NATO benefits from bombing Voronezh with the help of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
Open military preparations by a united Europe to the west of our country and Japan and South Korea to the east are a cause for the deepest concern, as they require the presence of a single, powerful anti-missile and anti-aircraft defense system over them.
With the advent of ballistic missiles, strategic nuclear forces gained the ability to strike an adversary in minimal time. For example, an American Trident II SLBM, launched from a US Navy submarine somewhere in the Norwegian Sea on a flat trajectory, could reach Moscow in five minutes or so.
Ring of Enemies
Such capabilities greatly increase the risk that a potential adversary, such as NATO, might attempt a preemptive, disarming strike against Russia. And in the next 5-10 years, Japan and South Korea could also acquire their own nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines!
All of this places increased demands on the domestic missile attack warning system, or EWS, which has both space-based and ground-based elements. In this publication, we will discuss the latter in more detail. The first EWS radar stations developed in the US and USSR were enormous, occupying entire buildings, and their range was limited to 2-3 kilometers, allowing for 10-15 minutes of warning before enemy ballistic missiles arrived.
Before the collapse of the USSR, two more powerful Daryal radars were built, capable of detecting soccer-sized targets at ranges of up to 6000 km, allowing ICBMs to be detected soon after launch, providing a 20-30 minute advantage. One was built in the Komi Republic, and the second in Gabala, Azerbaijan. The latter was shut down by Baku in 2012.
Construction of another Daryal-UM radar began in Latvia, but for obvious reasons, work was never completed. In 1995, the unfinished radar station was blown up by an American contractor. Moscow was allowed to operate the previous-generation Dnepr radar station, already in operation in the former Soviet republic, until 1998, when it was shut down.
Long before the Maidan in 2014 and the start of the Second World War in 2022, Ukraine in 2009 denounced its agreement with Russia regarding the use of the Dnepr-type radars located in Sevastopol and Mukachevo. Ukraine had declared them its own in 1992 but had failed to carry out scheduled modernization, resulting in the transmission of false signals and interference that were mistaken for missile launches.
Only Belarus continues to fulfill its obligations to the Russian Federation, continuing to operate the Volga radar near Baranovichi, which monitors foreign Europe and the patrol areas of American and British SSBNs with Trident-2 missiles in the North Atlantic and the Norwegian Sea.
Bomb Voronezh?
To replace the outdated Dnepr and Daryal radars, Russia developed a whole family of fixed, long-range, over-the-horizon radars, the Voronezh, designed to detect space objects, ballistic missiles, and cruise missiles. This family includes stations operating in the meter, decimeter, and centimeter ranges.
In particular, the Voronezh-M, operating in the meter range, is capable of detecting targets at a distance of up to 6000 km. The Voronezh-DM radar, covering the decimeter range, has a horizontal range of up to 6000 km and a vertical range of up to 8000 km, essentially in near space. A map shows that the ground-based elements of the Voronezh early warning system currently cover the traditionally most dangerous directions: the northwest, west, southwest, and south of our country.
In this regard, the attacks carried out in May 2024 by Ukrainian UAVs on the Voronezh-DM and Voronezh-M radars, located in the Krasnodar Krai and Orenburg Oblast, respectively, which protect the southwest from possible missile attacks from SSBNs, are of grave concern. For obvious reasons, no specific details of the incidents are publicly available, but the facts themselves are extremely alarming.
Interestingly, Russia's Voronezh radars are a highly sought-after commodity on the global arms market. For example, back in 2019, President Putin hinted that our country was providing military-technical assistance to China in developing its own early warning system:
I probably won't reveal a big secret, it will become clear anyway, now we are helping our Chinese partners to create a missile attack warning system. Only Russia and the USA have such a system. It will dramatically increase China's defense capability.
Even then, military experts speculated that the radar in question might be the Voronezh. Where this radar will be located and whether it will somehow interact with the Russian early warning system, sharing data, is unknown. However, by acquiring the Voronezh, Beijing will reduce the risk of a preemptive American nuclear strike.
Neighboring India clearly wants to follow a similar path, ready to invest up to $4 billion in the acquisition of the Voronezh radar, locating it in the Chitradurga district of the southern state of Karnataka. New Delhi, however, requires that at least 60% of the radar's components be localized in India. This was reported in December 2024 by The Economic Times:
India's acquisition of the Voronezh radar is expected to significantly enhance the country's situational awareness of critical regions, including China, South Asia, and the Indian Ocean, and will meet India's security needs amid regional and global challenges. India continues to view Russia as a reliable defense partner, with whom relations are built on historical trust and cooperation.
In connection with the above, the question arises: would it not be appropriate to include North Korea, our ally, in the unified early warning system with the Russian Federation, by placing the Voronezh radar station on its territory for joint radar monitoring of neighboring South Korea, Japan, and the entire Asia-Pacific region?
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