A decision to hand British and French missile-manufacturing know-how to Ukraine is less useful to Kyiv than it seems. The strike weapon in question is powerful, but Ukraine may be unable to fully exploit its capabilities and may have difficulty in standing up production.
A decision to supply cruise missiles of the type directly from British and French factories would have been better.
The type is called Scalp EG in France and Storm Shadow in Britain. Launched by aircraft, it’s used to destroy fixed ground targets, especially those that are covered by strong air defences and are protected behind concrete or under earth.
France and Britain co-produce their nearly identical national versions with a shared supply chain.
British Prime Minister Andy Burnham said in Kyiv on 24 August that Britain would supply its share of Storm Shadow’s blueprints. France promised last month to provide its.
But it’s doubtful that the know-how for producing Storm Shadow includes classified US cartographic data that the weapon uses for cruising at low altitudes to avoid defences. Alternative, non-US datasets are less detailed.
Storm Shadow has a range of about 560 km and must be air-launched, whereas the Ukraine-made, ground-launched Flamingo cruise missile can fly as far as 3,000 km. Ukraine also makes long-range attack drones – in effect, propeller-driven strike missiles. Granted, these are easily detectable, but they still have been highly effective in targeting Russia’s critical infrastructure, such as oil refineries. And they’re cheap.
The big advantages of the Franco-British missile are its ability to get through defences, thanks in part to its radar-evading shape, and a warhead that punches through concrete and earth.
But such a complex munition designed for production in conventional factories may not be well suited to Ukraine’s highly decentralised arms industry, much of which is underground.
Ukraine doesn’t have many aircraft that can launch Storm Shadows. Its shortage of air power has in fact been a driving force behind its reliance on ground-launched strike weapons.
Instead of releasing classified production information, Britain and France should be urgently expanding their own output of Storm Shadows to supply Ukraine directly.
Still, Ukraine may defy the odds, as it has done before, and speedily establish the necessary production lines while under Russian bombardment. Its refusal to allow domestic regulation to get in the way of arms production would help.
However, the main game for Ukraine is whether the US will fulfill a promise by Donald Trump to give Ukraine a licence to make Patriot surface-to-air interceptor missiles.
This is the more pressing issue for the Ukrainians because their interceptor stock is low and the Patriots are necessary to intercept Russian ballistic missiles. The US itself, also short of interceptors, might look forward to eventually drawing on Patriot production from a factory in Ukraine.
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