Very good article. And very powerful statements from the colonel. I hope that our governments can get them the weapons they need which are wasting away in storage.
He disclosed that in December Ukrainian authorities had been on the brink of ordering the complete evacuation of Kyiv due to the intensity of Russian airstrikes. “Not many people know this, but Kyiv was on the verge of evacuation,” he said. “There was one battle that, in my opinion, determined the fate of Kyiv and the Russian campaign to destroy our energy sector, when 49 cruise missiles were launched at Kyiv.”
In a desperate 15 minutes on December 16, Ukraine fired dozens of missiles from its Soviet-era S-300, American Nasams and German Iris-T systems to save the city from total blackout in freezing temperatures.
Isn't it just lies? As I understand hypersonic missile don't just fly fast, but also low trajectory and they are able to maneuver during all stages of the flight.
If the Russian missile was able to maneuver at the end, maths would not help, as calculated positions to intercept would be useless with a target that changes course. So Putin simply lied about the abilities of the missile, or - as there were some arrests in the news a few months ago with the developers of the missile - maybe those lied about the abilities of their product.
Well yes and no. It’s a ballistic missile, so it doesn't have a "low trajectory" but a ballistic flight path, which can be calculated from just 3 data points. It can indeed maneuver at all stages, but because it's really fast (that part isn't a lie), it's only able to do very small deviations from it's predetermined flight path (apart from also needing to hit the actual target, so it can't just fly in a completely different direction). The deviations are so small that the patriot can just correct for them in many/most cases. So it's not a lie it can maneuver, it's just not as much as would be necessary to reliably avoid interception, even though patriots fly slower.
There's hypersonic ballistic and hypersonic glide, the former is basically a normal ballistic missile (an srbm or so) launched at a flatter trajectory, while the latter is more complex and can maneuver.
Khinzals are the former, they're the old iskanders, but shot sideways instead of up.
As I see it, there are 2 flaws with your thinking: First, even a wildly manoeuvring missile eventually has to point the nose at the target and dive in. It is vulnerable then at the very least. Second, manoeuvring alone does not render something immune to interception. For example, fighter aircraft manoeuvre like crazy and they get shot down handily.
Shrapnel kills things when a fragmentation warhead explodes at a proper distance from the target. If a missile gets blown up thousands of feet in the air the only way it's hurting anyone is if a large piece falls on their head and brains them.