intercept! The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense issued a statement on the 27th that the Ukrainian air defense system intercepted a cruise missile launched at Kiev from a Russian Tu-22 bomber (Tu-22M3 "backfire") flying from Belarusian airspace.
If there is no accident, this should be Kh-22 or Kh-32 heavy supersonic air-to-ground missiles, conventional warheads weighing 1 ton, very powerful, with a range of more than 600 kilometers, but this missile is 11 meters long and weighs 5.8 tons, close to the size of a light fighter, and also lacks low-altitude breakthrough capabilities, so it is very likely that it will be shot down by the Ukrainian anti-aircraft missiles, such as the "Beech" (BUK) medium-range surface-to-air missile deployed in Kiev.
The Kh-22/Kh-32 is almost the only precision air-to-ground strike weapon outside the "backfire" zone.
Although there are also internal bomb bays with "backfires", rotary pylons can be mounted on 6, and external pylons can be hung on 4 for a total of 10 Kh-15 air-launched ballistic missiles (Figure 4, a very rare backfire mounting Kh-15), but that is a nuclear warhead, has been retired, and the latest Kh-47M2 "dagger" (transliteration Kimzal) hypersonic has not yet been integrated.
Surprisingly, the Kh-22 and its magic variant Kh-32 missiles are usually used to perform anti-ship, for precision ground strikes, a bit of anti-aircraft guns hit the mosquito feeling, now the news is very confusing, and the stop may also be the Tu-95MS launched Kh-55SM, the latter is subsonic flight, better interception. #Russia-Ukraine situation ##关注俄乌局势最新进展 #
