the first sentence above. But, the Ukrainians are smart and have experience with such things. Obviously, they’ve found a solution. The liquid-fueled engines would be easier to deal with.
For sure, it was a good idea to bring these missiles back to life, at least some of them, if they are not from Poland or Bulgaria. Maybe we’ll see a bridge-buster version soon?
They must also have found a solution for how to bring the S-200 into starting position. Because it was meant to be fired from an installed launch pad, the Soviets didn’t build a mobile launcher for it. The ingenious technicians of the AFU must have jury-rigged a suitable truck, I guess. 🤔
I wouldn’t be surprised at all if they did that. They’ve shown lots of ingenuity in this war.
“Ukrainian Air Force Speaker Reveals Details Of Russian A-50 Destruction”
“The pilots saw their death approaching on the monitors.”
https://charter97.org/en/news/2024/2/24/584953/
That the pilots were aware of the incoming missile is visible in the well known video: Several flares were released right before the hit. However, these don’t help against radar seekers. The A-50s allegedly are also equipped with ECM and radar decoys, but apparently these didn’t work. Maybe not operational at all because of poor maintenance or missing Western parts? Or is the modernized S-200 able to overcome such defences? The AFU will keep this a secret, for obvious reasons.
Anything is possible, Mr. Gray. They could’ve been inoperable due to maintenance incompetence, lack of funds (corruption), lack of parts, lack of operators’ skill, or the Ukrainians found a way to mitigate those defenses.
Sure, Mr. Ofp. I just wanted to point out that despite the A-50 being a huge and comparatively slow moving target (the S-200 moves at mach 4 or even more, depending on variant), this wasn’t necessarily an easy kill. I’m looking forward to learning the details of this AFU success and others after the war.
This makes a mockery of russian claims that it was friendly fire. Are the orcs so incompetent that they mistake a fast moving missile, for a slow cumbersome plane?
I can’t believe the “friendly fire” story for a minute. The A-50 was far away from the frontline, had been on the radar screens of Russian air defence for a long time, and operators must have known that by shooting at an Ukrainian intruder nearby, they would endanger their own plane. Apart from that, they probably wouldn’t have been alowed to launch on their own anyway, but only on orders by the A-50. But maybe I’m misunderestimating the stupidity of those Russians and the madness of the Russian military system, ok.
Of course, this is the usual ruskie drivel. Nobody with even half a brain believes that it was friendly fire, especially so far away from the frontline.
Me too! There will be many interesting details coming out of the woodwork after the war, I’m sure.