On Monday evening Russia launched a “full on aerial attack on Kyiv” overnight and fired nine cruise missiles from ships in the Black Sea, six hypersonic “Kinzhal” aero-ballistic missiles from Mig-31K warplanes at the Ukrainian capital overnight.
The Russian Ministry of Defence said that “targets [were] achieved” as they carried out “high precision attacks on ammunition and storage units.
They then claimed that a hypersonic “Kinzhal” aero-ballistic missiles destroyed a US Patriot air defence system in Kyiv in the early hours.
However, the spokesperson of the Air Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Yuriy Ihnat said that to destroy the Patriot air defence system with “Dagger” Kinzhal missile is “impossible.”
Ihnat, said, “I want to say: don’t worry about the fate of Patriot. From a technical point of view, Patriot is a complex, a battery, a division, a system which is called differently.
“Let’s take a division – a command post in which there is a combat service … a radar and up to eight launchers, each equipped with four transport and launch containers located at a distance, they provide missile launches,” he said on the air of the national telethon.
Ihnat said that the command post can operate in manual, semi-automatic and automatic mode and the latter allows the Patriot to shoot down air targets without human intervention, as happened on the night of 16 May.
He added, “To destroy the system with some kind of Dagger, well, it’s impossible. Therefore, I think that everything they tell there will remain in their propaganda archive.”
