Kh-22

A 1960s anti-ship missile carrying close to a tonne of explosive at Mach 4.6, fired at cities it was never designed to hit. Its miss distance is measured in hundreds of metres and sometimes kilometres, which is why the Kh-22's record in Ukraine reads as a record of civilian casualties rather than of destroyed targets.

Overview

The Kh-22 "Burya", designated AS-4 Kitchen by NATO, is a very large Soviet air-launched missile designed in the early 1960s for one job: destroying American aircraft carriers. It weighs roughly 5,800 kg, carries a warhead of up to 960 kg, climbs to 22.5 km and dives on its target at up to Mach 4.6. Against a carrier battle group detected by radar at sea, that combination of mass and speed made sense, and its guidance — inertial navigation with a primitive radar seeker — was adequate for a target the size of a warship in open water.

Russia has used it against Ukrainian cities. Against a land target the radar seeker has no distinctive return to lock onto, and the missile arrives with an error commonly assessed in the hundreds of metres, with some analyses citing kilometres. The result is a weapon that reliably destroys something within a wide radius of the aiming point but rarely the intended thing — the profile of the Kremenchuk shopping mall strike of 27 June 2022, which killed at least 21 people.

The modernised Kh-32 extends range to around 1,000 km with improved guidance, but remains, in the words of one analysis, "a more advanced — but still inaccurate — version."

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