Ukrainian and Western Officials Question Patriot Air Defences’ Reliability Against Improved Russian Missiles
Eastern Europe and Central Asia , Missile and Space
Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Ukrainian and Western sources have warned that U.S.-made MIM-104 Patriot long range air defence systems are increasingly struggling to intercept strikes by Russian ballistic missiles, raising questions regarding the practicality of future donations of these systems as aid. One unnamed Ukrainian official informed the outlet that Russian ballistic missiles have demonstrated greater levels of manoeuvrability, allowing them to evade not only interception, but also detection. Although he did not specify the missile class in question, it is likely to be the 9K720 launched by the Iskander-M system, which has been used successfully to neutralise Patriot systems multiple times since March 2024. These reports are far from unprecedented, with Ukrainian Air Force spokesman Igor Ignat having highlighted on May 26 the system’s shortcomings intercepting attacks by the system observing: “The Iskander missiles perform evasive manoeuvres in the final phase, thwarting the Patriot’s trajectory calculations… In addition, the Iskander can drop decoys capable of fooling Patriot missiles.”
On July 14 U.S. President Donald Trump pledged to dispatch further Patriot systems to Ukraine, with the president subsequently elaborating that up to 17 systems could be sent. Although severe shortages of Patriot systems in the United States and the exhaustion of European arsenals were previously expected to ensure that no major deliveries to Ukraine would be possible for the foreseeable future, the president raised the possibility that a European client, such as Switzerland, could agree to have its supplies delayed to allow deliveries to reach Ukraine faster. The Patriot is by far the highest value military asset in Ukrainian service, with each costing $2.5 billion. The cost effectiveness of sending the systems has increasingly been brought to question due to both its high vulnerability, and to the far higher cost of launching $4 million surface-to-air missiles to intercept Russian ballistic missiles that cost under $1 million. The fact that two interceptors are usually fired to intercept a single missile makes the cost effectiveness calculation appear particularly unfavourable, even if the system could be used to intercept the targets reliably.
The Patriot was first confirmed to have seen a unit destroyed by an Iskander-M system on February 23, 2024, with a subsequent strike destroying another system near the Sergeevka locality the following month on March 10, leaving ground forces in the region exposed. Subsequently in the second week of July, 2024, new footage confirmed the destruction of two batteries in the Odessa region, while on August 11 three more launchers and an AN/MPQ-65 radar were reported to have been destroyed in Iskander-M strikes. Further successes for the Iskander-M have continued to follow. Despite its limitations, Ukraine’s supporters in the Western world have had few alternatives to supplying the system other than to leave the Eastern European state totally exposed to Russian strikes, with the decision to send Patriot systems having been made in late 2022 after the country’s large arsenal of Soviet S-300 air defence systems was very heavily depleted during hostilities with Russian forces. Russian successes in significantly expanding the scale of Iskander-M production has further exacerbated the situation for Ukrainian air defences, as has the Russian Armed Forces’ procurement of North Korean ballistic missiles with similarly advanced capabilities such as the KN-23B.
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