Russian military risk their lives to obtain Storm Shadow missile

The Russian military from BARS-11 volunteer detachment and Tsar's Wolves unit seized a British Storm Shadow cruise missile, the head of the Tsar's Wolves Military-Technical Centre Dmitry Rogozin said.

According to him, the missile was only partially damaged as it fell flat.

"Our technical specialists dismembers the missile right on the battlefield: they separated the high-explosive, the cumulative parts and the control unit. They folded the wing for ease of transportation,” Rogozin said.

The British missile contained high-level electronic equipment, he added. It had a GPS beacon that could attract an assault team of the enemy. Russian fighters blocked the transmitter. The materiel of the missile had to be extracted in the "gray zone” of the line of contact under shelling. In addition, Ukrainian saboteurs tried to intercept a vehicle with a missile on the way. It took the Russian fighters two days to evacuate the captured Storm Shadow, he added.

Captured Storm Shadow sent to Moscow

The captured Storm Shadow missile was sent to a defence enterprises in Moscow. Experts will study control system algorithms of the missile and share them with air defence specialists.

"I hope that the examination of the control system of this missile will let Russian specialists quickly find a remedy to pacify the British-French storm,” Rogozin said.

The Drive website noted that the information that the Russians could obtain might become sensitive to the West due to the design of the weapon. The loss of a largely intact projectile came as an unwelcome event, the authors of the article also said.

Earlier, British Secretary of Defence Ben Wallace said that Storm Shadow missiles played a significant role and affected the Russian Army.

However, the Russian Defence Ministry said that the combat efficiency of Storm Shadow cruise missiles was low. British-made missiles "increasingly strike civilian infrastructure (…) or fall flat unexploded," the department noted.