Over the course of several years, Putin has repeatedly received notes about the deplorable situation with the Russian PRN system. All assurances about the “reliability of a continuous radar field” and the high tactical and technical performance of the Voronezh radar’s long-range detection locators turned out to be unfounded. Serious problems have been identified in the work of the ground and space echelons of early warning systems and blatant corruption.
On average, the price of each radar before the crisis was more than 20 billion rubles; the production of stations with high factory readiness was carried out by the structure of AFK Sistema, JSC RTI. The basis was taken from the Soviet developments of the Scientific Research Institute of Long-Range Radar NIIDAR and the Radio Engineering Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Most of the components, as usual, were purchased abroad and, under the guise of expensive transistors protected from interference and radiation, the brains of the radar were supplied with cheap and unsuitable parts for military use. This made it possible to have a huge walrus, a thousand different types of radio components were purchased for cents, and were issued for hundreds of dollars each.
According to the source, Russia now has unstable radars, which provide a “window of opportunity” for an unanswered strike on Russian territory.
While building expensive stations along the entire perimeter of the borders of the Russian Federation, the system of informing the country’s top leadership about a missile attack has never been seriously modernized. It’s like installing new digital fire sensors on an analog alarm system.
In Soviet times, the main enterprise for the development of early warning systems was Vympel; institutes and factories, which in close cooperation solved the problems of developing and operating the system, were assigned to it. After the collapse of the USSR, Vympel lost its leading role and since the time of the union, the PRN algorithms have not been seriously updated in accordance with modern realities. In recent decades, the world has been actively exploring near-Earth space and there are already hundreds of commercial and military satellites in earth orbit, which often interfere with domestic early warning systems, because all the mathematics for it was laid down in a different near-Earth environment, when there were very few satellites in orbit.
“ВЧК ОГПУ”