they’re also good for probing weaknesses in the Russian “air defenses”
guess Vlady shouldn’t have stripped all those S-400 systems of their missiles just so he could bomb Ukraine last fall, huh
There are severe weaknesses in Ukraine to take down a nuclear armed missile.
I believe the Russians were using S300 missiles for bombardment, not the new S400 ones. As the Russians seem to have mostly replaced their S300 systems with S400’s, at least in European Russia, the S300’s are available for other uses.
It makes sense, given the Russians scarce resources, to repurpose a redundant resource they have a lot of.
Besides being a not very accurate bombardment missile, it could have served a purpose in inducing the Ukrainians to waste their own SAMs on them. I dont know if this happened, but looking at it from the Russian POV it was worth a try.
That said, neither S300 nor S400 are any good at intercepting low flying drones that dont give much of a radar signature. Those SAMs were made for a very different category of target.