Daily Times

Washington: Joe Biden has promised to help Ukraine get air defence systems with a longer range than the shoulder-borne Stinger missiles already on the ground, but finding the powerful anti-missile batteries Ukraine’s military so urgently needs is proving easier said than done.

The US president, who wants to support Ukraine militarily without entering into direct conflict with Russia, is seeking to provide better defences against the Russian artillery that is pounding its cities.

The ideal armament to do that would be mobile anti-aircraft batteries of the Patriot type, whose effectiveness has been amply demonstrated in recent years in Iraq and the Persian Gulf.

Loaded onto trucks, the Patriot has a radar capable of automatically detecting and intercepting an aircraft, drone or missile within a radius of more than 60 miles (100 kilometres), as well as a surveillance post manned by three soldiers and a battery of interceptor missiles.

But Ukraine’s army is not trained to handle the sophisticated US weaponry. On the other hand, they know how to handle the S-300 anti-aircraft system, a first-generation Russian competitor to the US Patriot, whose range is more limited but which would be sufficient to protect Kharkiv or Kyiv, two cities close to the Russian border, where most of the missiles that pound them are fired from.

These S-300s could come from former Soviet bloc countries that still deploy them, in particular Slovakia and Bulgaria, where US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin has been visiting in recent days.

But those countries still depend on the S-300 for their own security and are demanding a substitute — in other words, Patriots — before giving them to Ukraine.

“We’re willing to do so immediately when we have a proper replacement,” Slovak Defence Minister Jaroslav Nad told reporters on Thursday during a meeting with Austin in Bratislava.