By KYIV. Dec 2 (Interfax-Ukraine) – Secretary of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on National Security, Defense and Intelligence Roman Kostenko (Holos faction) believes that the issue of closing the sky over Ukraine should now be resolved by providing partners with air defense systems and air situation lighting.
"Europe must understand that the closure of the sky above us solves many issues for itself: both in the military, and in the geopolitical, and in the economic planes. And first of all – in the field of security. Firstly, not getting Russian missiles into their territory (as was the case with Poland); secondly, lowering the combat potential of the Russian Federation by destroying their missiles, and thirdly, in the future it is a test of their anti-aircraft weapons. Europe already knows how to shoot down every Russian missile, that is, ballistic by NASAMS and cruise missiles by Stingers. The main thing now is to install lighting systems that will detect and shoot down these missiles. Europe and the United States are already responding to this, and I am sure that their defense industry is working on it. The Russians do not know what kind of missiles there are in Europe, in the States, how many of them there are and whether they will be able to resist them. This is a very big trump card for our partners," he said in an exclusive interview with Interfax–Ukraine.
The parliamentarian is convinced that the civilized world should do everything so that in the future Russia does not want to repeat such bloody conflicts as in Ukraine.
"It [Russia] must bear responsibility for this, paying for the damage caused. And the Europeans should understand: the better they protect our sky now, the fewer energy facilities in Ukraine will need to be rebuilt in the future," Kostenko said.
In addition, in his opinion, there should be a question of protecting every infrastructure object in Ukraine with air defense systems.
"Yes, it’s not easy. The need for air defense is huge. In general, we need to make it possible to produce our own anti-aircraft weapons, and not depend on Western countries. The war has already shown that all this bureaucracy leads to great casualties, devastation, because the transfer of even three systems is very time–consuming," the MP said.
