Ukraine’s defence minister Oleksiy Reznikov was meeting US officials when he took a phone call from his top commander. Turning to his American visitors, Reznikov said: “I have good news for you. We downed a Kinzhal,”
Financial Times reports.
The Kinzhal was supposedly a fearsome Russian hypersonic missile which, Vladimir Putin boasted, flew so fast it could not be intercepted. But on that day in May, Ukrainian forces fired a newly acquired Patriot air defence system, one of the most advanced pieces of weaponry supplied so far by the US, proving Putin wrong.
“Fantastic!” Reznikov recalled a US official responding.
The war in Ukraine is the first time that Nato weaponry is being used on a large scale against Russia’s army — after pleas for assistance from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy — and it is giving western militaries invaluable insights into the performance of their kit.
Experts had long suspected the Patriot was capable of shooting down a Kinzhal, but it took the Ukrainian military to demonstrate it. They have since intercepted more than a dozen.
Kyiv’s western allies “can actually see if their weapons work, how efficiently they work and if they need to be upgraded”, Reznikov said in an interview.
“For the military industry of the world, you can’t invent a better testing ground,” he added.
