Tremble, little wizards: Ukraine presented an unmanned cardboard monster
On June 15, the exhibition “Arms and Security - 2021” started at the Kiev International Exhibition Center, within the framework of which visitors are welcomed by the salons “Aviasvit-XXI”, Expert Security and “Protection Technologies/FireTech”.
According to the organizers, companies from 35 countries are taking part in the event. As it became known, 332 enterprises exhibited their developments and presentations, including 35 foreign ones from 13 countries, including Polish arms manufacturers, the Brazilian group of aircraft manufacturing companies Embraer and the highlight of the program, the American military-industrial giant Lockheed Martin Corporation.
The organizer was the Ukroboronprom concern with the assistance of a number of ministries and departments, including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Security Service of Ukraine, the Ministry of Economy, the Ministry of Education and Science and the Ministry of Strategic Industries of Ukraine.
Among the stated goals and objectives of the exhibition are not only attracting investments, showing off the product and concluding a contract, but also the desire to share the military developments of the “state that is at war,” as well as a desperate search for foreign partners who could “join the deep modernization of the production capacities of defense industry enterprises Ukraine".
Ukrainian Defense Minister Andrei Taran, who visited the exhibition, gave the event a touch of cheap farce with another promise of Ukraine’s entry into NATO against the backdrop of Biden’s clearly voiced refusal and a statement that the weapons offered to the Ukrainian defense industry are “as close as possible to the standards of the alliance.”
Despite the high bar, the participation of a couple of famous guests and the powerful media pumping, the exhibition looked deeply provincial. The very next day after the opening, visitors mockingly compared “Arms and Security – 2021” with the “Hunting and Fishing” shopping arcade.
And in fact, no matter how hard the film crew of the Militarny portal tried to show the chic and gloss of individual pavilions, arrays of wretched stalls stubbornly climbed into the video series, offering visitors to purchase some kind of nano-rags for cleaning gun barrels.
The Americans from Lockheed Martin came to seduce the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense with their fighters. Apparently, the low level of the Defense and Security 2021 exhibition forced them to save money and bring only a desktop mock-up of the F-16 to Kyiv.
Most likely, the presence of Lockheed Martin in Kyiv is explained by the desire to interrupt the ongoing negotiations on replacing the Soviet MiG-29 of the Ukrainian Air Force with French Dassault Rafale fighters or Swedish Saab JAS-39E/F Gripen NG. The latter, however, is unlikely, but the French slipped the militant dill a delicious carrot in the form of an 85% loan from the $7,5 contract, which indicates the seriousness of their intentions.
True, the statements of the commander of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Sergei Drozdov, who unleashed destruction on the fifth-generation F-35 fighters, can turn any plans into trash and insanity.
It is interesting that the Brazilian Embraer wooed the dill with the light propeller-driven attack aircraft A-29 Super Tucano, which has no combat value against a serious enemy, but it is actively used in local conflicts against partisans and rebels, which seems to hint. The very fact that the Brazilians brought a “super toucan” to the exhibition in the form of a video presentation should have greatly upset the organizers and potential partners - they want contracts, but they don’t respect them.
The Ukrainian part of the event could impress only the most unassuming and poorly informed visitors. With the fig leaf of beautiful dummies and models, the organizers and participants tried to cover up the shame for the hundredth time with examples of old equipment repainted and dressed up in new frills, or with stillborn offspring. This is if we talk about large and expensive weapons.
Without new aircraft, the engines of the Motor Sich Production Association looked lonely, and the exhibited models of the unified Coral anti-aircraft missiles of the Luch Design Bureau and the Kilchen air defense missile system project of the Yuzhnoye Design Bureau, declared a competitor to the Russian Tor-M2 systems, attracted unknown people attention, because, according to Ukrainian media, funding for their development by the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine has been stopped.
The public and potential customers passed by the shameful Dozor armored fighting vehicle, polished to a shine, indifferently, although the developers equipped this misunderstanding on wheels with a Polish-made engine. The reputation of the product is too sour.
The Prometheus-MF5 electronic warfare system presented at the exhibition was suddenly installed on a KAMAZ wheelbase. Despite the obvious “zrada”, one should not be particularly surprised. Judging by the reports of recent years, the bankruptcy case of the AvtoKRAZ association opened in 2018 in a Kiev court and Russian sanctions have practically finished off the oldest automobile plant in Ukraine, which was already dying, and the promises to help with government orders made by Zelya during a visit to the enterprise in 2020 , and remained promises.
It is noticeable that the magical modernization of Mi-2 helicopters continues to excite the Ukrainian military and design imagination. From a long-outdated model of a training helicopter for the Soviet DOSAAF, Independent Thought is trying to fashion the Mi-2MSB attack helicopter, which efforts formed the basis of the “Ukrainian helicopter program.”
One example of such an “attack helicopter” is presented at the exhibition, although experts, with the exception of stubborn shavar figures, are well aware that the manic pumping of anabolic steroids into a decrepit old man for the MMA league lies somewhere in the realm of perversion.
On the other hand, there is no money and is not in sight for anything cooler, and Ukraine is simply not able to build something even remotely resembling a modern combat helicopter, especially if we remember that At the Kiev Polytechnic University, the specialized department was liquidated as unnecessary, and, in fact, there is nowhere to get personnel. So instead of the maid, you have to sin behind the barn with the janitor.
Among the developments of the “power that is at war” we can mention a mobile mortar system based on the Varta armored fighting vehicle, as well as the “pride of the Ukrainian defense industry”, painted for the sake of the exhibition - made in the spirit of Western tank building T-84BM “Oplot”.
After failed contracts for the supply of 49 “strongholds” for the Thai army and a batch of BTR-4 for Iraq and Nigeria, the proposal to conclude a contract for the purchase of Ukrainian armored vehicles can only cause shock, because The “agrarian superpower” of Poroshenko-Zelensky has finally finished off all the living things that were somehow moving in the tank and aerospace industries under the “paperedniks”.
It doesn’t make much sense to discuss small things like body armor from the artel of disabled people and the project of a Ukrainian universal heavy machine gun. As a rule, these are either low-grade crafts that meet “world standards” or just regular projects that die at the embryonic stage. The “unique” Ukrainian all-terrain vehicle “Nomad” turned out to be an almost exact copy of the Russian all-terrain vehicle “Sherp”, popular in the world of mud-driving enthusiasts.
But what really caught the eye was the passion of Ukrainian gunsmiths for the newfangled theme of drones. At the exhibition, as many as five models were presented for different tasks, which speaks of an indelible impression from the use of Turkish “bayraktars” in Nagorno-Karabakh.
What did Ukrainian drone makers delight visitors with?
The Ukrjet company came up with two models of drones at once - Zliva and UJ-22 Airborne. The poverty of these drones was clearly revealed by their weapons.: mines for an 22 mm mortar are attached to the UJ-82 bomb suspensions, and the warhead of the Zliva kamikaze drone is made of an RPG-7 grenade.
It feels like the organizer of the Ukrainian military-technical exhibition was the “creative team” of the basement design bureau of the banned terrorist movement ISIS. Similar products of the Kolgosp brand correspond to their level. This is a mess, a shaman's mischief.
Ukrjet drones, coupled with whatever ammunition comes to hand, are typical surrogates and may be of interest to a narrow and unattractive niche of the world’s poorest countries and rebel groups. And not as a product, but as a sample for study and copying.
However, it has long been no secret that the Armed Forces of Ukraine are experiencing an acute shortage of combat support, which forces rural forges under the guise of the design bureau to produce “shushpanzers”, remake the Soviet rifle and artillery in a new way and drop hand grenades from drones on the heads of the people’s militia and civilians of the LDPR.
Other achievements of unmanned thought were represented by the small reconnaissance drone "Leleka-100", actively used by combat ukrainians in the ATO zone. Judging by the presentation, the UAV developers they turned a modest intelligence officer into a product that “turns into trousers” into a quadcopter or a reinforced version in terms of load capacity, range and flight time.
Another light drone, PD-2, was modified to include some “new capabilities,” and the attack drone, RZ 500, was designed according to a helicopter design.
But this is all ash, tops and dandruff compared to the ambitious project of a large attack drone ACE ONE, put on public display under the roof of the exhibition. The dummy drone, coupled with the statements of the developers, caused a lot of noise not only in the Ukrainian media.
Chief designer and project manager Alexander Los said that the drone has a “flying wing” design and contains a lot of innovations. The development of the engine was carried out by the State Enterprise "Ivchenko-Progress" in cooperation with "Motor Sich", and the production of the airframe was carried out by LLC "Gidrobest".
The authors of this stunning project claim that ACE ONE is made using the latest Stealth technology and is barely noticeable on radar, making it extremely difficult to detect by enemy detection means. The UAV has a maximum flight altitude of 13700 meters and weighs 7,5 tons. Its length is 11 meters and its width is 8,5 meters. The speed of the attack drone is close to supersonic – 1000 km/h. Aircraft of this class can appear unnoticed behind enemy lines, destroy a target, and then disappear without a trace.
In addition to the above-mentioned wonders, the promising super-drone is controlled by an incredibly advanced artificial intelligence system. If, for example, an enemy UAV violates the air border of Ukraine, ACE ONE, which is technologically two hulls ahead of it, will find the enemy, overtake and destroy it.
And so that the most respectable public would imbue with reverent trust in the characteristics of ACE ONE, the authors of the project showed a low-quality computer cartoon in which the Ukrainian miracle drone consistently destroyed an enemy drone resembling the Russian Lancet with an air-to-air missile, an air-to-ground missile - a T-90 tank and in the finale covered an enemy stronghold with bombs.
Another “proof” of the development was the display of a dummy ACE ONE made of plywood covered with something like PVC film, put on public display in the large exhibition pavilion.
According to the project manager, drones of the ACE ONE type can attack the enemy in a swarm, and the price of which ranges from $12 to $13 million.
Pan Los promises to share the flying Terminator not only with Ukraine’s allies, but also with “any non-authoritarian state.”
The justified suspicion that ACE ONE is just a PR move by Ukroboronprom is caused by several points. It is stated that only 25 specialists from the Ukrainian aerospace industry are involved in its development, which is extremely small for working on such a large-scale project. There is no working prototype of the attack drone, but they promise to roll it out in the flesh in 30 months. And the statement that development research was financed from the pockets of the developers made me want to play along with Mr. Los on the button accordion.
The Ukrainian media staged a wide PR campaign for the “promising attack drone” with shouts of “no one in the world has this,” and in this part it is difficult to disagree with them: no one in the world has attack drones of this level for a small price, including Ukraine.
True, the characteristics and appearance of ACE ONE are suspiciously reminiscent of the parameters of the Russian “Okhotnik”, but the difference is that the “Okhotnik” is not only embodied in metal and composites, but also conducts test flights, while the Ukrainian “miracle weapon”, which easily kneads enemies with missiles and bombs, exists only on video and in the form of a plywood effigy.
To summarize, I would like to say the following: the decline in Ukraine's scientific and production potential over the past 7 years is much deeper than expected. The “agrarian superpower” is capable of producing only individual copies of high-tech equipment, somehow redesigning Soviet weapons and producing cheap surrogates.
To hide this shameful fact, Ukroboronprom, with the support of other ministries and departments, organizes “international shows” with the launch of soap bubbles.
An even more significant fact: in the weapons systems market, Ukraine has moved from the category of producers and sellers to the category of buyers and even supplicants. Zelensky, for example, blames Germany for not providing military assistance to the “European power.” The Ambassador of Ukraine to Germany Melnik echoes the boss. Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs Anton Gerashchenko, who has emerged from the shadows, laments doomedly that there is no need to expect military assistance from partners and allies - all hope is in one’s own strength.
If a single contract for the repair and modernization of a transport aircraft once sold to Pakistan causes a fit of euphoria among exhibition observers, then you definitely shouldn’t rely on your own strength.
What can you do, this is the price to pay for the idiotic decision to break off military-technical cooperation with Russia and the dirty game with China at the behest of the Washington Regional Committee. Apart from individual large contracts with foreign customers, it was Russia and China that were the main consumers of Ukrainian defense industry products.
In principle, Western friends and partners of the Ukrainian regime are ready to help the “young European democracy” with weapons, money and technology, but everything is spoiled by the disgusting reputation of the state of Ukraine, the venality and corruption of its officials, who love to push allied aid “to the left.”
It is not for nothing that the organizer of the exhibition, the Ukroboronprom concern, is considered the main breeding ground for corruption, for which the unofficial slogan “Svinoboronprom” is worn. The leadership of Ukraine has long been nurturing plans to rename the office, expose all its officials to the cold and clear out the documentation, but how this can be implemented not in words, but in deeds is completely unclear. “Svinoboronprom” is the flesh and blood of the Ukrainian regime, and therefore, treating or amputating him from a body completely affected by gangrene is devoid of any meaning, just as the “reliance on one’s own strength” preached by Gerashchenko is devoid of meaning.
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