US Confirms Ukraine's Patriots Downed Putin's Rare Radar Plane: 'Historic'

War
Post At: Jun 10/2024 06:50PM

A senior U.S. Army officer has confirmed that Ukraine used one of its American-made Patriot surface-to-air missile systems to down a Russian Beriev A-50 airborne early warning and control aircraft in January 2024.

Colonel Rosanna Clemente, the assistant chief of staff of the 10th Army Air and Missile Defense Command, said in comments at the Fires Symposium event last month that Ukraine's Western-provided Patriot anti-air systems are serving in various roles.

Some Patriot launchers, Clemente said, are "being used to protect static sites and critical national infrastructure, others are being moved around and doing some really historic things that I haven't seen in 22 years of being an air defender. And one of them is a 'SAMbush'."

A Russian A-50 airborne early warning and control aircraft is sent "to monitor the situation over the Black Sea coastlines of Crimea and Kuban in context of the large-scale NATO exercises in several Eastern European... A Russian A-50 airborne early warning and control aircraft is sent "to monitor the situation over the Black Sea coastlines of Crimea and Kuban in context of the large-scale NATO exercises in several Eastern European countries," June 10. In June 2024 a US army officer appeared to confirm that one of the few A-50s Russia has at its disposal had been downed by the US-supplied Patriot missile system. Russian Ministry of Defense

"They're doing that with extremely mobile Patriot systems that were donated by the Germans, because the systems are all mounted on the trucks."

Such mobile systems, Clemente said, can be deployed close to the front and target Russian aircraft operating far from the contact line. Ukrainian anti-air teams, she said, used this tactic "to engage the first A-50 C2 [command and control] system back in January."

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