“The share of jet-powered UAVs has risen sharply: if you compare June with July, there were five times more jet UAV launches in July,” Ihnat told broadcaster Hromadske.
Ihnat said Moscow is shifting emphasis from air-launched Kinzhal and Kh-101 missiles to Oniks and Zircon hypersonic missiles.
“That’s clear because they have launched more of them — you can see it from analyzing strikes even without [restricted] intelligence data,” he said.
On the use of North Korean KN-23 ballistic missiles, Ihnat said the weapon had previously been used in a strike on Kryvyi Rih that killed an entire family. Specialists initially thought the strike was carried out with an Iskander-M, an S-400 or a KN-23, he said, but explosive ordnance technicians later confirmed the missile’s Korean origin by identifying fragments with unique parts. Ihnat said the KN-23 is essentially a copy of the Russian Iskander but is inferior in performance. He added that this was the only known use of a KN-23 in the past six months.
When asked whether Ukrainian forces could destroy Russian launchers to reduce strikes, Ihnat said it is possible but extremely difficult.
“An Iskander launcher is a mobile system on a wheeled chassis that arrives at a location at a specific time — when it’s cloudy or dark and not visible to satellites — takes position and can wait for a command,” he explained.
“When the missiles haven’t even reached the stratosphere and
the launcher already packs up and leaves. So destroying these launchers is not
easy.”