The Wall Street Journal reports:

Around 3:30 a.m. one recent morning, more than a dozen Russian missiles flashed on the radar screens of the Ukrainian air-defense crew defending this capital city.

The missiles were coursing toward Kyiv, some as fast as six times the speed of sound and many heading directly for the crew’s missile battery.

The Ukrainians didn’t panic, their commander said in an interview. They didn’t have time.

But they did have a U.S.-made Patriot surface-to-air missile system, which days earlier had, for the first time, knocked down an ultrafast Kinzhal ballistic missile. Also known as the Kh-47, the Kinzhal is one of Russia’s most advanced weapons.

Early that morning, May 16, the Patriot’s radar detected the missiles, including six Kinzhals, at a distance of about 125 miles. The system’s computer tracked the missiles and launched interceptors, destroying all of them, the last at a distance of about 9 miles—seconds before impact.

“No one was 100% sure that the Patriot was capable of destroying a Kh-47 hypersonic missile,” said Col. Serhiy Yaremenko, commander of the 96th Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade, which defends Kyiv. “Ukrainians proved it.”

Forty years after it was brought into service, the Patriot air-defense system is finally doing what it was designed for. It is destroying incoming missiles and other aerial threats in Europe and proving indispensable to the Ukrainian forces defending their ground troops, cities and critical infrastructure.

Ukraine’s political and military leadership have lauded the system as the only one capable of tackling the threat from Russian ballistic missiles, which the Kremlin had boasted couldn’t be stopped. Combining the Patriot with other Western air-defense systems as well as Ukraine’s Soviet-era weapons, Ukraine is now fending off most aerial threats against Kyiv, from ballistic and cruise missiles to drones. [Continue reading…]