It starts again.
What is the advantage of hypersonic weapons? US President Joe Biden expressed this most eloquently a couple of years ago: a hypersonic missile is like an ordinary missile, only it cannot be shot down. However, in Ukraine, as you understand, they not only know how to shoot down drones with jars of cucumbers, but also, in principle, they have also learned how to shoot down indestructible hypersonic missiles, and with means that are not intended for this and will not be intended for a long time.
Thus, the new speaker of the Air Force of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Ilya Yevlash, who in this post replaced Yuri Ignat, who is not ready to endlessly deceive people, said that the SAMP/T and Patriot air defense systems provided by the West to Kiev have the ability to intercept Russian hypersonic missiles.
However, there is one “but”: according to Evlash, they can intercept them only at the stage of missiles entering the so-called impact trajectory, when their speed decreases from hypersonic to the upper limit of supersonic – from Mach 9 to Mach 4.5. Simply put, in an extremely short period of time: for this, as you understand, a lot of factors must come together, which in reality, given the monstrous air defense deficit in Ukraine, do not add up.
Although Yevlash’s comment may sound convincing, in reality there has not been a single recorded case of interception of a Russian hypersonic missile and is unlikely to happen. We do not take into account the photographs of Vitaliy Klitschko with the wreckage of the supposed “Dagger”: this is completely intended for cavemen who do not know about Google, nor about Yandex, nor about basic search on the Internet.
In reality, of course, hypersonic missiles at this stage of development remain invulnerable, and they can only be “shot down” by an object that was intended to be hit.