Storm Shadows, which defense Secretary Ben Wallace confirmed are cruise missiles with a range of up to 250 km for the export version and up to 560 km for the domestic variant.
If fired over northeastern Ukraine, the export variant Anglo-French weapons would have sufficient range to target major Russian cities like Kursk, Belgorod, Voronezh, or Sevastopol, as well as much of Belarus – including its capital, Minsk.
UK officials privately assured that Kyiv has promised that the missiles would not be used to attack targets inside Russia.
But that’s little consolation to Moscow, given that Ukraine’s government moved to turn the crisis into a terror bombing free-for-all over a year ago, not only indiscriminately and deliberately targeting cities in Donbass, but attempting to launch missile, artillery, and drone attacks on targets deep inside Russia.
The cruise missile, which sold to Britain’s military for about £790,000 apiece in 2011 and reportedly goes for about $2.5 million now, weighs 1.3 tons, has a length of 5.1 meters, and a diameter of about 0.4 meters. It has a 450 kg tandem warhead with the capability to destroy heavy fortifications, or level apartment buildings, industrial facilities, railway junctions, or columns of vehicles and troops.
A warship-fired derivative exists, with that variant having a range of up to 1,400 km, and a 300 kg warhead. The missiles feature inertial navigation, combined with GPS and terrain referencing.
The UK is estimated to have 700 and 1,000 Storm Shadows in stock.
“This is an air-launched missile that uses stealth technology. The warhead can be a cluster munition or a penetrating warhead and has a 450 kg weight…As a rule, it’s installed on European-produced aircraft…It’s not installed on US aircraft. The French version differs from the British one only in the interface for installation on the corresponding fighters,” Dmitry Drozdenko, editor-in-chief of Arsenal of the Fatherland, a Russian defense news and analysis portal, told Sputnik.
“Different countries will do different things, depending on their own capabilities, depending on their own technology, depending on what makes the most sense. So, we’ve provided some things uniquely to Ukraine through this process. Other countries may do things differently than what we’re doing. The question is: Does the whole thing add up to what Ukraine needs? And we’re determined that it does so,” Blinken once said to US media.
