Air Defense Hit or Miss? Smolensk Video Shows ‘Cure’ Can Be Worse Option

As Kyiv Post reported, around 10 long-range kamikaze drones, part of a 50-plus mass Ukrainian drone attack on Russia overnight on Jan. 21, targeted the Smolensk Aviation Plant. As usual after such incidents, Russia’s Defense Ministry claimed its air defenses had shot down 22 over Bryansk region, 12 over Rostov, 6 near Voronezh, 4 in Saratov and 10 over the Smolensk region.

The Smolensk regional governor Vasily Anokhin claimed that all the drones had been shot down with falling drone debris causing only minor damage to residential buildings, fires on the ground and on roofs.

None of the official reports mentioned the aircraft factory, despite Astra posting videos of fire at the facility and the Russian Telegram channel Shot saying that at least two high-rise residential buildings had been hit.

In response to those and other reports, Anokhin warned against “fake information and videos” reporting that the drone attack that appeared on social media.

Smolensk is around 60 kilometers (35 miles) east of the Russia-Belarus border and 270 kilometers (170 miles) north of Ukraine. The city’s aviation plant is involved in the production and modernization of the Su-25 military aircraft, according to Andriy Kovalenko, the counter-disinformation chief at Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council.

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On Wednesday a remarkable video, said to have been taken during Tuesday’s attack, was widely posted on Telegram and X, showing a missile from a Russian Pantsir S-1 (NATO: SA-22 Greyhound) short-range air defense system successfully intercepting a Ukrainian drone over Smolensk.

At the start of the video the noise of the Ukrainian drone’s engine can be heard with flashes of nearby explosions in the background. After a few seconds the motor of a Russian surface-to-air missile can be seen to ignite. The missile flies at high speed, so close to houses as it flies over them that the light from its motor lights up their roofs, before hitting “something” in an explosion that scatters sparks and burning debris.

Pro-Kremlin Z-bloggers categorized the incident as a “textbook example of how a surface-to-air missile can down targets even at very low level, with limited response time.”

Others, after examining the video more closely, suggested that the missile had missed the drone and had actually hit a nearby building. They contended that the sound of the drone’s engine could be heard after the “strike,” indicating a miss, which the Z-bloggers countered by saying came from a second aircraft, without producing any evidence of a nearby UAV.

Yet others said it was immaterial whether the missile had hit the target or not. They argued that the proximity of the detonation – of the Pantsir’s 57E6 20 kilogram (44 pound) high explosive continuous rod fragmenting warhead – to the buildings was likely to do serious damage (even more so if it caused the drones warhead to function).

This seemed to be supported by a compilation video posted on the Clash Report X channel, which included the original images of the Pantsir missile launch and the strike with a second video apparently showing the missile’s impact. This additional clip sees a low flying twin-boomed Ukrainian drone pass overhead, followed almost immediately by an explosion on a nearby building and people scattering from nearby doorways.

There are numerous “post attack” reports of serious damage and often casualties being caused by Ukrainian drones and missiles that Russian authorities have claimed to have downed. The video shows that shooting drones down over civilian residences is a double-edged weapon – the “cure” could be just as hazardous as the original threat.