|
The reports of S-300 being used to target land targets originated from the same sources saying that a fragment found is from a S-300 missile. It's people on Twitter and Telegram, some of them "analysts" or people that seem to have sources in the different militaries (at least the ones that are usually right about what they say). I'm not saying that they are credible sources, but it's not like the picture of the S-300 fragment was released by an official source. We should keep this in mind when deciding what to (or not to) believe. I think it's a mistake to assume they wouldn't use S-300 because of its cost. It also doesn't make any sense to use expensive missiles to hit kid playgrounds, but it happened before Russia had cheap swarms of Iranian drones. It doesn't make sense to launch salvos of not very precise rockets from helicopters, but that's exactly what both sides are doing for close-ish combat support. Point is, and without knowing for sure if Russia is using S-300 for land targets or not, both sides have used expensive weapons even when it didn't make sense financially. On a side note, many of today's strikes seem to have used Kh-101 (edit: I meant to write 3M-54, not Kh-101) cruise missiles, which are not cheap ( https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/yw737b/the_m... ). They're using expensive stuff too, not just "cheaper-to-produce missiles". Regarding the damage from S-300 systems, yes, I've seen videos from Ukraine and Russia (Belgorod) where air defence damages some stuff. I agree that it's possible that what hit Poland was an Ukrainian S-300 or a mix of a Russian missile/drone and Ukrainian S-300. And yes, it could be a Russian missile too... even if it was not done on purpose, shit happens sometimes. I'm not a weapons expert or have special sources, so this is where I'll leave the thread. I just wanted to point out that the "running out of missiles" narrative was about other weapon systems, not about S-300s, of which they probably still have lots because it was an important part of the Soviet Union air defence. |