within the umbrella of a missile defense system, and targeted.

I am not saying that the Patriot or THAAD systems don't ever miss.  However, Ukraine reportedly has (I think) four or five Patriot batteries in the whole country. That means that they are tuned to protect some very specific assets. As much as it sucks, when your air defense is limited, you prioritize protecting the air defense system itself, critical infrastructure and military targets. Unfortunately, that means that the tradeoff may mean that there will be populated areas that are essentially unprotected, for all intents and purposes.

That's a really simplistic way of looking at it, I am sure some Patriot 14E guy could set me straight on what and how badly I got it wrong; but that's kinda the Cliff Notes version of it as I understand it.

The other reality is that the last time we heard something like this, it was the vaunted Russian hypersonics. The claim was that we not only couldn't see them, we couldn't hit them. Yeah, that was wrong.

Our SPY-1 radars have been detecting golf ball size targets at at greater than 150 kilometers for over 30 years. Something tells me what the Russians came up with hasn't obseleted our latest kit that quickly.