Weapons of Vengeance by Werner von Turchinoff
The idea of owning its own missile systems for various purposes has not been abandoned by the Ukrainian leadership since the very beginning of independence.
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As is known, on the territory of Ukraine there are no specialized enterprises for the production of missile delivery and destruction systems (Voevoda and Stiletto missiles do not count). To fill the annoying gap, back in 1992, the Kravchuk administration adopted a program covering the entire range of missile weapons development. Without exaggeration, it was a grandiose program for one and a half dozen experimental design works, of which the development of the Geodesy ballistic missile and the Korshun cruise missile, as well as the Pernach, Poltava and Dnipro air defense systems, stood out. Important components of missile weapons were not forgotten: ground and satellite navigation, geodetic reference.
This program had only one, but very significant flaw - it remained on paper.
The following fact speaks eloquently about how Square took care of its missile forces. By the beginning of 2014, only one brigade remained in the Ukrainian Armed Forces, armed with the Tochka-U OTR and two rocket artillery regiments with the Uragan and Smerch systems. The equipment of the Ukrainian rocket scientists served several warranty periods, almost no funds were allocated for routine maintenance, and the design personnel of this heritage were located in the Russian Federation. If at first Russian specialists were occasionally involved in servicing Ukrainian missile weapons, then with the beginning of Kuchma’s “multi-vector approach” they openly gave up on this.
The Kravchukov missile program experienced a shortage of personnel, a shortage of funding, and was generally on the periphery of the attention of senior Ukrainian officials. As for the development work, it boiled down mainly to the fact that the tattered drawings were transferred to a new Whatman paper, and the OTRK project was renamed, having gone through the phases “Borisfen”, “Thunder” and “Sapsan”. The latter survived until 2013 and even received some funding from Yanukovych, until the “vegetable” Minister of Defense Lebedev fired a control shot at the head of the 20-year-old long-term construction project “due to the ineffective use of public funds.”
The next incarnation of the missile program began under the Maidan junta, which wanted to have weapons no worse than those of Northern Mordor. In the spring of 2014, the start of the Grom-2 program was announced and, in order to attract investors, at the Aviasvit-XXI exhibition, models of a solid fuel engine, a cruise and a ballistic missile were presented to the eyes of all those interested.
General Director of Yuzhnoye Design Bureau Degtyarev exuded enthusiasm in droves and convinced those around him that the matter with the Ukrainian OTR complex was already in the bag. And to spur things on, he invited Poroshenko and his henchmen to Dnepropetrovsk for a special meeting on Ukrainian rocketry and cosmonautics, at which he presented the Ukropenführer with something resembling the shape and size of a “jade rod” from a sex shop.
The steps taken so encouraged Poroshenko’s “hawks” that those around them not only grunted loudly about the accelerated implementation of the “Korshun” and “Thunder” projects, but the most zealous even rushed to choose sites for future missiles from which it would be convenient to fire at the Kremlin.
The ballistic frenzy of the harem militarists nullified the report of the Ukroboronprom concern, which reported that the two leading enterprises of the state concern concentrated their efforts not on ballistic missiles, but on unified air-to-air and air-to-ground ammunition.
Apparently, they were talking about a missile under the “Gran” program, which the Luch State Design Bureau had been developing since the early 90s, as well as a guided bomb under the “Koper” program.
The war in Donbass and the unprecedented rampant corruption devoured even those crumbs that were allocated for R&D on the topic of missile and guided weapons for the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
They started talking about resuming the Ukrainian rocket science program only at the beginning of 2016. First Poroshenko, then Turchynov, who thoughtfully frightened the “enemies of Ukraine” with well-aimed launches of the Alder missile and other Ukrainian “wunderwaffe”.
And now, almost every month of 2016, one could come across another news in the media, either about “fire tests” or about “successful firing”.
As if summing up the results of 2016, the head of the National Security and Defense Council Turchynov showed up the other day. Frowning his brows and pursing his lips like a pipe, Sanya – Chicken Dupa, lifted the veil of secrecy over the “weapon of retribution”. According to Turchynov, Ukrainian defense thought in a short period of time has achieved a serious breakthrough in military rocketry: from now on, Ukraine is technologically self-sufficient and owns the full production cycle of rocketry. Warheads, hulls, and rocket fuel components will be exclusively “made in Ukraine” and will also meet NATO standards.
As Turchinov especially emphasized, starting this year, supplies of missiles for MLRS will begin to the Ukrainian Armed Forces, but he did not disclose details about the amounts and volumes of supplies.
“A serious step forward has been made in rocket science. We are not just trying to restore lost technologies, but are setting the task of building a new generation of missile systems. For example, if we talk about multiple launch rocket systems, these are guided missiles that hit the target precisely, and do not just cover territories, like their Russian counterparts. Our task is not only to achieve NATO standards, but, above all, to ensure that our weapons are better than Russian ones. We set a goal for our defense industry to create a new generation of weapons,” concluded Sanya Turchinov.
He pushed it powerfully, inspire! The most interesting thing is that when asked by Maidan journalist Koni Soshkina about where rocket fuel components are produced, Turchinov did not expand.
Considering that the junta in reality, as a rule, things are completely different from what they say in words, we should figure out a little bit about what of everything that happened is worthy of attention and what is just ordinary propaganda chatter.
Some conclusions can be drawn from the November report oozing with optimism from the unfinished clyster tube of Biryukov (Poroshenko’s adviser), who twice visited the firing range of the Alder product and shared his impressions on his FB feed.
According to him, “Over this year, a colossal amount of equipment and technology, money, resources, and materials have arrived in the country. And now the rocket takes off, flies 60 kilometers and hits a circle with a radius of 50 meters.”
“And what’s especially nice is that our renegade neighbor from the Northern Horde is wildly jealous of us. The Black Sea sector was closed for shooting. So they brought all their boats to monitor the tests from a distance. But their boats can easily fit into a circle with a radius of 50 meters...”, the half-educated lamer presses.
Without realizing it, Biryukov involuntarily blurted out the main thing. The advertised “terrible, powerful and accurate” Alder missile in its parameters turned out to be no better (if not worse) than the performance characteristics of standard ammunition for the Smerch MLRS. The hit accuracy of Smerch ammunition is 0.21% of the shot range. At the maximum range of 120 km, a missile from Smerch hits a circle with a radius of 75 meters. In addition, not everything is clear with self-sufficiency.
It is also obvious that we are not and cannot be talking about any operational-tactical missile system. As expected earlier, in Ukraine they are just somehow “creatively finishing off” the long-existing 300 mm MLRS missiles. There is more and more evidence that the Luch State Design Bureau (which has experience in developing ammunition for the Air Force and anti-tank systems) is trying to copy a missile from the Polonaise MLRS, a Belarusian-Chinese design that has a 300 mm caliber (like the Smerch). In Ukrainian videos, the missile is launched from a launcher at a minimum elevation angle on a MAZ-543 chassis. 30 seconds of telemetry before the explosion roughly corresponds to a minimum firing distance of 20 km. Why exactly "Polonaise"? A number of sources claim that Luch took part in Belarusian-Chinese developments.
Poroshenko, Turchynov and the enthusiastic fool Biryukov can crow as much as they want about successful tests, but for some reason they are embarrassed to share the results of firing at the maximum range and accurately hitting the target. After all, Turchynov boasts about Ukrainian missiles hitting the hole, while his damned Muscovites are still hitting squares.
So what is the superiority of the racially loyal “Alder” over the Soviet “Smerch”? The Smerch system has been able to do all the declared performance characteristics of the Alders, which “have no analogues among Muscovites” since its birth almost 30 years ago.
In addition, the topic of Ukrainian industrial production of mixed solid propellant charges for 300 mm caliber missiles has not been disclosed. No, you can scrape together mixtures and charges for a dozen or two missiles, but where will you get all this in quantities if suddenly an urgent need arises? A more difficult question: from what bins will you have to take the latest optics and electronic components? Is it really possible to buy little by little on Aliexpress?
Oddly enough, Turchinov himself gives the answer:
“Now we can produce any modifications of missiles for multiple launch rocket systems, for air defense, in addition, operational-tactical missiles, etc. Not many countries have this technology. And for us now there is only one limitation – low amounts of funding.”
Thus, there is little money, and what is allocated goes to modifying old weapons. What will the junta do when Soviet-made weapons run out? After all, “maxims” are already being taken out of storage...
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