Russian Air Force Probes Ukrainian Defense
The West needs to scale up quicklyMedium, April 20, 2023
This year, Ukraine intercepted nearly 90% of Russian missiles, up from 50%-60% in June last year. “Over the New Year’s weekend, the Ukrainian military said it downed every single one of the 80-odd exploding drones that Russia sent the country’s way”.
It is a stunning response to a weakness the Russian military had tried to exploit.
However, taking down Russian missiles and drones targeting Ukrainian civilian infrastructure has come at a price. In the absence of a dramatic and rapid change, the cost of keeping Russia’s long-range aerial attacks in check looks like an arduous task.
As an example, the Shahed-136 drones Russia purchased from Iran are very cheap when compared to the weapons Ukraine uses to destroy them.
“The Iranian drones can cost as little as $20,000 to produce, while the cost of firing one of the surface-to-air missiles used by Ukraine can range from $140,000 for a Soviet-era S-300 to $500,000 for a U.S.-made NASAM, or National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System”.
The Ukrainian government is aware of the problem. President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Russia is betting on the “exhaustion of our people, our air defense, our energy sector.”
Ukraine’s air-defense is running low on ammunition
Since October last year, Russia has repeatedly attacked Ukraine's civilian infrastructure with Iranian drones and missiles. As Russian air-defense missiles were repurposed to attack Ukrainian infrastructure, some experts speculated that Russia’s weapons stockpile has run out.
The lack of precision weapons was often cited as the reason why Russia used a wide array of weapons against the Ukrainian electric grid, heating systems, and water supplies. But the Russian military was also trying to impose heavy costs on Ukraine in order to protect its civilian population.
In order to protect its citizens and soldiers, the Ukrainian government took whatever steps they could to protect them. As a result, Ukraine took down drones worth $20k with +$100k missiles. And those missiles aren’t easy to make.
Russia is well aware of the difficulties associated with manufacturing high-end weapons.
At the start of the invasion, the Russians made a stressful effort to take control of the Ukrainian sky. Ukrainian air defenses and their readiness to face the Russian air force prevented the Russians from enforcing the terms from the skies. Putin ordered the Russian air force to retreat after losing aircrafts at an alarming rate in the first few weeks of the war.
“The Russian Army has been mauled,” Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in an interview with MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” in February. “But the Russian Air Force has not.”
An assessment in the recently leaked Pentagon document puts the number of Russian fighter jets currently deployed in the Ukraine theater at 485 compared with 85 Ukrainian jets.
The Russian air force still remains largely intact. We do not know the status of the ammunition the Russian air force has and the number of experienced pilots who are still available for challenging combat missions. But the sheer size of the Russian air force does offer Putin potential to change things in the battlefield.
As of now, Putin is not sending his air force to even help his ground troops. From his point of view, humans can be recruited, forced into a suicide mission and another guy can be found to replace the dead human. But replacing an air craft needs time and money. The two things Putin does not have.
This also explains why Putin never ordered his air force to work in close co-ordination with his ground troops. He is not going to send his rooks to save his pawns.
But, if the battlefield landscape changes and the Ukrainian army makes a successful charge to hit the rear of the Russian occupation chain in Ukraine, Putin will reach a stage where it makes sense to throw everything in his possession.
The rooks may finally come out in order to protect the king.
Russia is already testing Ukrainian air defenses from the margins
After months of regular attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure targets, the Russian air force is probing to see if there is any weakness in the multi-layered Ukrainian air-defense.
Russian air force is “bombing in Bakhmut, particularly at night so that they can avoid most types of MANPADS. It’s only one particular MANPAD system, I think, that Ukraine has that’s effective at night,” said, Michael Kofman, the director of the Russia Studies Program at the Center for Naval Analyses
“So the Russian Air Force has been making bombing runs, and even while I was there, I could hear sort of the distant echo of Russian jets,” Kofman said noting that Ukrainian jets are also still active but in a limited role.
“It’s clear that they are pushing more airpower into the fight for Bakhmut, and they’re also testing to what extent Ukraine has radar-guided air-defense still up and available,” Kofman said. “Because they know that availability of ammunition, basically missiles, for radar-guided air-defense is a problem for Ukraine and has been since October.”
“You can see that the Russian airpower is kind of playing in the margins but looking for ways to push itself into the fight,” Kofman added.
It is clear that all the parties involved, Ukraine, Russians and the West, are aware of this development. It will depend on what the west is prepared to do from now on as to how serious a threat the Russian air force can pose during the Ukrainian counter-offensive.
Russia has its own problems
Not only Ukraine, but the Russian air force also has some seething troubles that need urgent attention. It’s evident that Putin has a backup plan to counter the Ukrainian offensive, but even this plan has plenty of human sized holes in it.
According to a report by the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank, the Russian air force lacks fully trained pilots and makes poor use of its few good ones.
“Ukrainian assessments concluded that given limited flight hours and the practice of training being delivered in units, the VKS (Russian air force) entered the conflict with fewer than 100 fully trained and current pilots,” the report said.
Less than 100 fully trained pilots!!
Russian armed forces have repeatedly demonstrated their incompetence to the entire world over and over, so anything is possible. I am not prepared to rule out the possibility that they are running out of experienced pilots. This is an army that assumed it would topple Kyiv in 100 hours but ended up fighting for more than a year.
Ukrainian Air Defense Needs a Serious Upgrade
The western planners have explicitly stated that they are not ready to provide fighter jets to Ukraine. If that decision was made early on, what were they thinking when Russia began attacking civilian infrastructure?
In December, more than 70 countries came together in Paris to raise over a billion dollars to help Ukraine survive the winter. They helped Ukraine rebuild the power grid brought down by Russia but forgot Ukraine will need strong air defense systems to protect the power grid.
The Pentagon leak, assuming its real, shows that the US officials are worried about the effectiveness of the Ukrainian counter-offensive. Of course you should be concerned as the west does not grant Ukraine the long range weapons it needs to make it more difficult for Russia to hide its warehouses.
There is no question that it will be difficult for Ukraine to drive the entire Russian army off its land since the west took forever to supply heavy weapons and engineering equipment to Ukraine.
Every day that passes without Ukraine having the tools to tackle the enemy is another day that the Russians can dig deeper, lay mines, double barbed-wire fences, recruit more soldiers, and exhaust Ukraine’s air defenses.
However, Ukraine has proven time and again that it can make full use of the limited weapons and ammunition supplied by the west. Ukraine asked for 60 plus multiple rocket launchers, but got less than half of that number. They asked for long range missiles, but were given artillery with a maximum range of less than 100 kilometers.
But they still managed to drive the Russians from Kyiv, Kharkiv and Kherson. It is only because of the terrain and the weather, Ukraine had to take the foot of their offensive pedal.
Intelligence agencies never gave Ukraine a chance of winning the war with Russia.
“The initial pessimism about Ukraine’s chances was, however, scarcely unreasonable. Russia had overwhelming superiority in the standard measures of military power, such as the number of soldiers and the quantity and quality of major armaments.
In the event, stronger morale, superior generalship, and Russia’s overconfidence (and consequent expectation of a rapid victory) proved of outsize importance. By now Ukraine has amply demonstrated just how significant these and other, often intangible elements can be”.
And Russia’s many military shortcomings have become evident to the point that even ardent pro-war Russian nationalists openly acknowledge them, recognizing that the winter offensive has failed to push the frontline forward substantially, and questioning the prospects for success. Yet many Western assessments of the war’s likely course and outcome still assume that none of this will matter very much and that Russia will prevail because it will learn from its mistakes and has material resources that far exceed Ukraine’s”.
As long as western intelligence assessments continue to discount the tangibles that heavily favor Ukraine, I refuse to believe them. They were wrong before the war. And they were proved wrong again and again over the last twelve months.
Let them remain pessimistic as long as they like.
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