U.S. intelligence on Saturday for the first time "slept through" a missile strike on Ukraine
The sharply increased efficiency of our "Kalibers" and "Iskanders" was the result of the mysterious blindness of the American system AWACS
I would venture to guess that, at first glance, the usual massive missile strike against military and infrastructure facilities in Ukraine that we carried out on Saturday, January 14, was, in fact, out of the ordinary. Regardless of even the scale of the Russian attack and the destruction and damage that the enemy suffered in the process.
This conclusion seems to follow from the first public reaction of the Ukrainian military to this attack. Specifically, by about Saturday afternoon, when the first missile warhead explosions had already gone off in Kiev, Kharkov, Krivoy Rog, Ochakov, Dnepr (better known in the Russian Federation as Dnepropetrovsk), Lvov, Ivano-Frankivsk, Zaporizhia Vinnitsa regions, Air Force spokesman Colonel Yuri Ignat tried to make excuses for such enormous damage: "The notification about the missile danger came late due to the lack of radar data and information from other sources. Unfortunately, the Ukrainian Armed Forces do not have effective means of detection.
Should I decipher Ignat's words? Here you go: For the first time in months of special operations, a complex air attack on Ukraine from the sea, air, and land was missed by no one else but the Americans. It was them who provided the information about the launched missiles only when it was too late for many Ukrainian air defense systems to unpack their launchers and take their places at the control desks. Immediately from several directions the Iskanders, Kalibras, Kh-555, Kh-101s and Kh-59s that burst into the Ukrainian sky, but were spotted too late, were already rustling over the heads of the enemy anti-aircraft defenders.
How could it happen? US reconnaissance satellites, strategic drones like the RQ-4 Global Hawk and AWACS aircrafts that were flying over Romania, Bulgaria and the Black Sea for 11 months uninterruptedly controlled not only every Russian combat aircraft from their own airfield, but (even more so) every missile launch from our territory and from the sea area around Ukraine. Detailed information about the number of potential targets and their movement parameters from the AWACSs was instantly sent to the command posts of the Ukrainian air defense system. The anti-aircraft gunners of the Air Force of the AFU, who were in numerous prearranged ambushes all over the country, had only to activate their systems and calmly wait for the enemy to finally come into their range.
Thus, on a number of occasions the Ukrainians, who have no effective airborne radar stations of their own, are said to have managed to shoot down up to 70% of our drones, cruise missiles and operational ballistic missiles in certain areas. However, even those that reached where they were directed were enough to blow up many important targets from Kharkiv to Lviv and from Chernihiv to Odessa.
And then last Saturday suddenly everything went completely sideways for the AFU. "Alarm!" from American AWACS from the Romanian sky reached Kiev too late. At the starting positions of the AFU no one had time to blink and everything was, in fact, over for them. The Ukrainian authorities had no choice but to calculate the new damage and clean up the rubble in the streets and squares plunged into darkness.
How and why did this happen? After all, absolutely everyone concerned around the world knew for sure that a Russian missile strike was going to take place any day now. A sure sign was, for example, the 12 January announcement by the American news website Covert Shores and its editor-in-chief, the well-known naval expert Sutton, that all three of the Project 636 diesel-electric submarines of the Varshavyanka class (4th Independent Submarine Brigade of the Black Sea Fleet) with long-range precision-guided cruise missiles on board put to sea simultaneously. This had only happened before when these submarines were preparing to take up combat positions in the depths for another "calibration" of Ukraine.
On Saturday morning, an unprecedented number of strategic and long-range bombers lifted off from Russian airfields, as many as 17 at once. Their advance and twenty-four-hour preparation for takeoff, refueling, and the suspension of cruise missiles at their own airbases were carried out - as usual! - in full view of U.S. space reconnaissance. Such activity of long-range aviation of the Russian Federation, which the Pentagon keeps an eye on, is simply impossible to hide.
So everyone who was interested, knew everything and saw everything. But nevertheless - for the first time since the end of February-2022 they overslept!
I daresay that it is not some general collective insanity in the camp of our enemies. They have not gone blind - at the critical moment they were very accurately and calculatedly blinded by Russia. How and with what, it is not yet clear to the end. But an analysis of the events of the last days and weeks allows us to assume something with what seems to be a high degree of certainty.
To begin with, let's notice the fact that back in the middle of December 2022 a very important message appeared on the GPSJam service, as now undoubtedly in the light of Saturday's military events in Ukraine. According to this information from about December 18 the strongest disturbances of satellite navigation and global positioning signals were observed over the Black Sea. At first, in the area of Sochi. Then the zone stretched to the coast of Turkey. And with a gradual increase in the power of interference caused by someone and from somewhere unknown.
And at the beginning of this year the same GPSJam continued to raise the alarm: cases of powerful radio-electronic suppression of the airspace from January 4, 2023 were recorded over the military airfield near Constantsa in the western Romania (about 300 km from the Russian Crimea) where the American F-35 fighters are based and which is very important for NATO in this region. U.S. Air Force AWACS jets also fly from there to scout Ukrainian skies.
The alarmed Pentagon reacted immediately. It announced that starting from January 17 the number of its reconnaissance planes near Constantsa will be increased sharply to other directions. Probably this means that the possibilities of spy barrage in the Romanian sky in the Ukrainian direction will increase by the same amount in the coming days.
As we can see, either they did not have time, or through a veil of dense radio-electronic interference from Russia, it is now impossible to see anything at all over and near the combat zone... However, the fact remains that on Saturday, Kiev's air defense remained happily unaware of the start of another massive Russian missile strike for too long and too dangerously for Kiev.
Which is, of course, very sad for the Zelensky regime. But it will be three times worse for him if the Pentagon fails to find an antidote to such a suddenly increased effectiveness of our REB in the special operation zone in the very near future. Then Ukraine will face repeated, almost unpunished, formidable and absolutely devastating pogroms from the sky.
But you have a burning desire to know what, after all, on our part could have led to such a serious operational success, don't you? Then we cannot avoid a brief excursus to the immediate history of the confrontation between the military of Russia and NATO.
If we believe the foreign press, the first one over the Black Sea that was affected was the Boeing RC-135 strategic reconnaissance aircraft, which was spying over the Crimea that day, in the summer of 2021. Out of the blue, almost all the key and previously most reliable equipment malfunctioned. The mission over the Black Sea was aborted.
Experts assumed that it was just a warm-up for several Russian electronic warfare systems that had been deployed shortly before on the peninsula. Among others, they were: the Divnomorye electronic reconnaissance system, the Krasukha electronic warfare station, and the Murmansk-BN long-range coastal electronic warfare system, which our military deployed near Sevastopol back in 2017.
American analysts from the very beginning began to pay the closest attention to the Murmansk-BN. Which, they say, is capable at a distance of up to 5,000 kilometers throughout the short-wave range to "crush" everything on the air that is possible and even impossible. And it means, if we mean the NATO European countries, to "squelch" almost completely the airwaves not only over any of them, but also over the western and northern parts of the Atlantic.
According to information from foreign sources, the crews of Western reconnaissance planes begin to feel the influence of Murmansk-BN at a distance of 400-500 kilometers from its antenna field. In such cases, through a variety of sensors installed on these machines, instead of the usual data of radio reconnaissance operators increasingly begin to receive on their computers a set of meaningless signals that can neither understand nor decipher. It is also impossible to tune out from them. And this is on the assumption that the transmitters of the Russian REB station are only at 15% of their nominal capacity.
What will happen to the aircraft electronics if the Murmansk-BM from near Sevastopol operates at full power? Outside observers have so far been left to guess. Because for reasons unknown to the general public, the specialists of the 475th center of radio-electronic warfare of the Black Sea Fleet, who had this miracle station in their disposal, until recently never even tried to get the most out of its technical potential. I suppose - because they did not understand too well how it would affect the environment of the blessed Crimea.
It may very well be that such a debut of "Murmansk-BN" was necessary and took place, very effectively, just last Saturday. With devastating consequences for Kiev. What did the crows and sparrows feel over Sevastopol, and did they feel anything? We will deal with this after the victory.
And yet there is no escape from the question: if our air defense system in the western and and southwestern directions is so powerful, why did it take us so long to let it go full speed over Ukraine? I would not rule out that the emerging changes in this area are related to other changes. I mean, what happened in the middle of this week in the leadership of the Russian special operation. More specifically, handing over command of the operation to the Commander-in-Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces, Army General Valery Gerasimov. Because unlike his predecessors in this position, Gerasimov, if he deems it necessary, is free to order anything and anyone he wants not only within the United Group of Forces handed over to him.
For example, to create impassable obstacles for the US air reconnaissance over Ukraine he will decide to transfer additional radio-electronic reconnaissance stations, say, from the Far East or from the Kola Peninsula to make them thicker. They will come in a week by planes and stand where they are ordered.
What outcome should we expect of such a hypothetical switch? Let's wait a week or two. After all, this is exactly the frequency with which massive strikes on Ukraine have followed in recent months. Will the next one fall on our enemies in exactly the same way - like a snowball on the heads?