Why Ukraine Can't Stop Iskander Missiles, by Rob Lee

Ukraine struggles to intercept Iskander missiles because a single Patriot interceptor is often "a 50% chance of hitting or less", says Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. The Iskander-M's 9M723 can fly a ballistic or a quasi-ballistic path, so the Patriot has to guess, and a ground-launched missile can land seconds after launch, often before the air alarm sounds.

The United States, Lee says, would launch multiple interceptors per missile. Ukraine lacks the PAC-3s to do that. Dmytro Putiata, a veteran sergeant of Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces, adds the other half of the problem: Ukraine knows roughly where the launchers hide, but has to catch them in the few minutes they stand in the open. Both spoke in early August 2026.

Why is one Patriot interceptor only a 50% chance?

The answer is in the missile's flight path. The 9M723, Lee explains, can use a ballistic trajectory or a more quasi-ballistic one, and the defender does not know in advance which it will be. The Patriot has to guess. If you can launch only one interceptor, the guess is often going to be a 50% chance of hitting or less. He calls it one of the enduring problems Ukraine has, with no good solution.

Stock makes it worse. Lee says Ukraine lacks PAC-3s, and that the United States has itself gone through a large share of its own, "like 65%, I think", the figure reported the week before he spoke.

Supply is not the whole story, though. In Lee's words, the 9M723 "is difficult to intercept even when Ukraine has enough Patriots". The ground-attack version of the S-400 missile is also hard, because it was built as an air defence missile. It manoeuvres in a unique way, and that alone confuses ballistic missile defence systems.

Hear Rob Lee explain the 50% Patriot problem at 1:31:00.

How much warning does Ukraine get before a missile strike?

Lee sorts Russia's missiles by how much notice they give, a distinction that decides whether air defence crews have any time at all.

| Launch platform | Weapon | Warning, by the guests' account | |---|---|---| | MiG-31 aircraft | Kinzhal air-launched ballistic missile | The air alarm sounds across the country as soon as it takes off | | Tu-95 bombers | Kh-101 cruise missile | The alarm sounds at take-off and everyone is ready | | Ground launchers | Iskander-M, the S-400 in a ground-attack role, North Korea's KN-23 and KN-24 | Seconds before impact (Lee); up to two minutes (Putiata) |

Lee thinks Tsirkon and Onyx, also ground-launched, can appear in the same category. Ground launchers, he says, are hard to track and can operate in a decentralised way. In Kyiv, over the previous two months of strikes, "you hear the first impact and then the alarm goes off".

Putiata's own tracking is slightly more generous: usually up to two minutes before you hear the impact. Either figure leaves a crew almost no time.

Are the North Korean missiles harder to stop than the Iskander?

They are bigger, and Putiata's account of them carries its hedges. From what he has heard, Russia has two launchers able to fire the North Korean missiles, which are much larger and more powerful than the Iskander, and they belong to rocket brigades under the Moscow Military District. Citing what GUR reportedly said, he supposes there will be more: maybe up to six launchers and more than 100 missiles.

He doubts North Korean servicemen will fire them. He thinks it will be Russians.

Their early launches were, in his words, super inefficient, landing about a couple of kilometres from the target. They improved a lot after that, "definitely with Russian help". A strike in the Dnipro area killed an entire family in a house maybe a couple of hundred metres from a railway station, which he assumes was the real target.

What can Ukraine do instead of intercepting?

Lee goes through the options, and none of them is good right now.

• SAMP/T. Ukraine has it, but as far as he knows it has not had much success against ballistic missiles, and he thinks interceptor quantities are a big issue there too.
• Hitting the factories. Ukraine has struck plants making Iskander components. Some people he has spoken to think it may work; others think it is not effective at all, because Russia can produce elsewhere. He does not know.
• A domestic system. Fire Point says it is coming with an option next year. "We'll see," Lee says.
• Licensed PAC-3 production. It now seems unlikely to be agreed until the winter, and even then it is a long-term thing.

That leaves going after the archer, not the arrow. Putiata says Ukraine knows where Russia puts its launchers. In most cases they sit in forest areas with shelters, and Ukraine knows how many launchers are in a given part of a given forest. The problem is timing: you need to catch a launcher while it is standing and trying to launch. You could send 200 drones against that forest and maybe be efficient. He does not know.

He also names a hard limit. Without Starlink, Ukraine's own technology lets it strike out to about 100 kilometres, when it is operated at all. "We have a lot of things to fix," he says, "and it's not going to be easy."

Lee's answer is cheap, persistent drones. The 9M723 has roughly a 500 kilometre range, so the launchers sit within about 500 kilometres of the border. A Starlink-connected fixed-wing drone such as the Blyskavka can be piloted into a truck at more than 100 kilometres for less than $2,000, cheap enough to fly without a target and crash into a tree if nothing turns up. With Hornets or Blyskavkas on Starlink, the quantities are great enough to flood a launch area, he argues, and teams can go hunting the moment a missile is fired, while the launchers find it harder to move at all. It won't be a 100% solution, he says, but it can contest them more than now.

The catch is geography. 200 to 300 kilometres into Russian territory, Starlink is not enabled for Ukraine. Lee notes it was reported that President Zelenskyy asked President Trump to enable it there. Why the link stops where it does, and what that costs, is in where Starlink stops at the border.

Is there a cheap answer to ballistic missiles?

Not in Lee's view. Ballistic missile defence is difficult and sophisticated to develop, and expensive, and "there's no way of doing it cheap". The PAC-3 shortfall also runs through his account of what Ukraine still needs from its partners, in Ukraine's aid dependence, narrowed to Patriot interceptors.