Outdated missiles, untested targeting equipment two key elements of a missile test gone drastically wrong
A brand-new training ground. Test launches of missiles made in 1979. A plane in the right place at the wrong time. An under-funded military performing its first missile test-launches in 18 months.
Those were among the many elements that set the stage for the apparent downing of a Russian Sibir Airlines Tu-154 passenger jet by a Ukrainian missile on Oct. 4. All 78 people aboard the plane, en route from Tel Aviv to Novisibirsk, perished.
Defense Minister Oleksandr Kuzmuk on Oct. 13 finally appeared to accept the reality that that a Ukrainian missile brought down the plane, apologizing for an accident “horrible by its consequences.” The admission followed 10 days of official denials – and flat-out lies – about Ukraine’s role in the disaster (See timeline, page 3).
Kuzmuk’s acknowledgement came shortly after Russian investigators announced on Oct. 13 that an anti-aircraft missile had definitely caused the crash. Russian investigators are now preparing to turn the case over to Ukrainian prosecutors.
While the Defense Ministry has yet to explain how it lost control of a deadly S-200 missile, details on what exactly Ukrainian military forces were up to on the ill-fated afternoon of Oct. 4 began falling into place this week.
Those details reveal that, at best, the Ukrainian military acted irresponsibly in holding the military exercises that caused the incident, and acted clumsily in dealing with the aftermath. At worst, the Defense Ministry negligently caused the deaths of 78 foreign civilians and tried to cover it up.
The exercises
Oct. 4 was the first of two days slated for missile tests during a planned, two-week military training exercise on Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula. The exercises were scheduled to run from Sept. 28 to Oct. 12.
The training ground, known as Opuc Cape, is actually operated by Russia. Russia leases the grounds from Ukraine. The autumn exercises marked the first time that Ukraine’s military had used the Opuc Cape site.
Ukraine had previously held similar exercises annually on Crimea’s Chauda Cape, some 40 kilometers away from the new site. But last year’s exercises were canceled after Ukraine’s military accidentally sent a surface-to-surface Tochka-U rocket through the roof of an apartment building in Brovary, outside Kyiv, killing three people.
As it turned out, the ill-fated Oct. 4 missile launch was the first test launch of Ukrainian anti-aircraft missiles in two years, and Ukraine’s first test launch of any kind of missile since the Brovary accident 18 months before.
According to Ukrainian military officials, the new site was chosen due to its mountainous terrain, which “adds difficulty to anti-aircraft corps and radar targeting system crews.”
The rugged landscape wasn’t the only new element of the exercises. Ukraine’s military was testing several new technologies for the first time, including a new land-based radar targeting system for anti-aircraft missiles. Defense officials said the radar, designed and manufactured domestically by the Zaporizhya-based Iskra plant, has a wider targeting range and is capable of processing more information than systems used previously.
Also being tested was a new, automated data-transferring mode, which transfers information from the radar-targeting system to the missile complex.
Maj. Serhy Avyrkin, spokesman for Ukraine’s anti-aircraft corps, said the first week of this year’s exercises was reserved for launch preparations. Actual launches were scheduled for Oct. 4 and Oct. 11, and airspace over the exercises was scheduled to be closed on those two days only. The Oct. 11 launches were canceled after the Oct. 4 accident.
According to Avyrkin, Defense Minister Oleksandr Kuzmuk and Volodymyr Tkachyov, commander of Ukraine’s anti-aircraft forces, supervised the training exercises. Both men were present at the missile launches on Oct. 4.
Avyrkin said all launches were to have been confined to a 39-kilometer zone; the zone of sealed-off air space stretched about 90 kilometers into the Black Sea, he said.
Contrary to earlier press reports, the Russian military was not involved in the botched missile launches. The Russians did have one naval vessel, the Pytlivy, involved in the exercises. It was involved in firing short-range missiles.
Ukrainian military officials said that top Russian military officers were on hand as observers, along with observers from Belarus, Moldova, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia.
The flight
At 12:40 p.m. on Oct. 4, the Sibir Airlines Tu-154 entered airspace monitored by Russian air-traffic controllers. The plane was proceeding along international air route B-145.
A minute later, two missiles were launched some 240 kilometers from the plane.
According to preliminary findings by Russian investigators, at 12:44 p.m. one of the missiles exploded 15 meters above the Sibir airliner, as designed, dousing the plane with a wall of shrapnel.
“The whole of the aircraft was within the zone of the explosion of the warhead,” said Vladimir Rushailo, the head of Russian commission investigating the crash.
The plane’s pilot and navigator, as well as most of the passengers, were killed instantly as 350 seven-millimeter metal balls perforated the aircraft, according to Russian investigators.
Andrei Pozdnyakov, spokesman for Sibir Airlines, said the plane was 1 hour and 45 minutes into its flight when the missile destroyed it.
The missiles
According to Tkachyov, the S-200 missiles involved in the exercises were made in 1979. The rockets have an operational life of 25 years.
The S-200 missile was designed by the Soviet Union’s Almaz Central Design Bureau during the late 1960s, according to the Almaz Web site. Almaz is now owned by the Russian government.
National security laws prevent military officials from releasing information about the composition and size of Ukraine’s missile inventory. Analysts are reluctant to comment, for fear of breaching those laws. As a result, it is unclear how many missiles, and more specifically how many S-200 missiles, Ukraine inherited from the Soviet Union.
But Ukraine’s missile arsenal would appear to consist almost exclusively of Soviet-era missiles. Both Valentyn Badarak, the head of the Army’s Conversion and Disarmament Research Center in Kyiv, and Leonid Polyakov, the head of military programs at the Ukrainian Center for Political and Economic Studies, said they were not aware of Ukraine buying any new anti-aircraft hardware since 1991.
The Tochka-U surface-to-surface missile that got away in Brovary last year was also Soviet-designed and -made, probably in the 1960s or 1970s. The Defense Ministry said at the time of the Brovary accident that Ukraine had a stock of some 500 Tochka-U missiles.
It is also unclear whether Ukraine has sold any of the missiles it inherited from the Soviet Union abroad.
While it turns out that terrorists were likely not behind the Sibir Airlines crash, the accident has fueled concern in the international community about such missiles ending up in the hands of terrorists or states that support terrorism.
Indeed, Ukrainian military hardware has been known to end up in the hands of rogue regimes and rebel armies, principally in Africa. In July, London’s The Guardian newspaper reported that a Ukrainian parliamentary commission set up in the late 1990s found that some $57 billion worth of military arms, equipment and property essentially disappeared from the country between 1992 and 1998.
The military
The Sibir Airlines crash is a symptom of deeper problems within Ukraine’s military, analysts say.
Most of those problems are related to funding issues, Badark said. He said that Ukraine’s spending on equipment modernization and purchases of new military hardware equaled only about Hr 315 million this year, less than the cost of a single battery of S-400 missiles, a newer-generation Russian-made anti-aircraft weapon.
According to Badarak, Ukraine’s total defense spending this year is planned at Hr 2.7 billion ($550 million), while the actual needs of the country’s army are estimated at “at least” Hr 10 billion ($2 billion).
Polyakov, the head of military programs at the Ukrainian Center for Political and Economic Studies, added that Ukraine’s defense expenditures now are only enough to “feed personnel.”
“It covers neither maintaining combat potential, nor upgrades to the military hardware, nor science,” Polyakov said.
As a result of insufficient funding, Badarak said, Ukraine is left with poorly- trained troops and archaic military hardware.
“If we don’t consider these problems, our planes will go down during exercises and our anti-aircraft corps will shoot down other peoples’ aircraft,” he said.
