Why the Russians are firing more and more X-22 missiles/Channel 24 Collage
the occupiers do not stop shelling Ukrainian cities with deadly rockets. Residential buildings and civilian infrastructure remain under threat, because even if you believe in fables about attacks on military targets, they do not fire precision-guided missiles.
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About this on air Channel 24 said military expert, chief editor of Defense Express Oleg Katkov. According to him, among those missiles that the Russians use to terrorize the Ukrainian population, there are no high-precision ones at all, even if they are declared as such.
They hit with such a spread that does not allow us to talk about them as selective weapons in the ideology of modern high-precision weapons. – the expert explained.
For example, the Soviet Kh-101 and Kh-555 cruise missiles allegedly belong to high-precision weapons. According to various estimates, there are not many of them in Russian arsenal, because these are weapons that the Russian military-industrial complex cannot produce in sufficient quantities. Consequently, their number in active use has noticeably decreased. But, unfortunately, this does not mean that the shelling is over.
Among other things, Russia often uses X-22 missiles, which, according to Katkov, still remember Khrushchev. These missiles, developed in the 60s and modernized a little later, were even decommissioned by the Russian army, but they were returned.
It is important that even according to the nomenclature, the allowable deviation from the aiming point for Kh-22 missiles is hundreds of meters. You need to understand that when the Russians use this weapon, the target for them is not a specific object, but an entire settlement. It is almost impossible to know exactly where the missile will hit. At the same time, the invaders are beginning to use Kh-22 missiles more and more often.
“The number of attacks with Kh-22 missiles, in my opinion, will increase, because they have significant stocks of these missiles. Which ones, how many of them – 100 , 200, 1000 or 2000 – we do not know, because these are missiles that were manufactured in the Soviet Union, and it is rather difficult to estimate even an approximate number,” the expert believes.
He added that the complexity is also added by the fact that before the launch of the X-22 they undergo repairs, because for decades they have been stored awaiting disposal.
Countering Kh-22 missiles is also a difficult issue. First you need to understand the mechanism of their action:
- A Tu-22 aircraft lifts a rocket to a height of 10 kilometers,
- then it unhooks and rises to a height of 22.5 kilometers,
- accelerates to 4.7 speeds of sound,
- at a distance of 60 kilometers from the target, it begins to dive at a speed of about Mach 2,
- at the moment of impact, its speed is from 2 to 2.5 speeds of sound.
This is an extremely fast target that can only be intercepted by a complex located near the impact site. It cannot be shot down on the flight path,” Katkov explained.
Since Kh-22 missiles belong to the class of aerodynamic targets, they can be shot down. The corresponding complexes are also in service with Ukraine – these are, for example, the S-300 and Buk. However, the probability of destroying such targets with such a complex is 30%.
“This is a difficult target. Even the presence of these complexes does not guarantee that the missile will be intercepted. For a banal reason – it was created to destroy US aircraft carrier groups, then there are the same aircraft carriers that are covered by dense anti-aircraft, anti-missile defense,” the expert concluded. Nikolaev. Previously, there were no victims of shelling, but they fell into industrial and critical infrastructure facilities.
