Igor Zaytsev's blog

After 20 days, UA repeats the strike on Engels Airbase housing the air component of the Russian nuclear triad. Very little information so far, but what was officially confirmed is that the airbase was hit, again, and three airmen were killed, again.

If the first success of the attack can be attributed to the element of surprise (which shouldn’t be), then the second strike demonstrate not only that the national air-defence capabilities of the Russian Federation were degraded into utter rubbish, leaving the most critical Russian facilities wide open to cruise missiles strikes, but also that the current commanders and the MoD are unable to learn a lesson and fix a problem even after their impotency was revealed for the entire world to see.

For a long time, I was hopeful the war will push the top government and military officials to start fixing the system they broke. In my opinion, war is unfortunate but inevitable crisis that should reinvigorate the entire nation from the stagnation of the elites and government officials who usurped the political power for much too long. Now I understand — these people are unable to do anything productive even then their own position is threatened by the fruits of their corrosive corruption. Now I can only wish for their failures to bring as much public disgrace for them as possible, so that the popular opinion in Russia will finally turn against the rotten clique and their protector saint, Rasputin himself. After that I will pray to God that competent and reasonable people will take charge, without giving rise to something even worse than corruption and incompetency.

Now, some people might think this is overreaction. The MoD reported that the threat was intercepted, and the soldiers on the airbase were killed by debris. Yet, this makes no sense at all, since no one in its right mind will intercept targets exactly at the area they are targeting. The point of air intercept is to prevent the threat from reaching its target. Were those fragments (either from the makeshift cruise missile or from the interceptor missile warhead) that killed those poor souls from the debris or from the cruise missile’s warhead blast is irrelevant, since the intended target, the airbase, was hit, and with multiple fatalities. And I don’t believe a word about “no bombers there damaged in the attack”, since too many lies were already told about those debacles. Any missile-based air defence has a minimal effective range of several kilometers. Even the anti-aircraft guns have their minimal range of 200 meters. In order to intercept a cruise missile (or a Tu-141 “Strizh” drone what was modified into one) in such a way its debris would hit the tarmac, it needs to be intercepted from the air-defence system, positioned on the opposite side of the airbase. So, either there is only one such system that protects the most important Russian airbase, and the Ukrainian drones approached the base from exactly the opposite side, or the reports of successful intercepts on both occasions where base personal was killed (at least one time on the tarmac, while servicing one of the bombers) are utter and shameless bullshit.