This Yastreb-AV radar makes it possible to detect enemy artillery after the first shot in order to neutralize it. Nevertheless, Kiev is making a serious exaggeration by talking about a system worth “$250 million.”
Fire isn't everything in artillery duels. You still need to know where to shoot, and quickly. The Russians learned this the hard way on January 2nd. While they had just announced the first operational deployment of their “1K14E Yastreb-AV” counter-battery radar in Ukraine, on the same day this complex and expensive system was destroyed by a multiple rocket launcher (MLRS) supplied by Himars from the United States to the Ukrainians.
Its destruction, captured on video by a drone, was authenticated by Osint (Open Source Intelligence) specialists who daily monitor the war in Ukraine. When the Ukrainian long-range artillery attacked, the valuable radar was in the Russian-annexed Kherson region, which controls about 70% of its area on the left bank of the Dnieper. At least two guided grenades can be seen hitting their target and two Russian soldiers storming out of the cab of the tractor-trailer, which is emitting smoke.
The event, which, of course, cannot represent the state of the balance of forces along the 1000-kilometer front line, is nevertheless noteworthy in that this type of counter-battery radar has precisely the task of detecting … the MLRS Himars destroyed it. To understand this, we must resort to what the military calls counter-battery fire, with the aim of neutralizing enemy artillery. For this purpose, it is first necessary to locate the artillery systems, which is a difficult task given the attack distances, which are often more than 20 kilometers. The moment of choice comes immediately after an opponent's first shot: by identifying his trajectory, it is possible to trace the wire to locate the origin of the shot. And this must be done in a very short time so as not to give the enemy artillery piece time to move immediately after the shot. However, many of the guns are not “towed” but “self-propelled,” which increases their mobility.
This is where defensive radars come into play, capable of identifying and calculating the trajectories of enemy artillery in order to locate them. In artillery battles, they are the eyes or even the brains of the armed arm. Although the Russians have much greater firepower than the Ukrainians, the latter undeniably demonstrated their ability to prevail in counter-battery fire this summer. It must be said that Western artillery systems supplied to Kiev often have greater ranges than those of the Russians. Despite everything, on January 1, the Russians released for the first time a video of a Zala drone that allegedly managed to identify, film and track a Himars rocket launcher in the Kharkiv region. They then unsuccessfully attempted to destroy it with their own MLRS, Smerch. To date, there are no visually confirmed Himars losses in Ukraine.
$250 million? A Ukrainian exaggeration
In this context, the destruction of the first “1K14E Yastreb-AV” is anything but anecdotal. On “Himar’s Time!” “A perfect shot destroys a Russian 1K148 Yastreb-AV counter-battery radar worth around $250 million,” the institution commented. The amount still seems very excessive. “This price announced by the Ukrainians is not at all valid … even a new Tu-160M (the most advanced strategic bomber in Russia, editor's note) costs less!”, specifies a good expert on Russian military issues. which states that almost no information was filtered out on the Yastreb AV. “The Russians are deliberately keeping too quiet about this counter-battery system, the first images of which date back to 2017,” he specifies.
If we do not know the value of such a system, we can still refer to the value of other Western counter-battery radars, such as the American-French-German-British Cobra, whose unit cost was set in a Senate report at 15 million euros. It was certainly in 2002 and there was inflation there. A German report in 2018 gave a value of 50 million. If we now think about the American AN/TPQ-53 radar, we notice that an export contract with Saudi Arabia in 2017 for 26 of them was worth $662 million. Or 25 million per unit.
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The idea that a Russian radar could be worth ten times more is unthinkable. At least for one reason related to what economists call “purchasing power parity,” which can be summarized as follows: We don’t buy the same thing with one dollar everywhere in the world. However, the vast majority of Russian weapons are manufactured in Russia and are therefore not affected by the low value of the ruble against the dollar, which would have a major impact on their price if they had to import elements. This is one of the reasons why, in dollar terms, Russian weapons are structurally inexpensive (and why, always in dollar terms, the Russian military budget is largely underestimated).
Since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the Oryx website has listed 19 counter-battery radars destroyed, damaged or captured on the Russian side. So far, however, these have been older models (Zoopark or Ark) whose origins come from the Soviet Union. On the Ukrainian side, there are 13 at the Osint site, all of them Western-made and in almost all cases American. These are only visually confirmed losses, so the list on both sides is not necessarily complete.