"Sapsan": plywood dummy?
To post on Facebook, hosted About a month ago, Sergey Sgurts, director of the Defense Express information consulting company, until today, few have paid attention. “Inside,” as the author himself called it, was dedicated to the Independence Day of Ukraine, on the occasion of which everything new that the Ukrainian military industrial complex could create during the years of independence will be shown in Kiev.
The salvo fire system “Alder”, MLRS “Verba”, 155-millimeter self-propelled guns “Bogdana”, and most importantly, operational-tactical complex “Sapsan” - all this will be shown at the parade in honor of the Independence Day of Ukraine 24 of August, Sgurets revealed.
It would seem that an unremarkable stuffing about power in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, to which everyone had long been accustomed, should not have provoked a resonance, if it were not for one “but”: in the commentary to the director of Defense Express, an employee of Yuzhmash, who questioned the veracity, came laid out "insider". This is what the media paid attention to.
OTRK "Sapsan"? There is no such OTRK, it simply does not exist either in hardware or in technical documentation, Alexey Vasilenko wrote, noting that the only OTRK “Thunder” never “Sapsan”, and it is done not at the expense of the defense department and not at all for the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Under the announced “Defense Express” complex there is no base and nothing at all that could promote the project, and the only thing that can be shown in Kiev is a plywood dummy on a wheelbase, the design bureau officer said.
Indeed, in Soviet times, the Ukrainian military industrial complex was developed quite well, and everything that the Ukrainian defense industry is showing today is nothing more than slightly modernized Soviet armament, but in the case of the Sapsan story different. Based only on this fact, it is necessary to recognize that the future of OTRK, the foundation for the creation of which somehow served the “Thunder”, whose export potential turned out to be small, is questionable.
Nikolai Sungurovsky, director of the Kiev Razumkov Center, noted this point as far back as 2012, expressing confidence that without foreign customers, the project can be considered unprofitable at the ROC stage. In the same year, in the wake of discussing the promising OTRK for its army, some Ukrainian officials even spoke in favor of buying Russian Iskander, which, given today's realities, is a mythical scenario.
The problem of modern Ukraine and its military-industrial complex, experts say, lies in the fact that export prospects are the starting point for the creation of one or another weapon, and not domestic needs of the country, which is why the lion's share of weapons created by Kiev ends its way at the prototype stage, and sometimes and the one before. The same models of equipment, which bring to a seemingly logical conclusion, become victims of haste and underfunding, which is the cause of technical errors. Vivid examples: "Stronghold", "Bucephalus", "Hammer".
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