Ukrainian strikes on Russian early warning radar installations: a strategic blow or an irrelevancy?

In the past several days, Western mainstream media have reported on a Ukrainian drone attack on a Russian early warning radar installation in the south of the country that is said to have disabled the facility. And now in the past 24 hours, we hear that a second such installation also was struck, though it is unclear how severe the damage may have been. 

The major point in these Western accounts is that the target had strategic value for Russia and that their blinding was putting Russian national security at risk.  This would appear to come under the category of existential threats that President Putin has evoked when speaking of Russia’s latest nuclear doctrine that allows nuclear counter-attack in such circumstances.

It thus came as no surprise to me when several of my correspondents asked me what Russian state television has been saying about these attacks.  My response was that they received little or no mention in the official news bulletins but were discussed very briefly on the widely watched Evening with Vladimir Solovyov talk show. The point made there was that the attacks on such radar units have no relevancy to the ongoing war in Ukraine which is being decided on the battlefield all along the 1200 km line of contact, and in particular in the Kharkov, Donetsk, Lugansk and Kherson regions, where the Russians are decimating the Ukrainian forces, pushing them back in disorderly retreat and capturing new villages each day.

To be specific, Vesti’s daily reported kills have risen from 1200 just a few weeks ago to 1700 or more today. And at the same time there appear to be larger numbers of Ukrainians surrendering each day, as those Ukrainian soldiers who have been recently mobilized by force on the streets of Kiev and other cities take the first opportunity to give up the fight.

To be sure, bitter fighting is going on in several cities of the Donetsk region where the Ukrainians have decided to make a do or die stand.  But the indications are that Russians will soon be moving past these holdouts in the direction of Kramatorsk and Slavyansk, sealing Russian control over the Donbas.

 Accordingly, my first thinking about the “strategic” nature of the Ukrainian drone attacks on Russia’s southernmost early warning radar installations was to point a finger at who is telling us this:  it is the press that is hand-fed by Washington. If the loss were truly of a strategic nature, would not the Russians have shown their alarm by some dramatic counter attack?

Indeed, in his essay on the radar installation attacks, Paul Craig Roberts suggests that Washington directed them via its Ukrainian proxy to enrage Moscow and prompt a violent and disproportionate response that might justify NATO’s entering the war directly now, given that NATO forces on the ground are the last hope to prevent an impending Ukrainian defeat. See https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2024/05/27/the-ever-widening-war-61/

Of course, as I noted above, the Russians did not take the bait, which should lead one to think that the military value of the given radar installations has been greatly exaggerated by the Biden administration and its minions.

However, today an article by retired MIT professor Ted Postol backs up the dire characterization of the Ukrainian attacks on early warning radars that mainstream first put forward. See

Arrest these insane NATO warmongers!

Postol was a long time scientific advisor to the Pentagon on missile defense systems and other high technology gear, and so his estimation of the dangers arising from blinding Russia’s ground based radar networks has to be taken seriously.

In what follows, I do not challenge Postol’s facts. After all, he is the military technology expert, and I am not. Instead, I am questioning his interpretation of the facts and the logic he employs.

For at least 25 years professor Postol has been telling us that when the Russians let the Soviet era satellite launch monitoring network lapse they lost the ability to see over the horizon and so greatly shortened the time at their disposal to decide upon the threat level of objects flying in their direction. What this would mean is launch on false data would be much more likely, with the result of heightened risk to the USA. At one point going back a couple of decades professor Postol even suggested that the USA should share technology with the Russians so they could improve their early warning systems and not set off nuclear Armageddon by mistake.

There are substantial amounts of that former argumentation in professor Postol’s latest essay, though the fact that Russia today has moved ahead of the USA in the modernity of its nuclear triad, though the fact that Russia is years ahead of the USA in developing and deploying in active service its devastating hypersonic missiles should lay to rest the idea that the Russians are incapable of setting up a satellite network of global launch detection if they thought it would improve their defense capability.

Postol and I are in agreement that the blacked out radar installation(s) would only have been useful in detecting launches from the Mediterranean or Indian oceans  This is very different from detecting ICBMs coming from North America over the pole.  Professor Postol does not take this very important distinction to its next logical point:  that the only source of missile attacks on Russia from the south and southeast would be American bases and nuclear submarines in the Middle East.  They might launch a few cruise or ballistic missiles, but that is not to be compared with hundreds of ICBMs with multiple warheads carrying out a decapitating first strike from silos in the continental United States. It is hard to imagine anyone in Washington risking a massive Russian revenge nuclear attack on their homeland by taking advantage of the supposed blinding of Russia’s early warning network in the south to send some nuclear armed missiles to the Russian heartland. Such suicidal madness is hardly possible even in these days when incompetents populate the highest positions in the State Department and in the National Security Council. That such are the people in power today is one point in Postol’s latest essay with which I concur entirely.

Finally, a colleague has sent me the following appreciation of the attacks on Russian early warning radar from a Russian military expert of The Military Summary channel. The issue is discussed in the first three minutes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfhwvwSzekc

The point here is that the intention of the planners of these strikes may have been to harm the defenses of Iran, not Russia, since the given installations would be most useful in detecting missile launches in the West and South directed against Iran. This assumes, of course, that there is close collaboration between Moscow and Teheran precisely for such common defense. In any case, the attack on the radars has nothing whatever to do with the war in Ukraine: the USA would have been using the Ukrainians as nominal attacking party to further their own regional aims that are unrelated to the fate of Kiev.

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Before closing this discussion of the latest hot issues surrounding Russia and the war, I am obliged to say a few words about the press conference which Vladimir Putin held at Tashkent airport on Monday at the conclusion of what appears to have been a very successful three day visit to Uzbekistan with a large government and business delegation.  Meeting with representatives of the Russian media, he addressed directly the idea suggested by Jens Stoltenberg, by David Cameron and now by Emanuel Macron that Ukraine should be given free hands to do what it will with the long range attack missiles and other hardware being supplied to it by the NATO countries, meaning it should be allowed to strike deep into Russian Federation territory to destroy military bases there.

Putin directed attention to the utter falseness of this concept, saying that these weapons all require space based reconnaissance data for targeting that Ukraine does not possess but is receiving from French, German, US and other military personnel. In effect, the missiles are targeted by NATO officers who may also push the launch button, if this is not left to the Ukrainians, who may not even be aware where the missiles are heading.

By saying this, Putin has pulled away the fig leaf of NATO’s supposed non-co-belligerent status.  This is an entirely new messaging from Moscow and it is just a hair’s breadth away from declaration of war.

At the same time, Putin spoke directly to the leaders of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, reminding them that they are really very small countries with very dense populations and that they should think twice before declaring, as the Prime Minister of Estonia did last week, that the task now is ‘to bring Russia to its knees.’   His remarks may be described as a direct threat to wipe the Baltics from the face of the earth.

Who now insists that Putin’s mildness and restraint give cause for misjudging his readiness to defend Russian sovereignty whatever the cost?

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024