Moscow- Coinciding with the escalation of the confrontations between Russia and Ukraine and in explicit disregard of prior warnings to Moscow, the Western system announced that it would provide “effective” military support to Kiev, bringing the crisis into its most complex junctures so far. How do Russian military experts evaluate this Western support for Kiev and its impact on the course of the war?
To some extent, the reluctance of some European countries to hand over German-made Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine reflected something like avoiding reaching the brink of the abyss and a relative concern not to burn all bridges in relations with Moscow.
Russia has stated since the beginning of the war with Ukraine on February 24 that Western arms supplies to Kyiv contribute to the escalation of the conflict, and that it will not change anything in the situation on the ground.
break the rule
However, if the Western system set during the first stages of the war a framework for its military support to Ukraine that did not go beyond the limits of enabling Kyiv to confront the advance of the Russian army, then with the new aid package it almost touches Moscow’s “sensitive nerve”, which is Kyiv’s acquisition of long-range weapons capable of being transported even Part of the military confrontations inside the Russian territory, and thus the use of Ukraine in a long-term armed confrontation.
It is not excluded that this is the reason behind the Russian Ministry of Defense announcing that its air defense units are conducting exercises in Moscow that simulate repelling possible attacks on military, industrial and civilian facilities, a measure that had not been taken before even in the darkest conditions of confrontation between Russia and the West in the post-war period. The second world.
Military expert Vladislav Shurygin says that the European decision has caused a shake-up in the equation of engagement, but without enabling Kyiv to launch attacks inside Russia.
Shurygin explains that the West will later continue to pump weapons into Ukraine and expand the scope of supplies, and that by spring – in his opinion – any restrictions will be lifted, and Kyiv will receive long-range planes and missiles, and will almost completely switch from Russian weapons to NATO weapons.
In the event that this is achieved, the Russian expert believes that Russia will go towards pushing the lines of threats from its borders at a commensurate distance, and at the same time it will increase the pace of field progress in the coming months, and move to the stage of decisiveness of the battle by intensifying the “painful” strikes.
Clean up warehouses
However, the “quality” of the weapons to be delivered to Kyiv also raises questions among Russian experts in military affairs, and some of them even say that a large part of them has become out of service.
Among them is Leonid Artemyev, who says that some of the weapons are relatively new models, such as the Stinger missile system, which was put into service as a portable air defense system in the early 1980s, and was used during the Falkland War between Britain and Argentina, before it underwent a series of developments. .
And the Russian military expert continues that it is not clear whether the West will hand Kyiv old or modern types of this system, because only modern ones are capable of capturing a maneuvering and active target in conditions of severe interference with jamming devices.
As for the known part of the aid, it is mainly related to Germany’s decision to provide Ukraine with the “Strela-2” portable air defense missile system, which was produced by the Soviet Union, and was in service with the forces of the German Democratic Republic, and it remained in warehouses for more than 30 or 40 years. years, and therefore its effectiveness is very doubtful, according to Artemyev.
It is explained here that these missiles may simply not fly or may explode in the hands of the launcher, and although they are considered a good weapon, they have not been stored in a way that allows them to be used later.
The same speaker concludes that Berlin would not have used these missiles, but would have disposed of them, but instead sent them to Ukraine, which reveals that NATO countries want at the same time to get rid of old and unnecessary weapons and ammunition, including Soviet-made weapons and ammunition that have outlived themselves. Much of it is half a century old.
closed atmosphere
The same question is raised by the Russian military expert Victor Litovkin, but this time in regards to the supply of RPG-7 grenade launchers and ammunition to Ukraine from Greece and Slovakia, which is not known how much time has passed since their storage, but it is likely It came to Greece and Slovakia from the former East German arsenal.
Litovkin points out – in his interview with Al-Jazeera Net – that the logistics of arms supplies will be difficult in any case, because Kyiv does not control the country’s airspace, which means that this delivery can only be done by truck or railway.
He added that since Russia controls an important part of Ukrainian territory, all these weapons will be destroyed as soon as they are unloaded from trucks or trains in warehouses, and in the best case they will be stored in the Lviv region in western Ukraine, without the possibility of transferring them to other places.
