On the evening of September 22, Air Command "South" reported four Shahed-136 "kamikaze drones" of Iranian manufacture (referred to as "Geran-2" in russia). Notably, only "two medium-range anti-aircraft missiles" were used to take them down.
This detail is twofold noteworthy. First, the sole fact that it took only two missiles to take them all down shows both the real value of experience gained over almost seven months of the all-out war in the field of anti-drone warfare, and russian incompetence in operating Iranian systems which resulted in all these "Shahed" munitions failing to reach the target. The Air Command doesn't detail how many drones were involved in the attack in total.
Read more: Ukraine Seeking to Create a Three-Tier Air Defense and Boost Military Industry – Defense Minister Reznikov on "Ramstein-5" Results
As a reminder, the most effective way to take down drones is to detonate the missile mid-air, as it approaches the target. For example, the British Martlet system works this way. Blast fragmentation causes enough damage for a relatively small aerial vehicle to break and fall.
Secondly, the mentioning of some "medium-range" missile might be just a casual referring to one of those Western-supplied short-range missiles: the very same Martlet, for instance, has a firing range of 6 to 8 km which is comparably wider than the Soviet "Igla" (5 to 6 km) or "Strela-10" (5 km) but still not so much to call it "medium-range".
Or perhaps Ukraine does have actual medium-range missiles. As far as we know, the American NASAMS are expected to arrive only in mid to late November. However, if we recall the story around the supply of German IRIS-T missile systems, there was some ambiguity regarding the terms of delivery. Yet, German Minister of Foreign Affairs Annalena Baerbock was expecting the first system to come to Ukraine in September.
Anyway, there was no official data on the arrival of IRIS-T or NASAMS yet, and no evidence either, so all these speculations remain utterly theoretical.
Read more: Does the US Really Send More Weapons to Ukraine Than Announced: How HARM And Other Armament Were Disguised For Ukraine’s Armed Forces
