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| Vyacheslav Madiyevskyi/Ukrinform/ZUMA Press |
Without air supremacy, Moscow can’t stop Kyiv’s offensive or target precisely, relying on drones and missiles
Russia’s struggling invasion of Ukraine has faced problems from poor coordination to unmotivated soldiers, but overshadowing and aggravating all was a critical blunder in the war’s early days, say Western military officials: failure to win control of Ukraine’s skies.
Without air superiority, Russia has been unable to stop Ukrainian attacks on its soldiers with U.S.-supplied M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or Himars, and other weapons. Kyiv’s forces have capitalized on Russia’s limited ability to respond by retaking hundreds of square miles of territory from the invading army since early last month.
Russia has recently reacted to Ukraine’s battlefield successes by unleashing deadly attacks on civilian targets using missiles and drones. But even those strikes betray weakness in Moscow’s air strategy, Western military analysts say, because it must rely on remote aircraft rather than piloted planes, out of fear they will be shot down.
“Failure to achieve air supremacy is one of the decisive things that cost Russia their advantage in the war,” said Jakub Janovsky, a military analyst with Oryx, an independent team of analysts that has tracked open-source intelligence on equipment losses throughout the war. By mid-May, Russian losses in Ukraine had fallen to fewer than 10 planes and helicopters a week, compared with more than 60 a week in early March, according to data from the Ukrainian defense ministry.
Russia’s Defense Ministry didn’t respond to a request for comment on its air war in Ukraine.
When Russia launched its large-scale invasion on Feb. 24, military experts on both sides of the fight assumed Moscow would target Ukraine’s air defenses and quickly work to eliminate them before pushing further. That was the approach U.S. forces took in both Gulf wars and Libya because it helps to protect attacking aircrews and ground or naval forces the aircraft support.
But after Russia achieved some initial successes hitting Ukraine’s antiaircraft systems and disrupting its communications backbone, Kyiv regrouped and managed to thwart Russian air attacks. By early March, Ukraine was shooting down growing numbers of Russian planes and helicopters. Ukraine’s air force, despite early losses, kept flying and engaged Moscow’s pilots in dog fights. --->READ MORE HERE
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| AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky |
When massive, coordinated Russian bombardments shook cities and towns across Ukraine a week ago to trigger a new phase in the Kremlin’s war, one strike left a huge crater in a popular Kyiv children’s playground and ripped open a central intersection.
The next day, traffic flowed over the newly asphalted road, and life in the capital had returned to near normal. The response to Russia’s new wave of attacks was to get back to work, stroll in the warm autumn sun and tend to final harvests from summer vegetable gardens.
A similar scene played out in the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro that day, where city workers repaired a road overnight after it was destroyed by shelling in that coordinated attack.
“We worked all night, gritting our teeth,” wrote Dnipro Mayor Borys Filatov on Facebook the day after the Oct. 10 attack. The post included before and after photos of where the strike had hit and the completed repairs.
“We will restore and rebuild everything. But our hatred will live for centuries,” he said.
Ukrainians’ resilience in the nearly 8-month-old war continues to be unwavering, despite an uptick in attacks that are seen as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s vengeful response to an explosion that damaged a Moscow-built bridge to the Kremlin-annexed Crimean Peninsula on Oct. 8. --->READ MORE HEREFollow links below to +++++relevant+++++ and related stories:
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