Defense News reported on Wednesday that while the Kiev regime now has the licensing and technical data it needs to put the Anglo-French Storm Shadow/SCALP missiles into production following UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s visit to Kiev on Monday, it’ll still take time to get the production lines into operation. “However, despite the highly symbolic and strategic nature of the SCALP move, it is unlikely that Ukraine will be able to produce large numbers of Storm Shadows in the near future, as it lacks specialized, high-precision manufacturing equipment at scale, complicated by the fact that the country is at war,” it says. One obvious complication is that Russia will bomb assembly plants and the logistics that support them wherever they find them, though this is not mentioned.
The British government said the decision came alongside Project Brakestop, which aims to quickly develop effective and cheap long-range weapons for Ukraine’s use, Defense News reports further.
Moscow has not taken kindly to the announcement, it continues, with former Russian Deputy Foreign Minister and current Kremlin advisor Andrei Fedorov telling the BBC that the U.K. could see its factories involved in support for Ukraine face a “semi-military” response, “not by Russia, but from unknown sources.”
