- The Ukrainian ground forces are saturated with MANPADs after 8 years of continuous pumping (to the point of untrained personnel getting them), which has significantly accelerated at the end of the last year. So the Russian Air Force can not operate easily on low-mid altitude far from their ground forces.
- The remaining Ukrainian anti-air missile systems (like S-300, but there are also older ones) are heavily supported by NATO radar infrastructure in Poland, so it's risky for Russian planes to stay long on high altitudes.
- The Kalibr missile is quite sufficient for striking stationary objects, so you don't need planes for those. It's hard to strike mobile forces, because they quickly get intelligence from NATO about planes in the area and thus able to hide in cities, thus making it hard for RAF to strike them (the Russian forces have enough firepower to level cities to the ground, but they have orders to minimize damage if possible).
- Air supremacy is already achieved (almost all Ukrainian war planes and strike drones have been shot down), so it does not make much sense to patrol the air space too much, since operating a plane is far from being cheap.
How do you square that with the mass destruction of Ukrainian cities, including by aircraft bombing? It seems to be a ridiculous assumption long debunked.
> Air supremacy is already achieved (almost all Ukrainian war planes and strike drones have been shot down), so it does not make much sense to patrol the air space too much, since operating a plane is far from being cheap
Nope, Ukrainian drones continue to inflict heavy damage - either directly or indirectly with targeting, just this past day there were direct strikes on a railway bridge, command post deep in Russian held territory, and an indirect one with artillery on Russian troops in a forest. Check out Oryx the blog or twitter account, they verify posts and retract errors if any are detected. Furthermore, Ukraine still operated fighters as of what, 2-3 says ago at the latest? Russia does not have air supremacy, only local air superiority.
One way to square it is that the perception of what is "minimal" is vastly different in their minds. Mind you, they decided to attack a well armed sovereign country that was definitely not welcoming them, and they have a total control of their media, so they don't really care about achieving surgical precision. That doesn't mean they must then choose to level cities to the ground. It's not a binary choice.
You can compare this "mass destruction" with the Grozny's state after the second Chechen war or, if you want a more recent example, with Mosul and Hudaydah.
Perhaps, but how many of those does Russia actually have? Whenever I read reports of US Tomahawk inventory, I'm always surprised by how few they actually have in inventory (e.g. guessing they'd run out quickly in a hot war).
> Air supremacy is already achieved (almost all Ukrainian war planes and strike drones have been shot down)
My understanding is that's not true. The airspace is contested, since neither Russia nor Ukraine have full control.
Ukraine still has planes and they're still flying them, according to this: https://www.politico.com/newsletters/national-security-daily....
And most of those are old. Really old in some cases. Like half got used in Iraq II and the other half are still around...
Stockpiles of newer and scarier stuff is probably less known, however.
that is pure Russian propaganda. Most of the videos of destroyed armor in cities is Russian armor - i.e. it is Russian armor hides in cities (yet it doesn't help them against Molotov cocktails and RPG and high-precision strikes https://youtu.be/D5WoCUqNWIs?t=13).
Russian airforce and artillery indiscriminately bomb and shell Ukrainian cities using unguided bombs and unguided missiles (from "Grad" and "Smerch" systems), and among the huge amount of videos of Ukrainian cities destruction by Russians there is no videos with Ukrainian armor inside destruction - ie. Russians attack residential areas without any Ukrainian hardware there.
On March 5 Ukrainians shot down such a Su-34 when it was bombing Chernigov and captured the pilot. The pilot confessed to the order of bombing the city (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkszHkNoQNo, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWrxX_gpNjM). That pilot has been doing similar unguided bombing of Aleppo 6 years ago (https://www.unian.net/war/bombil-mirnyy-gorod-letchika-so-sb...) for which he was celebrated by Putin and Assad.
Russian bombing of cities is done to force Ukrainians out. That is ethnical cleansing, a part of the announced by Putin destruction of Ukrainian ethnical and national identity.
>Air supremacy is already achieved (almost all Ukrainian war planes and strike drones have been shot down), so it does not make much sense to patrol the air space too much.
that just doesn't make sense, especially given how many Russian ground hardware is being lost to drone fire and to drone guided fire.
Looking at comment history, so is most of what the account posts.
Obviously there never is a "clean" war where only military is being hit with surgical strikes. Armies always promise that (like the US did in its invasions), but usually don't deliver.
> "they have orders to minimize damage if possible"
Right, at a guess you are in Russia and not in Ukraine.
On the other hand, clearly any such 'minimize damage' directive is not protecting smaller Ukrainian cities and towns.
> quickly get intelligence from NATO about planes in the area and thus
> able to hide in cities
Jokes aside, I suppose there is some kind of exempt for defenders, unless one can prove that civilians were held as hostages.
Where is the line between "objectively assessing an enemy's weaknesses" and "blatant wishfull thinking" ?
While we're discussing how bad the russian air force is doing, cities are being bombed constantly, and the ukrainian governement is imploring for a no-fly zone that no one will enforce given it would mean engaging with, guess what, the air force. Oh, and starting a nuclear war at the same time.
Maybe it's an operationnal failure on Russian's side - but if so, they carved themselves a situation where they can't really _lose_, even if they can't win quickly.
Hopefully something will change the game - but I doubt "hoping for the other side to secretly be stupid" will cut it.
"..A senior U.S. defense official added Friday that the Ukrainians “are not using their fixed-wing fighter aircraft very much. They have about 56 fighter aircraft remaining on the ground, and that is the majority of their fleet.” Kyiv is only flying about five to 10 sorties a day compared to Russia’s roughly 200, the official continued. The Ukrainians “haven't proven that they need to do more than what they're doing. They've been very effective with the other tools that they have used, very creatively, and those are having a good effect on Russian airpower...”"
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/national-security-daily...
Beating the Russian Air Force in the air isn't the primary issue, we can do that. The bigger issue is that a no-fly-zone must be secured, i.e. bombing radar and SAM installations in Ukraine/Belarus/Russia.
> ... they carved themselves a situation where they can't really _lose_, ...
Quite the opposite, what does a Russian "win" look like here? A huge portion of the population doesn't want them there, a puppet government won't be internationally recognized, and the resulting insurgency would make Chechnya look quaint. Not to mention the humiliation that Russia has already suffered.
It's lunacy to think that Russia is gaining anything out of this. It's not even certain that Russia can beat Ukraine anymore, and it's already a pyrrhic victory if they do.
If he takes Kyiv and deposes the current government, getting a treaty that achieves that probably won't be that hard. I don't know enough about Ukrainian demographics to know if a puppet government could be stable without a huge Russian military presence. If the latter is needed then it would probably count as a failure.
Relative inexperience (not inability) in SEAD(Suppression of Enemy Air Defense) in the face of a robust Ukrainian air defense network.
A desire to preserve force and munitions in case of direct NATO involvement.
Additionally there is a third potential reason, I am no military expert by I assume the acquisition and engagement of targets in populated areas is hard from the air.
All these probably skews the risk/effectiveness balance toward a less aggressive air stance.
They may have a lot of aircraft sitting around, but may only have the fuel, munitions, and parts to keep a fraction of it working.
There was a lot of discussion for a while about the state of the tires in the Russian army, and how that often led to break downs or troops getting stuck. Likewise, something as simple or mundane as not having enough flairs or chaff, could be enough to keep much of the fleet grounded, doubly so in the face of a reasonably effective Ukrainian AA network. Multi-million dollar aircraft are temperamental beasts, and missing even a few parts, or not being confident in said parts, is essentially a recipe for casualties, and they can't just conscript more SU-35s
Yes but apparently not by the Air Force. Mostly by ground based missiles (and maybe some Ship based ones)
The No-Fly zone won't fix these and will come at a significant cost.
That’s pretty much it in the short term, from what I can tell. They can only lose over the long term, by bleeding themselves dry to find their imperialist adventure in Ukraine just like the USSR did in Afghanistan. It is probably likely to happen. It’s cold comfort for the people being bombed, though.
They could very well lose and are likely to, according to most experts. Even if they do take Kyiv before they run out of money, materiel, and political support - which is uncertain - they are very unlikely to sustain an occupation and defeat an insurgency. Invaders often lose to insurgencies - look at the US in the last 20 years.
nuclear weapon aside, 40million motivated Ukrainians with NATO weapons are much much much more powerful than 140million lost Russians with dysfunctional weapons
Everyone expected the much, much larger Russian Air Force to establish air superiority in Ukraine within days, even hours.
When an organization systematically failed to be able to perform even its basic activities for no obvious reason, organizational incompetence is almost certain.
A thought experiment:
- if Putin is not insane and wants to live and enjoy his lifestyle (but plays his role to frighten everyone)
- that means he is unlikely to use nukes
- which means it might be practical to establish a no-flight zone, etc
If you believe he is insane, however, the West has nothing else to do than to let him grab whatever he wants (Estonia, maybe?). This is a dead end for NATO.
But I do hope Western militaries are not counting on Russia's "incompetence and inexperience".
The gist was that the US goes immediately for dominating the sky. Russia sees ground forces as the main engine of the army, and the Air Force only supports the advancement of ground forces near the border, without bombing far into enemy territory (which is a task for the army's missiles).
This is not a reason to relax, but one can certainly observe that.
This state of indecisiveness wasn't anticipated by anyone. Germany did even want to skip the sanction part since the war would be over in 3 days.
Now we have to actually deal with it; and the plans on both sides are made up as we go.
I would take the (sadly looks more like wishful thinking) incompetence over the current destruction.
[1] https://forums.hardwarezone.com.sg/threads/russian-su-34-sho...
I verymuch support Ukrainians, their freedom, and their democratic government, but POW interviews are propaganda.
Why would we believe that?
No army has ever lost a war because they overestimated the strength of the enemy army.
In other words, they were trying to avoid bad press and having the population immediately perceive them as being indiscriminate or blowing up their entire country etc. There would just be so many videos on TV and the internet of so many bombs and missiles.
Its actually kind of like the discussion about LIDAR on Teslas. People always come up with these supposed scientific reasons that they decided not to use it. But the biggest reason was, it doesn't look good, or fit in at all with the sleek design of Teslas. Teslas would go from the sexiest car to the dorkiest overnight.
Anyway, pretty rough analogy, but similarly, the Russians probably decided not to operate in the most effective way, deliberately, due to "optics".
The claims they are trying to minimize damage are misguided.
And even if the facts are 100% true, it doesn't mean automatically that they want terror. They might just be helpless about it (doesn't excuse it of course).
Ukrainian state is already in a state of total war, they don't lose anything by escalating. Their goal is to drag other countries into the war, or at the very least maximize external support. Exaggerations, taking stuff out of context, hyperbolizing isolated incidents, or even outright lies - all the tools of trade are normally shunned are now allowed. Level-headed assessment of ground-level truth is not on the agenda right now
In general modern military seems to be focused on delivering as much power as possible in a single unit, never bothering to ask if multiple lesser units could do a better job combined. And so we get destroyers and cruisers that look mighty, but can nevertheless be rendered inoperable, if not outright sunk, by a single torpedo.
The S-300 do seems to be working as Russian planes are forced to fly all the way over Ukraine to their targets at extremely small altitude.
"The Mysterious Case of the Missing Russian Air Force"
https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentar...
and follow up under the same subject:
"Is the Russian Air Force actually incapable of complex operations?"
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/world/is-the-russian-air-...
"Russian and Chinese Combat Air Trends - [PDF]"
https://static.rusi.org/russian_and_chinese_combat_air_trend...
It looks like the Oligarchs stole most of the money that should go for effective logistics. The Russian Air Force probably cannot supply enough spare parts. Military jets need hours of maintenance for each hour of flight.
Shelling a city with Grad and artillery is far cheaper.
>Pentagon says some Russian jets are avoiding Ukraine's airspace during sorties to avoid being shot down
>The Pentagon believes Russia is flying about 200 sorties every day, although many never enter Ukrainian air space.
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/pentagon-says-russian-jets-avoidin...
Can't say I blame them really.