Ukraine: Russia using decoy missiles, ‘special air balloons’
KYIV, Ukraine — Russia has switched its aerial strike tactics to fool Ukraine’s air defenses, using decoy missiles without explosive warheads and deploying balloons, a senior Ukrainian official said Thursday.
“The Russians are definitely changing tactics” as the war approaches its first anniversary, said Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
The goal of the decoy missiles, Podolyak said, is to overwhelm Ukraine’s air defense systems by offering too many targets.
“They want to overload our anti-aircraft system to get an extra chance to hit infrastructure facilities,” Podolyak said, adding that Ukraine’s air defenses are adapting to the challenge.
Podolyak also renewed Ukraine’s appeals for longrange missiles that would enable it to strike Russian troop concentrations far behind the front lines, and also stressed that “we just don’t have enough shells.”
Nearly a year into Russia’s invasion, the human, economic and diplomatic costs are proving huge for Moscow. Its military difficulties include a growing shortage of missiles, Ukrainian and Western officials say. It has fired wave upon wave of missiles and killer drones at Ukraine since October, in a sustained and targeted effort to take out power supplies and other essential infrastructure over the winter.
Podolyak said Russia is facing “missile exhaustion” and that shortages are forcing its change in tactics. He said Russia is mixing older Soviet-era missiles with “new missiles that have some value.”
Moscow has not acknowledged problems with weapon supplies. But Britain’s Defense Ministry said in late November that Russia appeared to be stripping nuclear warheads off old cruise missiles and then firing the missiles as blanks at Ukraine. “Russia almost certainly hopes such missiles will function as decoys and divert Ukrainian air defenses,” it said.
The change in tactics — seen by some as evidence that Moscow is adapting its brute-force war strategy into something more nuanced — appeared to pay dividends Thursday when Russian forces fired 36 missiles in a two-hour overnight burst. Ukrainian air defense batteries shot down 16 of them — a lower rate of success than against some previous Russian waves.
Another new feature of Russia’s strategy is the use of what Podolyak called “special air balloons.” He wouldn’t go into detail about their suspected purpose. But they may be intended to possibly confuse or provide intelligence about Ukrainian air defenses.
Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, said the Russian balloons carried reflectors to mislead air defenses, and indicate that Moscow is “starting to use other methods.”
Kyiv’s military administration said six such balloons were detected floating over the capital on Wednesday. Ukrainian air defenses shot down most of them.