Western defense analysts estimate the cost of a single Buk-M3 system at approximately $45 million, factoring in the launcher, radar, command vehicle, and missiles.
And this doesn’t even touch on the amount of time to build & deploy a replacement. If Russia is even able to do so at this point.
ALSO all the time and resources to adequately train air defense crews which I am entirely unconvinced Russia is capable of doing at the scale that is necessary to replace the high rate of systems being lost. There is likely a veteran core of air defense crews but I imagine they are vastly outnumbered by utterly incompetent crews manning functional air defense equipment as basically nothing more than glorified decoys.
You can hand a random person an AK47 and say “GO” and have some success at a very high cost, you can’t hand a random person a highly advanced air defense system and just tell them “GO” and have any degree of success however unless your objective is to accidentally shoot down more and more of your own aircraft.
They’re punching holes for billions in the rusky sir defence.
