Found this on the internets yesterday. Ukraine says it shot down a Kinzhal, Russia’s cruise missile…
Klichko and Kinzhal
Published
Found this on the internets yesterday. Ukraine says it shot down a Kinzhal, Russia’s cruise missile…
Insomniac Resurrected 
That’s an old BetAB-500 concrete-buster bomb. Look it up.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I can’t find a Russian language article at the entry https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BETAB-500
LikeLike
BetAB-500:
https://вооружение.рф/armament/betab-500/
There’re some commenters saying that this really is a Kinzhal warhead, which exists in the bunker-/concrete-busting version.
https://andrei-bt.livejournal.com/2103042.html
Try searching yourself:
https://yandex.ru/search/?text=%D0%9A%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B6%D0%B0%D0%BB%20%D0%91%D0%B5%D1%82%D0%90%D0%91-500
Search on yandex.com for БетАБ-500 to get some pics.
The fishy bit is that compared to a BetAB-500 the Kiyev metal cone has different mounting holes. On the other hand a warhead may not necessarily have mounting holes but it might have holes for fuse wiring. Another commenter’s arguments are that PAC-3 can intercept ballistic missiles and Kinzhal missiles aren’t really that fast in their ballistic descent stage, especially if manoeuvring. Realistically though your PAC-3 might have less than a minute to intercept a fast missile (about half a minute with a Mach 5 speed). But then a Kinzhal falling onto a target will be fairly slow too, around Mach 2 or less. A missile’s ballistic flight stage is when it doesn’t have any fuel left and is basically falling onto its target.
The odd bit is that one might assume a Kinzhal warhead would detonate when hit by a Patriot PAC-3 interceptor missile (the ones that *can* intercept ballistic missiles as PAC-2 missiles are more limited) or when falling fused (which it should be unless the fuse was a dud). BetAB-500 carries ~75 kg of explosives so if the anti-bunker Kinzhal warhead is similar it wouldn’t be just lying on the ground (or standing) like that.
https://glav.su/forum/threads/1726198 — this forum post has it as a KAB-1500 warhead and not BetAB. Which might be a bit more realistic as that could be a dud laser-guided bomb warhead that had a fuse failure.
IMHO whatever Klichko has doesn’t look like either a Kinzhal missile or a bomb warhead as that would require the missile or bomb to fall and stay relatively undeformed and unexploded, which is a bit hard to achieve for a missile like Kinzhal which flies high and fast. It could be something locally made. And it’s really dubious that he’d be feeling so safe near a missile warhead which has some 75 kg or more of high-explosive matter, even if unexploded.
LikeLike
The other odd bit about all of this is that BetAB-500ShP is relatively new, introduced in Russia in 1999 and for a bomb like that to make it to Kiyev with its air defences it would have to be dropped off a plane happily flying over all the air defences from the Russian border, which is kind of far. It is not a gliding bomb, it’s a rather particular rocket-boosted setup which to my knowledge has not been (cannot be) adapted for gliding so cannot be launched away from air defences. KABs have been more commonly dropped so it could be a dud KAB warhead.
LikeLiked by 1 person