Ukrainian Authorities Panic as Patriots Run Out Amidst Russian Ballistic Frenzy
Russia has again struck Kiev with a large ballistic missile-focused attack. Even the Ukrainians had to admit not a single one was shot down because Patriot missile stocks have run dry:
Major weapons production facilities were said to be hit, and some claim even stored Pac-3 interceptors for the Patriot system were amongst the targets, though this is unverified. The secondary explosions certainly pointed to some sort of munitions being struck:
As stated, even Kiev Independent reports that Ukraine’s Patriot interceptors have been effectively exhausted:
This has materialized in extreme urgency amongst top Ukrainian military experts. Serhiy “Flash” Beskrestnov went on back to back rants regarding Ukraine’s desperate search for more Patriot missiles from European partners.
Here he explains that there is a global shortage due to both Iran and the Ukraine war, as well as the fact that European ‘allies’ are stockpiling the precious missiles themselves due to the rising “threat” of some kind of Russian invasion against European states which the Brussels elites have beat into everyone’s heads:
A recent update from Kiev Post reported that Lockheed Martin announced its inability to guarantee favorable timelines for the production of these necessary missiles:
US missile manufacturer Lockheed Martin has warned that it cannot guarantee delivery timelines for key Patriot PAC-3 interceptor missiles despite plans to sharply increase production. According to the FT, the company is expanding output to 2,000 missiles annually by 2033, but supply constraints and prioritization decisions remain unresolved. The shortage is already affecting US allies and Ukraine, which rely heavily on Patriot systems to counter ballistic missile threats.
The report notes that Lockheed intends to raise annual Pac-3 production from ~650 to 2,000 missiles by 2033. Consider how tiny that is: 650 per year is a measly 54 per month—that’s for the entire world. Ukraine alone needs far more than that per month, particularly when you take into account that, doctrinally, multiple interceptors have to be fired at each threat, particularly a ballistic threat. Minimum two are necessary, and sometimes as many as four or even six Patriots per Iskander.
Even when production increases to an “ideal” 2,000 per year by 2033, this still amounts to merely ~166 per month for the entire world, including the US itself. And the article implies that this ideal may never be realized because many problems still remain unresolved.
A separate WSJ report last month tackled what the issues are, precisely:
This particular piece states that the 2,000 per year target isn’t expected to be reached until the end of the 2030s. The challenges are many:
Lockheed is facing a litany of challenges to hit its target, from component bottlenecks to tight markets for local labor. A Lockheed spokeswoman said the company is working with the government and its suppliers to “eliminate bottlenecks and shorten lead times wherever possible, while still maintaining the rigorous performance and safety standards required.”
Shockingly, the article states that each single Pac-3MSE missile takes over two years to build.
Granted, there are many being built at the same time, but the total lead time for the manufacture of all the different parts, and then final assembly—which itself takes six weeks—apparently totals over the two year mark. The main reason is that there are over 400 different companies supplying parts to this single missile type, which all manufacture their various components at different rates and scales. The components themselves then all have to be individually tested before final delivery. This entire complex process explains why expandingthe supply chains all at once is nearly impossible, and why the ambitious goal of 2,000 per year will likely never be even remotely approached.
But getting back to the Kiev strikes. A Ukrainian officer’s channel angrily laments that a quite sensitive “secret” facility was amongst those hit:
On top of this, Russia has been accelerating its campaign of smaller infrastructure strikes, particularly gas stations. A video emerged of a Ukrainian man who explains that every single gas station between Dnipro and Kharkov has been taken out:
The official Ukrainian State Emergency Services government account reported yesterday:
A Ukrainian fuel expert explains how Russia is increasingly using AI-powered Geran drones which can discriminate gas stations and attack them autonomously:
The Russian Armed Forces are attacking Ukrainian gas stations with “Geraniums” equipped with AI, which itself calculates gas modules and decides on a strike, - Ukrainian fuel expert Leushkin.
Another good thread on Russia’s recent attacks, which counts over 70 gas stations near the front reportedly hit in June:
In the aftermath of this campaign, Ukrainian pundits have often said that Ukraine will be fine because it “imports most of its gas, anyway”, and thus the destruction of its gas stations will not affect the country. But Russia likewise has begun importing gas from Kazakhstan, Belarus, China, and India in light of Ukrainian attacks on its refineries. So, if Ukraine can easily weather the storm, according to these pundits, by importing gas, then why shouldn’t Russia also be able to weather the damage to its refineries?
In actuality, we will likely soon learn that Ukraine is not weathering the storm as well as they’d like to believe because the funding for all that expensive imported gas has to come from somewhere.
The Russian strike campaign continues picking up beyond just gas stations. Here the Deputy Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine Oleksiy Kuleba reports on Russian strikes against railway targets, which have increased drastically in the past few weeks:
And in the latest General Staff meeting for the announcement of Konstantinovka’s capture, Putin in no uncertain language stated that he is ordering the continuation of the recent Russian campaign of infrastructure attacks on Ukraine:
In fact, even after the latest huge attack on Kiev it is being reported that Russia is now readying a second mass strike to come as early as tomorrow night, this time reportedly targeting western Ukraine and Lvov region.
The US intelligence community is warning the Ukrainian authorities of a high probability of two to three massive bombardments, similar to the one that took place last night, in the next 10 days. They believe that Russia will definitely take advantage of the shortage of ammunition for Ukrainian air defense systems and will try to achieve maximum results before Western aid arrives.
Conversely, a Ukrainian blogger wonders whatever happened to Zelensky’s promised “40-day special operation” that would somehow force Russia to kneel:
Ukrainian blogger Alena Yakhno expressed outrage at the progress of Zelensky’s promised 40-day “special operation to force Russia to peace.”
“Which day is it today? The 12th or the 13th?” she asked after the Russian Armed Forces’ overnight strike.
While Ukraine did strike the distant Omsk refinery in Russia, much of Ukraine’s “Crimean blockade” attacks have seemingly petered out, particularly with the very update in Russian defensive tactics we spoke about several articles ago.
One of those has been the dispatch of Russian mobile fire groups which patrol the main highways. I stated last time the Ukrainian drones essentially have to overfly these major arteries to seek their targets, which makes anticipating the drones fairly easy to do. Just yesterday footage came of precisely such a Russian mobile fire group taking out the infamous Ukrainian “Hornet” drone:
Note how it must overfly the highway just as we said, and therefore becomes an easy target, so long as the necessary assets are in place.
Lastly, there are continued reports of Russian successes on the frontlines.
First, when it comes to glide-bomb drops, Russia set another record last month reportedly averaging 8,266 total bombs on the frontline:
🇷🇺The recipients counted the number of aerial bombs used by the Russian Aerospace Forces against the positions of the Kiev regime’s forces over the past month. As expected, another record was set: 8,266 bombs, an average of 276 per day.
The enthusiasts also decided to calculate the accuracy of the airstrikes. It is unknown what principle they used to count a target as hit, but the spread ranged from 95% in the Izyum district of the Kharkov region to 40% on the Pokrovsk axis. The situation with strikes in the Zaporozhye region, where they estimated 80%, was discussed earlier with examples in the form of satellite images of Ukrainian Armed Forces positions in forest belts.
But even more shockingly, Russia continues to widen the gap in vehicular losses with Ukraine. For months now, Russia has been getting the edge in exchanges even as per Oryx and other pro-Ukrainian bean-counters.
Now, for the month of June it was estimated that Russia lost 42 military vehicles versus 232 Ukrainian ones:
Continued:
For self-propelled guns, Ukraine lost 36 while Russia lost 7, a ratio of 1:5.1 in favour of Russia. In May, the ratio was 1:4.5 in favour of Russia.
The trend of vehicle attrition continues to greatly favour Russia. For self-propelled guns, it is even higher.
The full chart shows each month of this year so far, with the total being 267 Russian losses versus 1,314 Ukrainian ones:
It’s clear the loss statistics continue to slide for Ukraine, which can only explain why Zelensky’s propaganda organs have fired up this past month with unprecedented campaigns of panic-mongering about Crimea and “40-day retributions” and the like.
Now even as of the past two days, Russian forces have again captured numerous areas and advanced all across the map, not least of which being the Russian MOD-announced capture of Konstantinovka. This is why the West has to amplify the hysteria as much as possible now, and deflect all attention away from the frontline to phony canards like the following:
In the latest FT piece, Zelensky says that “the battle in the sky will decide the war’s fate”.
‘Battle in the sky’ will decide the war: Zelenskyy said the decisive phase of the war has shifted from land and sea to the air, arguing that the “battle in the sky” would determine the conflict’s outcome.
In an interview with the FT on Monday, hours after a massive Russian attack on Kyiv, the Ukrainian president said his country had already succeeded in denying Russia victory on the battlefield and had pushed its fleet from much of the western Black Sea, leaving airspace as the defining theatre.