The Minister of Defense of Ukraine, Oleksii Reznikov, published an infographic with an updated estimate of the stockpile of russia’s missiles as of January 3, 2023. In it, for the first time during the full-scale invasion, there were official estimates of the number of the Iskander 9M728 (also known as R-500) and 9M729 cruise missiles.
According to Ukraine’s data, as of February 23, 2022, there were a total of up to 100 cruise missiles to the Iskander complex in russia, during the war additional 20 missiles of both types were manufactured (the average production rate is 2 missiles per month). A total of 68 units were launched, leaving only 52 9M728 and 9M729 cruise missiles.
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The amount is actually not so small, if you consider that, according to the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, russians now have only 59 Kalibr cruise missiles (with 15 units produced monthly). Accordingly, there is reason to assume that in the near future russia might begin to use not only ballistic missiles, but also cruise missiles for the Iskander complexes more actively. Therefore, there is reason to once again talk about the characteristics of such cruise missiles.
The main characteristic that can distinguish the 9M728 and 9M729 cruise missiles from each other is the actual flight range. Regarding the 9М728, the declared firing range is 500 km. Regarding the 9M729, Western analysts assumed that this missile could have an actual firing range of about 1,500 km, which was essentially a violation of the terms of the INF Treaty (the elimination of short- and medium-range missiles), which the russian federation stopped observing in August 2019.
There is an assumption in open data sources that both types of 9M728 and 9M729 missiles have an identical warhead weight of 480 kg and an identical flight speed of subsonic, about 900 km/h. So it turns out that the Iskander cruise missile can cause the same damage to the infrastructure of Ukraine, as the X-101 and X-555 missiles, as well as the Kalibr.
There were indications in open sources that russian developers used, in particular, Western chips of the 1980s to manufacture the 9M728 missiles. But despite such "technological simplifications", for unknown reasons, the russian military-industrial complex did not increase the production of such cruise missiles. A total of 68 cruise missiles of both types were launched: a "modest" quantity considering the figures for launching other types of missiles.
There are not that many references to the use of the Iskander-K in open sources: on March 3, 2022, there was a report about the launch of the R-500 over Kyiv; in May 2022, russians fired three cruise missiles of this type at a training ground in Dnipropetrovsk oblast, two were shot down, one hit the target. In September 2022, there was a report that Ukraine’s air-defense shot down three Iskander-K missiles over Dnipropetrovsk oblast.
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