Recently US-made Tomahawk missiles have been a hot topic in Washington and Kyiv. says he has not ruled out supplying Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine if Russia continues to refuse a peaceful resolution to the conflict in Ukraine — this started in 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that he and Trump had discussed the long-range missiles in a phone call although he did not provide further details.
Zelenskyy believes Tomahawk missiles could help bring an end to . “We see and hear that Russia is afraid that the Americans may give us Tomahawks — that this kind of pressure may work for peace,” the president said on October 12.
Zelenskyy said if the US were to supply these weapons, Ukraine would only strike Russian military targets with them.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, said the missiles posed no serious threat to his country but added that supplying them to Ukraine would still mark “an entirely new, qualitatively different, escalation” in US-Russia relations. Putin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, told Russian state television that Tomahawk deliveries to Ukraine were causing “extreme concern” in Moscow.
Zelenskyy is expected to meet his US counterpart in Washington on Friday. Talks there should focus on Ukrainian air defenses and long-range weapons, he said.
Tried and tested
Tomahawks are high-accuracy, subsonic cruise missiles, come in many variants, can carry different warheads, including nuclear ones, and can be launched from various platforms.
“The Tomahawk is a fairly old missile, developed in the 1970s,” Ukraini (EN): Why Ukraine want… an military expert Kostiantyn Kryvolap told DW. “The Americans originally designed it as a delivery system for nuclear warheads in three variants: air-launched, land-based and seaborne.” Initially, the nuclear-armed Tomahawk had a range of up to 2,500 kilometers (1,554 miles). As nuclear warheads were replaced with conventional ones, Tomahawk missile ranges were reduced to 1,600 kilometers, though Kryvolap says some variants still have a 2,500-kilometer range.
Land-launched Tomahawk missile systems were dismantled after the US and Soviet Union signed the 1987 . But after the US withdrew from the INF treaty in 2019 during Trump’s first term, many Tomahawk launchers were restored. Kryvolap believes Ukraine needs these land-based Tomahawk systems.
The missile’s key feature is its ability to fly at very low altitudes while navigating the terrain and avoiding obstacles. “Its low altitudes flight is its most important feature, it makes the best use of terrain-contour-matching technology available for cruise missiles,” Kryvolap said, adding that it was the most long-range, non-nuclear cruise missile in the West’s arsenal.
Why Tomahawks could pose a problem for Russia
The Tomahawk missile was first introduced in 1983 and has been used by US forces in , and . Tomahawks were successfully deployed to knock out Russian air defense targets in Syria in 2017 and 2018, says Andriy Kovalenko of Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation.
Tomahawks use complex navigation systems giving adversaries mere seconds to react once the missiles are detected by radar, Kovalenko told DW. A dense network of low-level radars, rapid targeting and synchronized air defense are required to intercept them, he explains. “Russian [defense] systems covered Syrian targets at the time but failed [to down Tomahawks],” the expert said, adding that the missiles are “especially effective when launched in salvos, as overloading air defenses increases their success rate.” Russian S-400 or Pantsir systems, he said, are “weak against Tomahawks.”
The missile’s long-range capabilities would allow Ukrainian forces to strike key military targets deep inside Russia up to 1,600 kilometers away, Defense Express editor-in-chief Oleh Katkov told DW. “A number of Russian arms factories could be destroyed.”
The US-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW) also believes Ukraine could use Tomahawks to significantly damage or destroy key military facilities inside Russia, such as the drone factory in Alabuga, Tatarstan, or the Engels-2 airbase in Saratov, which Russia uses to launches bombers for large-scale attacks on Ukraine. The ISW estimates that 1,600 to 2,000 Russia military targets could be within Tomahawk range.
How many Tomahawks could Ukraine acquire?
Ukrainian experts worry that the country will not have enough Tomahawks to hit all these targets. It is unclear how many Tomahawks the US has or how much each would cost, Katkov told DW. Washington now only sells weapons to Ukraine through NATO’s Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List (PURL) mechanism, which is funded by European NATO countries and Canada, he added.
Tomahawks are expensive, though prices vary depending on which country is buying them. The Netherlands, for instance, pay $12.5 million per missile, while Japan pays just $4.25 million, likely because the US regard Japan’s neighbor China as a major security threat, Katkov explained.
“If we take an average PURL funding package of half a billion dollars and use Japan’s price, that would buy about 117 missiles. Using the Dutch price, it would be significantly fewer. The production rate for all Tomahawk variants has been about 50 per year. That’s not much, meaning Ukraine definitely won’t get thousands, maybe not even hundreds of the missiles,” Katkov told DW. Whether Ukraine receives any, or just a certain number, will determine how Kyiv uses them and whether they could change the course of the war, he added.
Tomahawks send a strong message
Trump’s decision to supply Tomahawks to Ukraine would come as a direct reaction to Putin rejecting Trump’s Ukraine war peace proposals, says former US ambassador to Ukraine, John E. Herbst, now senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center.
“Kremlin hysteria over a possible delivery of these weapons to Ukraine shows it could influence Putin’s policies,” Herbst told DW. He believes while Tomahawk missiles are unlikely to decide the war, they could send a strong signal to Putin and push the Kremlin toward peace negotiations.
This article was translated from German
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