Russia has moved parts of its long-anticipated S-500 air-defense system to annexed Crimea, Kyiv has said, putting its combat-untested, highly valuable and scarce new system in possible range of Ukrainian strikes.
Lieutenant General Kyrylo Budanov, the head of Ukraine’s GUR military intelligence agency, told Ukrainian media on Wednesday that Russia had placed components of an S-500 anti-aircraft missile system in Crimea. The system is still “experimental,” he added.
This appears to be the S-500’s—also known as the Prometheus surface-to-air missile system—debut on the annexed peninsula, although it is not clear which parts of the system have been relocated to Crimea. Air-defense systems of this type have several different elements, including command posts, radars, and launchers.
It is not known for sure how many S-500s Russia has, and Moscow has indicated it expects to serially produce the system by next year.
Russia currently has one active S-500 regiment, which would typically suggest it has two battalions with two air-defense batteries each, giving Russia four in total, Sidharth Kaushal, a research fellow at the London-based Royal United Services Institute think tank, told Newsweek.
Russian media reports suggested in fall 2021 that the first S-500 had been deployed around Moscow.
Persistent Ukrainian strikes on Russia’s ground-based air defenses in Crimea, including the S-500’s predecessor, the S-400, have strained Russia’s protection of key assets on the peninsula.
Kyiv’s targeting of air defenses in Crimea has forced Moscow to relocate weaponry to shield its bases and infrastructure, and “further Ukrainian strikes against such air-defense assets may render the peninsula untenable as a staging ground for the Russian military,” said the U.S.-based think tank, the Institute for the Study of War.
Budanov said the S-500 had been deployed to protect the Kerch Bridge, a Russian-built structure personally unveiled by President Vladimir Putin in 2018 that connects Crimea with the Russian mainland.
Also referred to as the Crimean Bridge, the 12-mile-long link is crucial for keeping Russian troops on the peninsula and in Russian-controlled mainland Ukraine supplied. It has been repeatedly targeted by Ukraine.
Protecting the bridge is a priority for Russia, Paul van Hooft, a senior strategic analyst with The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies, told Newsweek.
The deployment of parts of an S-500 could be an interim solution for S-300 and S-400 losses, plugging capability gaps but also allowing Russia to test parts of the S-500 without losing an entire battery, he added.
