Ukrainian Forces Prep Their 8-Ton Strike Missiles at Night. The S-200 Is an Ancient Soviet Weapon That Still Works Just Fine.
The restored Ukrainian S-200 has struck targets on the ground, and also downed two Russian warplanes.
In the summer of 2023, a mysterious—and extremely powerful—Ukrainian munition struck Russian cities and bases in the oblasts near the border with Ukraine.
A slow-motion video that circulated online in July that year finally revealed what the munition was: an eight-ton 5V28 missile from a 60-year-old S-200 long-range surface-to-air missile battery.
Nearly two years later, the Main Intelligence Directorate in Kyiv finally published an official video of an S-200 in action against invading Russian forces. The new video depicts a 5V28 missile launching from a 5P72V fixed launcher, not a mobile launcher.
That the launcher is fixed, and thus very difficult to move, may explain why—as depicted in the video—the operators work at night setting up for a morning launch.
The first confirmed S-200 strike, around July 9, 2023, may have blown up an industrial site somewhere in Bryansk Oblast. The second confirmed strike, 17 days later, ended with a 5V28 plunging into Taganrog, a city on Russia’s Black Sea coast 20 miles from the border with Ukraine and a hundred miles from the front line.
There was nothing of obvious military value on that Taganrog block. But it wasn’t hard to guess what the real target actually was: Taganrog air base, which lies just northwest of the city. At the time, the Russian air force operated drones, cargo planes and Tupolev Tu-95 bombers from the sprawling base.
The restored 1960s-vintage S-200s continued targeting Russia’s heaviest warplanes—and not just on the ground. On Feb. 23, 2024, an S-200 battery—perhaps the old Soviet battery in Dnipro—hit a Russian air force Beriev A-50 early-warning radar plane flying over Krasnodar Krai in southern Russia, a hundred or so miles from the line of contact in southern Ukraine.
On few months later on April 19, 2024, an S-200 battery—possibly the same one—downed a Russian air force Tupolev Tu-22M3 bomber over Stavropol Krai, 190 miles away from the S-200’s launch site.
Huge missile
The eight-ton 5V28 “is a honking big missile with a really heavy and voluminous seeker space,” wrote Trent Telenko, a former quality auditor with the U.S. Defense Contract Management Agency. The 5V28 packs a massive, 500-pound warhead.
The Soviet Union developed the S-200 and its 5V28 missile in the early 1960s specifically to target U.S. Air Force heavy bombers. Ukraine finally retired the air-defense dinosaurs more than a decade ago owing to their cumbersomeness as well as the cost of sustaining them.
But an upgrade was on the table. Before the current wider war, the Ukrainian government considered refurbishing some S-200s—and upgrading them with the same new seeker Ukrainian industry had developed for the smaller S-125 air-defense system.
Given the reasonably good accuracy of the resuscitated Ukrainian S-200s in the surface-to-surface role, there’s a good chance Kyiv’s engineers have installed a better seeker. Whether that same seeker works against aerial targets is unclear. It’s also unclear how many 5V28s Ukraine has left.
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Under the Cover of Darkness, Dozens of Russians Marched Toward the Front Line. Unfortunately for Them, Ukraine's Drones See at Night.
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