The trial operation of three new Voronezh high factory readiness radars (VZG radars) of the Missile Attack Warning System (SPRN) in the Krasnoyarsk and Altai Territories and in the Orenburg Region will be completed before the end of the year, after which they will be put on alert. This was reported by Interfax with reference to the press service of the Russian Defense Ministry. Presumably, by the end of the year, as planned, the construction of new VZG radars in the Komi Republic and in the Murmansk region will also be completed. On the Kola Peninsula, the new radar will replace the outdated Dnepr type with a frequency-phase scanning slot antenna, which has recently undergone modernization. The operating radars in Baranovichi (Republic of Belarus) and in Pechora (Republic of Komi) have also been improved.
In December 2016, at a meeting of the Collegium of the Ministry of Defense, Sergei Shoigu said that for the first time in the history of new Russia, a continuous radar field of an early warning system was created along the border perimeter in all strategic aerospace directions and along all types of ballistic missile flight paths.
In addition to the Voronezh-type stations, digital radars of the Don family and earlier radars of the Dnestr family are currently on alert. The Don-2N firing radar near Sofrino near Moscow was put on alert more than 20 years ago as part of the A-135 anti-missile defense system of the Central Industrial Region. Until now, it is an unsurpassed world-class masterpiece. It was built specifically to warn about the launch of the American Pershing-2 medium-range ballistic missiles, which were in West Germany until 1991. The flight time of the Pershing to Minsk was then 2 minutes, to Moscow - 5 minutes, to the Volga - 7 minutes.
Today, the problem is again actualized in connection with the deployment in Poland and Romania of the American Aegis anti-missile defense complex, which, according to Russian experts, has an offensive potential. NATO is expected to complete the creation of a regional missile defense system in Europe by 2018. From 2020, it is planned to start integrating it with the missile defense system deployed on the North American continent.
Russia will not helplessly look at the growth of the American missile defense system, including the appearance of its elements in South Korea, Russian President Vladimir Putin said at a meeting with the heads of international news agencies at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. “In Alaska, now in South Korea, missile defense elements are emerging. We just have to look at it, just like in the western part of Russia, or what? Of course not. We are thinking about how we can respond to these challenges,”said Vladimir Putin.
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu at the government hour in the Federation Council assured that the military department is monitoring the American threat from space. “We are not sleeping,” he said, answering the question of how the Russian Aerospace Forces can counter the American threat from space. The rest he promised to tell the senators behind closed doors.
During the summer training period, the space forces of the Aerospace Forces will concentrate efforts on performing tasks to maintain constant readiness for the use of early warning systems. In particular, under the leadership of the commander-in-chief of the Aerospace Forces, command and staff exercises will be held to control the orbital group during the warning of a missile attack and information support of the Russian Armed Forces.
At the end of May, the orbital group was replenished with one more spacecraft (SC) of the missile attack warning system EKS-2 (Unified Space System No. 2). On May 25, from the Plesetsk cosmodrome, the combat crews of the Aerospace Forces launched the Soyuz-2.1b carrier rocket with the Fregat-M upper stage and the new generation 14F142 Tundra spacecraft. After successful launch into the target orbit, it was assigned the serial number "Cosmos-2518". This is the second satellite, the first EKS-1, which received the serial number "Cosmos-2510", was launched into orbit on November 17, 2015. In total, it is planned to deploy 10 satellites.
EKS should become the basis of the space echelon of the early warning system. As noted earlier in the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, it will significantly reduce the detection time for ballistic missile launches of a potential enemy. At present, the operation to intercept and suppress a launching ballistic missile in automatic mode lasts from 10 to 15 seconds. Initially, it was planned that the CEN would be fully deployed by 2018, although two years ago, Roskosmos, probably, realistically assessed their capabilities to fulfill everything that had been planned earlier.
At a meeting with the leadership of the Ministry of Defense and representatives of the defense industry enterprises on May 19 in Sochi, Russian President Vladimir Putin suggested that the audience "focus on the issues of creating a promising technical reserve based on breakthrough technologies." The President stressed that the intellectual potential of the entire scientific community should be fully utilized in ensuring the state's defense capability.
The scientific community seems to be ready for this, including those who create the space echelon of the early warning system. Scientists and designers in their work have come close to the borderline when, from the point of view of physics, mathematics and materials science, it will become possible to create a space radar with the same characteristics as those of ground-based systems. However, to launch it into orbit, a super-heavy launch vehicle with a "carrying capacity" of tens of tons will be required. The country already had a corresponding carrier - let us recall the famous Energia rocket, which could lift up to 100 tons into space. But this load is too heavy for the Russian economy. You will have to wait for a long time, perhaps even more than a decade - until the second stage of the Vostochny cosmodrome is built and a super-heavy rocket is created. The only consolation is that the richest state in the world, the United States, investing an order of magnitude more money in the development of space programs than Russia, is still unable to move its ground-based missile attack warning systems into space.
