S-200 in a German museum.
Wikimedia Commons
The missile that the Ukrainian Air Force used to shoot down a rare Russian Air Force A-50 radar aircraft on Friday was not an American Patriot missile, as many observers assumed, according to the Ukrainian magazine ” Pravda.”
No, it was supposedly an ex-Soviet 5V28: the missile component of the S-200 air defense system.
In hindsight, it should have been obvious that the A-50 was shot down by something other than a Patriot. The lumbering radar plane was about 120 miles from the front line in southern Ukraine when it crashed to the ground. While a Patriot typically has a range of no more than 90 miles, an S-200 can hit targets 150 miles away or further.
We already knew that the Ukrainians had reactivated some of their aging S-200 batteries – out of 16 that the Soviet Air Force once maintained across Ukraine – because they were firing them at targets on the ground in occupied Ukraine and even in Russia itself .
We didn't know until this week that the Ukrainians were firing brutal rockets at aerial targets.
But the development makes sense. The S-200 is not the most accurate air defense system in the world. It's certainly less accurate than the Patriot. But what the S-200 lacks in finesse, it makes up for in sheer power.
The eight-ton 5V28 “is a huge rocket with a really heavy and voluminous search space” wrote Trent Telenko, former quality inspector at the US Defense Contract Management Agency. The 5V28 has a huge, 500-pound warhead.
The Soviet Union developed the S-200 in the early 1960s specifically to attack U.S. Air Force heavy bombers. Ukraine finally phased out the air defense dinosaurs more than a decade ago due to their relatively unwieldy nature (they are heavy and bulky and difficult to transport) and the high cost of modernization.
But an upgrade was on the table. Before the current, broader war, the Ukrainian government considered reactivating some S-200s and equipping them with the same new search system that Ukrainian industry had developed for the smaller S-125 air defense system.
Given the reasonably good accuracy of the revived Ukrainian S-200 in the surface-to-surface role, there is a good chance that Kiev engineers installed a better seeker head in the 5V28: either the new seeker head from the S-125 or a different model. Whether the same seeker could work in the surface-to-air role is an open question.
Regardless, Friday's launch was a return to form for a classic rocket that the Soviets had developed specifically to shoot down large, slow aircraft. An A-50 is nothing if not big and slow.
Now the billion dollar question: How many 5V28s does Ukraine have left? When the Ukrainian Air Force last retired the S-200 around 2013, it may have had hundreds – even thousands – of missiles.
But big, chemical-filled rockets don't last forever. So it is possible that the Ukrainians received new batches of 5V28 from their allies who still operate the S-200. Maybe the Poles. Or even the Bulgarians.
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