Successful coup: Putin's first bomber crashes - over Russian territory; hit by a rocket that itself flies around 300 kilometers.
Stavropol – “Ukraine has the right to self-defense. This also includes attacks on legitimate military targets outside Ukraine," said Jens Stoltenberg - the NATO Secretary General's statements following the virtual meeting of the NATO-Ukraine Council are aimed at an attack that the Ukrainian defenders apparently carried out successfully against the air force Vladimir Putin's leadership; over its own territory.
According to the intelligence service of its Ministry of Defense, Ukraine shot down a Tu-22M3 strategic bomber with a missile on its return flight after an attack on Ukraine. The bomber is then said to have crashed over a military airfield near Stavropol; i.e. on Russian territory, on the border with Georgia in the Northern Caucasus.
Russian bomber shot down in Ukraine war – Ukraine speaks of “ambush”
Ukraine's Defense Ministry says on its website that the Tu-22M3 enemy aircraft was shot down at a distance of about 300 kilometers from Ukraine using the same means used to destroy the Russian A-50 long-range radar detection and control aircraft. Due to the damage, the bomber was able to fly to the Stavropol region, where it crashed.
Ukrainska
Pravda
reports that Ukraine used an S-200 long-range anti-aircraft missile system against the bomber - thereby defeating Russia's air force at its own game. According to
Newsweek,
Russia's first strategic bomber has now been destroyed in the air;
Newsweek,
citing Ukrainian military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov, also reports that Ukraine had been planning this "ambush," as Budanov called the move, for a week.
Shooting down the TU-22: probably a painful loss for Vladimir Putin
The S-200 is a stationary anti-aircraft missile made by the Soviet Union to combat supersonic fighter aircraft at medium to high altitudes, as the
aircraft lexicon
writes. In its latest version, the fifth, the missile can engage targets with a range of up to 300 kilometers and an operational altitude of between 500 meters and 40 kilometers. The system was put into service in 1967 in order to achieve a hit probability of up to 80 percent against the increasingly faster aircraft of the West, especially their long-range bombers. The S-200 system is said to be very resistant to radio interference; Since the rocket has an autonomous guidance system, it can no longer be influenced after launch, writes the
aircraft lexicon
.
“Ukraine is not defending the freedom of the West, but its own. That’s hard enough, and a peace in victory is unrealistic.”
Headline from Zeit Online to an article by Helmut W. Ganser
According to
Spiegel,
the loss of the bomber is painful for Russia, “because stocks of the aging military machine are comparatively small anyway.” According to
Spiegel
, Vladimir Putin should only have around 60 of the Tu-22 aircraft. In total, Russia has lost around 100 aircraft in the Ukraine war so far, as the British Ministry of Defense announced on X on Saturday (April 20). In any case, these types of missiles are supposed to cause serious harm to the Russian invasion force, as
Ukrainska Pravda
reported in February: According to this, Russian sources are said to have reported that Ukraine would attack targets in Russia and occupied Ukraine with S-200 missiles. According to Russian information, the Ukrainians are said to have modernized these air defense systems in order to fire at ground targets with 5B28 missiles.
Improvised use of the S-200: Ukraine also aims the missile at ground targets
Ihor Romanenko, former deputy chief of general staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in charge of air defense, confirmed that “Ukrainian soldiers are trained to attack ground targets with S-200 systems,” Pravda
wrote
. British intelligence also reported on its
X
channel about the use of the S-200 as an offensive weapon against ground targets. Various media outlets speak of targets hit or targeted on Russian or Russian-occupied territory - for example the Crimean Bridge, an air force base in the Rostov region, Taganrog and the Kaluga region; However, these reports are unconfirmed.
Russia's Belgorod has also been under attack since the end of last year, as
Deutsche Welle
reports and at the same time asks whether Ukraine is allowed to attack Russian targets - possibly with German weapons. According to
DW
, Moscow complained that civilian targets were primarily and specifically hit in the city near the border. Deutsche
Welle
quotes the international lawyer Wolff Heintschel von Heinegg from the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt an der Oder: In international armed conflicts, “no conflicting party is obliged to limit hostilities to its own territory,” he says. “On the contrary, it is a legitimate goal to weaken the opposing forces and therefore attack these and other legitimate military targets.”
Federal government's security policy: Scholz's hesitation finds supporters
The use of German weapons to strike Russian territory continues to divide political camps in this country. The categorically negative Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) finds a supporter in retired Brigadier General Helmut W. Ganser, who warned against a long-range weapons delivery in an article for
Zeit Online
: “Ukraine is not defending the freedom of the West, but its own. “It’s hard enough, and peace is unrealistic,” the magazine writes. For Ganser, the assumption that Ukraine can restore its full integrity through armed force is based on “a blatant loss of reality.” And further: “Responsible security policy, which must prevent harm to the German population, must not follow this.”
However, after the recent meeting of the NATO-Ukraine Council, Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg made it clear that the West's efforts to strengthen Ukraine's air defense were still too small: "The problem is that it has to be stronger and more comprehensive, since Ukraine is over has various systems for launching drones, launching various types of cruise missiles and also launching the most advanced ballistic missiles. So Ukraine has NASAMS (National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System), it has IRIS-T (Infra Red Imaging System Tail), it has Cheetah, of course it also has Patriot batteries. So these are different levels of air defense systems, but they need more systems, they need more batteries and they also need more ammunition for all of these systems. And that’s exactly what we addressed in today’s meeting.”
Russian State Duma warns Germany against Taurus deliveries
In March, members of the Russian State Duma, i.e. the Russian parliament, warned Germany against equipping Ukraine with long-range weapons; Russia had thus intervened in the debate about the Taurus delivery with the express demand to refrain from anything that could make Germany a party to the conflict. This is precisely the reason given by the Chancellor for his rejection of the delivery. In January, a senior Ukrainian military official actually announced in an interview that he wanted to bring the war back to Russia. On land, in the air and at sea: Ukraine would win the war faster if it had permission to fire British and other Western weapons against targets deep inside Russia, Vice Admiral Oleksiy Nejishpapa told the British news channel
Sky News.
The Ukrainian armed forces' greatest success to date was the sinking of the Russian missile cruiser Moskva in April 2022 - the then flagship of the Black Sea Fleet. "At that time, Ukraine realized that Moscow could be beaten in this war," said the vice admiral. “A modern war is a war of technologies, and whoever wins in the technological sense wins,” Nejischpapa summed up: “We would like to have the opportunity to dissuade Russia from ever setting its sights on Ukraine again. “