Russia and Syria threaten to fire SA-5 missiles into central Israel if IAF air strikes continue

12 Comments / 12 Comments

1. @ Michael S: Not an immediate threat to Israel, at any rate. Will be a long time before system is a threat to the U.S. either. Just thought I’d give our readers a heads up. Russia continues to try to improve its missile strike force and to develop new weapons. In the long run, that creates dangers for Israel, unless Russia drops its alliance with Syria, Iran, etc.

2. @ adamdalgliesh:
   Putin is just trying to make sure of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) for a while. The arms race is on, and it will eventually break the Russians — unless Dems and Rinos in the US lead us into an Obamaesque surrender.

3. This from Yeshiva World News, usually an accurate source. Also they are reprinting an AP release:

   Official: Russian Weapon 27 Times Faster Than Speed Of Sound
   December 28, 2018 8:15 am

   Russia’s new strategic weapon has rendered any missile defenses useless at a small fraction of their cost, officials said Thursday.

   The Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle flies 27 times faster than the speed of sound, making it impossible to intercept, Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Borisov told Russian state television.

   The new weapon “essentially makes missile defenses useless,” he said.

   Borisov spoke a day after Russian President Vladimir Putin oversaw what he described as the conclusive successful test of the Avangard and hailed it as a reliable guarantee of Russia’s security for decades to come.

   In Wednesday’s test, the weapon was launched from the Dombarovskiy missile base in the southern Ural Mountains. The Kremlin said it successfully hit a practice target on the Kura shooting range on Kamchatka, 6,000 kilometers (3,700 miles) away.

   The Defense Ministry released footage from the test launch, in which a ballistic missile could be seen blasting from a silo in a cloud of smoke, but it hasn’t released any images of the vehicle itself.

   Putin said the Avangard will enter service with the Russian Strategic Missile Forces next year.

   The test comes amid bitter tensions in Russia-U.S. relations, which have been strained over the Ukrainian crisis, the war in Syria and the allegations of Moscow’s meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

   Sergei Ivanov, a former Russian defense minister, said in televised comments that the Avangard constantly changes its course and altitude as it flies through the atmosphere.

   He emphasized that unlike previous nuclear warheads fitted to intercontinental ballistic missiles that follow a predictable trajectory allowing it to calculate the spot where they can be intercepted, the Avangard chaotically zigzags on its path to its target, making it impossible to predict the weapon’s location.

   A smiling Ivanov likened the weapon’s flight through the atmosphere to a pebble skipping off the surface of water.

   Ivanov, who now serves as Putin’s adviser, said the Avangard could be fitted to the Soviet-made UR-100UTTKh intercontinental ballistic missile, which is code-named SS-19 Stiletto by NATO.

   He noted that Russia has a stockpile of several dozen such missiles, which are in a factory-mint condition and not filled with fuel, allowing them to serve for a long time to come. Ivanov added that they could be put in existing silos, sharply reducing the costs of Avangard’s deployment.

   “The Avangard has cost hundreds of times less than what the U.S. has spent on its missile defense,” Ivanov said.

   He noted that Russia began to develop the Avangard after the 2002 U.S. withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and started to develop defenses against ballistic missiles.

   Moscow feared that the U.S. missile shield could erode its nuclear deterrent, and Putin announced in 2004 that Russia was working on a new hypersonic weapon.

   Ivanov recalled that when Russian officials warned their U.S. counterparts about the new weapon program at the time, American officials were openly skeptical about Russia’s ability to carry out its plan.

   “We aren’t involved in saber-rattling, we simply ensured our security for decades to come,” he said.

   (AP)

4. @ Bear Klein:
   Hi, Bear

   I think I also take “prophecynewsstand” with a grain of salt. The bottom line is that even if they wanted to, the Russians are unlikely to attack Israel. Their priority at the moment, seems to be with strengthening Assad and unifying Syria:

   “Kremlin Welcomes Return of Syrian Kurdish Territories to Assad”

   — https://themoscowtimes.com/news/kremlin-welcomes-return-of-syrian-kurdish-territories-to-assad-63997

   The Syrian Kurds have a long history of cooperating with Assad, even while fighting for autonomy. They certainly prefer him to Erdogan, who has imprisoned their leader and is waging cultural genocide against their North Kurdish brethren in Turkey.

   I think Turkey will continue its efforts to expand its influence in Syria, but he will probably have to wait for a moment of some rift between Assad and Putin. I don’t think anything is certain in that country.

5. I believe the article below which confirms the Debka article has a great likelihood of being true. The logic why I also believe the likelihood of the threat is articulated in the next paragraph.

   Russia first claimed that Israeli missiles were mostly shot down by the Syrian air defenses. Israel showed images that countered this clearly faulty claim. This all makes Russia look impotent and does not help it in the marketing of Missile Defense Systems. The Israelis have been cutting them to shreds. So the threat from the Syrians and Russians is likely as they are in need of deterrence against the IAF attacks on Iran in Syria plus the destruction of Syrian missile systems when the IDF is threatened by them.

   Russia and Syria threaten to fire SA-5 missiles into central Israel if IAF air strikes continue

   A new Russian threat was received in Israel on Wednesday, Dec. 26: Any more air strikes and Syria’s SA-5 air defense missiles will be fired deep into Israel – like the one that shook several towns on Tuesday night in the middle of an IAF attack on Iranian sites in Syria. Israel’s air defense system missed the intruding missile; it exploded harmlessly in an unpopulated part of Mt. Carmel. By issuing this threat, Moscow confirmed that the Syrian missile was aimed deliberately at the Israeli heartland, and was not a stray from the attacks on Israeli aircraft, as some Israeli officials have claimed.

   People living in the towns of Hadera, Caesarea, Or Akiva, Zichon Yacov and Binyamina reported that their houses shook under the blast and for many hours the air reeked of gunpowder. A quarter of a million Israeli civilians were affected. That would be a mild foretaste of what is to come if the Russians carry out their threat of payback for any more Israeli air strikes over Syria. And that was a single SA-5 missile. The impact of five or 10 fired by a Syrian battery does not bear thinking of.

   The SA-5 (Russian coded S-200) is elderly but it has a very long range, medium-to-high altitude surface-to-air capacity, can function in all weathers and can be used to hit ground targets as well as aircraft and missiles. DEBKAfile’s military sources note that the Russians indicated that Syria would not launch a surface missile offensive against Israel but would employ a tit-for-tat strategy, countering Israeli air strikes over Syrian air space with missile attacks over Israeli air space. There was no indication of whether Israeli air attacks mounted from Lebanese skies were included in the threat.

   This warning from Moscow and Damascus prompted an Israeli official to confirm for the first time early Thursday, Dec, 27, that the IAF had struck several Iranian targets in three main locations – primarily storage and logistics facilities used by Iran to ship weapons to Hezbollah – and also destroyed a Syrian anti-aircraft battery that fired at the Israeli jets. The official did not elaborate, but the battery was the one that had fired the SA-5 into central Israel This disclosure embodied Israel’s counter-threat.

   Our military sources also reveal that the three targets attacked in Syria were the command center of the Syrian army’s 10th Division at Qatana, its Dimat base and the 4th Division’s compound in Saboura, which houses Iranian Revolutionary Guards weapons and ammunition stores laid in for arming the five militias Iran is building in Syria for a long-term presence.

   http://prophecynewsstand.blogspot.com/2018/12/russia-and-syria-threaten-to-fire-sa-5.html

6. @ Ted Belman:
   Russia is not a friend of Israel. Don’t be deluded. I believe the article.

7. Fire missiles into Moscow.

8. The Syrians already shot one of these missiles into Israel the other day. It was not by accident. Israel reported not just via Debka (which is used by Israel to release info at times it does not want to distribute directly from the government or IDF and for dis-information) that a Syrian missile battery was destroyed by the IAF plus Iranian missile and component storage facilities.

   If they shot several missiles into Israel the response would be a massive attack on all Syrian missile systems by Israel and perhaps government installations.

9. The Syrians already shot one of these missiles into Israel the other day. It was not by accident.

   If they shot several into Israel the response would be a massive attack on all Syrian missile systems by Israel.

10. @ Ted Belman:
    I also take DEBKA with a grain of salt, and check other sources as you do — and I agree with your conclusion. Also, the content of the article is incongruous. If Russia attacked Israel, it would be inviting the US back to Syria, big time (at least with air strikes) — as well as inviting the Sixth Fleet to cover for any Israeli counterattack against the Russians, including the taking out of ALL the missile defense batteries. It’s just absurd.

    If Russia had indeed made such a threat, it would appear in RT or Sputnik, not DEBKA.

11. A journalist friend of mine wrote to me to say don’t trust DEBKA.. I have often heard that. So I google to find out if there were any other sources claiming this but found none.

    Another insider suggested to me to ignore the report implying that Russia is more friendly then that.

12. Sounds like a well-informed report. In its early years, (2000s decade) Debka filed many reports that proved false, and some journalists claimed they just made things up. But in recent years their reputation in Israel has improved, and their reports have become both more detailed and more plausible. This one may well be accurate.

    One hopeful report was in the New York Times a few days ago, to the effect that U.S. sanctions were really biting in Iran. According to the NYT, the Iranian middle class has been badly hit, with many businesses failing, incomes shrinking drastically, and prices rapidly rising. If Trump keeps them in place, they may at some point force an Iranian withdrawal from Syria, as the Iranian government is finding it necessary to control its spending. Although the U.S. sanctions in Russia are much milder, they too seem to be biting, and middle class incomes have begun to shrink there, too. Trump prefers economic to military warfare. He may be right that it will prove more effective, in Syria and elsewhere, in the long run.