US, allies to help Ukraine build air defence against Russian attacks

Pentagon envisions technically complicated project stitched together from different countries’ missile systems.

Mark Milley leaves a meeting of the Ukraine Defence Contact Group in Brussels on Wednesday. Picture: AFP

The US and its allies plan to help Ukraine field an integrated air-defence system to protect against Russian cruise missiles, ballistic missiles and aircraft, the U.S.’s top military official said Wednesday.

The initiative marks a new undertaking for the Western nations and is technically ambitious, US officials acknowledge.

The effort is intended to help Ukraine better protect itself against the waves of cruise and ballistic missiles Russia has unleashed at Ukraine’s energy and other infrastructure in recent days.

“What Ukraine is asking for, and what we think can be provided, is an integrated air-missile-defence system,” General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Wednesday. “That doesn’t control all the airspace over Ukraine, but they’re designed to control priority targets that Ukraine needs to protect.”

General Milley’s comments followed a meeting in Brussels of the Ukraine Contact Group, a 50-nation group that meets to assess Ukraine’s defence needs, including Ukraine’s request for more help with air defences.

Though Ukraine has had considerable success in shooting down Russian planes, the missiles Russia fired earlier this week at Ukrainian electrical and other infrastructure highlight Ukraine’s difficulty in defending populated centres against missile attacks.

Appeals by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Ukraine Defence Minister Oleksiy Reznikov for more air-defence capability have added to pressure on the US and its partners to do more.

General Milley said the system the US and its partners hope to build would be assembled from a mix of allied systems that can defend against low-altitude, medium-altitude and high-altitude threats. He didn’t say when such a system might be in place.

Experts said that the objective was a worthy one but could be technologically challenging.

“It is certainly the right aspiration. Technical integration will be a challenge,” said Thomas Karako of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“The threat is there. The need is there. But this is also something that the US Army has been working on for over a decade, and they are still trying to fully integrate their disparate air defence elements.”

General Milley acknowledged that building the defence wouldn’t be easy. He said that such a system could include the I-Hawk, a US Army surface-to-air system that was deployed in the 1970s. Gen. Milley said that Ukraine had specifically asked for the system and that it was still effective.

Other elements include the German Iris-T, the first of which Berlin is now delivering, and possibly Patriot surface-to-air missiles from allied nations. Israeli air-defence systems, General Milley said, also might be incorporated.

“The task will be to bring those together, get them deployed, get them trained because each of these systems is different,” he said. “It’s quite complicated from a technical standpoint.”

The Wall Street Journal