UKRAINE SAYS RUSSIA IS TURNING TO DECOY MISSILES

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, Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said in an interview with The Associated Press.

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.

In the AP interview, 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.”

He argued that speededup supplies of weaponry from Western partners would quicken an end to the war and said drawn-out war would favor Russia, not least because its population is more than three times that of Ukraine.

But nearly a year into the Russian 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.

The changed Russian 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.