The curious case of Russia's missing Air Force
economist.com
economist.com
"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.
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.
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.
Angry FSB Guy (which may be entirely false) stated that the decision isn't Putin's alone to make and that Russians are not willing to die for Putin.
"..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.
By a very naive reading, this maps [1] seems to scream: "Dombass has all the mines. It's the mines, stupid !" ; but I could not find any resource on the topic (neither to tell it's the real casus belli, nor if they're nothing else to grab there.)
[1] https://img.favpng.com/24/9/15/ukraine-natural-resource-map-...
I've always heard a lot of talk about that (even before the war), especially by Western leaders trying to puff up the effectiveness of their support, but is that resistance actually materializing in Russian-controlled areas?
IIRC, that's currently the expected best case outcome of this. The Ukrainians are fighting with everything they have, but the Russian Army is just plain bigger and better equipped, so they've only bee able to slow it down, not meet it and defeat it. I don't really see that changing unless the West stops tiptoeing around (at least) and offers more than halfhearted military support to Ukraine.
To be clear: the West's support is less halfharted than it was before the war, but it's still halfharted (e.g. the nonsense with the Polish jets, only supplying "weapons of a defensive character," etc.).
Arguably, the Arab Spring was the first in these wars, since failed harvests and grain prices are what kicked off a lot of unrest to begin with.
"War, war never changes"
Or maybe there will be a remake, but with white actors [2] ?
[1] https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/how-the-inv...
[2] https://www.politico.eu/article/food-price-inflation-eastern...
Do you have a link to this? I'd be interested.
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.
And there's no reason to believe that the Ukrainian government will give up once kyiv is taken, it's not a video game. In fact, western Ukraine is so terrifically safe I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of government operations are being run from there already.
I agree. But they don't need to give up for a puppet government to be in place. They need to lose control of the military and communications infrastructure. If the government is far to the west or in exile, it's hard to see how they would maintain control.
And I also agree that a new government would need a substantial Russian military presence. It wasn't that long ago though that a substantial voting bloc supported pro-Russian parties. It's likely that Putin calculated that they'd only get problems with western Ukraine. That's likely been badly misjudged.
It'd be really interesting to get some polling data on those people. It's hard to imagine that they don't feel betrayed. After all, the russian speaking population has been subjected to the harshest and most violent portions of this conflict, albeit incidentally.
You don't find them sometimes because Russia is extremely untrustworthy. Demilitarization just means it will be easier to annex Ukraine later. Recognizing the Donbas republics is nonsense as Putin's men have already admitted they plan to annex them afterwards.
There's a reason why you hardly ever find a mention of Poland's attack on Germany in 1939[1]. It has something to do with the fact that it's not real.
The other outcome is that Russia defeats Ukraine into unconditional surrender, and then demilitarizes it anyway.
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
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.
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.
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.
nuclear weapon aside, 40million motivated Ukrainians with NATO weapons are much much much more powerful than 140million lost Russians with dysfunctional weapons
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
I also don't won't to take sides here, I merely point out that the information is rather one-sided.
I personally also can not verify for example of that children's hospital had military stuff going on or not.
The Ukrainian MoD does release estimates of Russian losses, and they're probably fluffed 2-3x but not more than that. I think part of their strategy of appearing like a modern Western country involves actually seeming truthful unlike Russia/China.
It also could be a general feature of war or people quarrelling that both parties have different versions of events. They could even both be right in a sense, even if from afar their positions seem to contradict each other.
Kurosawa's movie Rashomon comes to mind.
While technically true, it is evident that people in the west have some mental barriers on visiting RUnet.
> widely reported on in the west
That doesn't seem to be the case. Quite a lot gets omitted or even blatantly misrepresented. People even have trouble verifying sources, because they are afraid of "Russian propaganda", despite the fact that their news medium has just referenced this particular piece of "propaganda".
Among unbiased observers with a grasp of the situation it is clear that Russia could be doing much more damage to Ukrainian cities, and we can only speculate as to why that is. They could be trying to save munitions, they could be doing it for public relations purposes, they could be doing it because they want relatively intact cities if they eventually succeed in taking over Ukraine, or any number of other reasons.
The one thing you can be sure about, is that anyone who claims to know with certainty what is happening in the war zone, or what the "true" motivation of Russia is at the current time, can be safely disregarded as someone who is either confused or pushing an agenda.
There aren't "actors" nor "both sides" in that war. There is Russian Fascist regime which is conducting genocidal war in Ukraine to erase Ukrainian ethnic and national identity. And there is Ukrainian people fighting for their survival. The propaganda comes only from Russia, as compare to Russian propaganda (say publishing 10-20x smaller Russian losses than they really are among other obvious lies) the inconsistencies in Ukrainian information (say publishing 1.5x larger Russian losses than they really are) are just that - inconsistencies natural for a country being invaded and bombed by overwhelming military force.
>This is just objective reality and the nature of war
That is your reality. The reality of Russian propaganda. "We lie and they must be lying too". A reality of the people who couldn't understand how normal civilized people think and behave.
>Among unbiased observers with a grasp of the situation it is clear that Russia could be doing much more damage to Ukrainian cities
nice. I see that new propaganda spin getting peddled by several pro-Russian "propagandons" like you. Whole world - "You, Russians, are committing grievous war crimes by the indiscriminate bombing of civilians". And the new Russian response - "Russia could be doing much more damage to Ukrainian cities. Be grateful that it isn't", and that is a lie too as Russia seems to be running at the maximum of the available hardware.
Stringing together lists of bad words like fascism, genocide is not an argument. Neither is calling people propagandists. If this is the level of discussion you want r/worldnews is the place to be nowadays.
Current Russian regime is fascist according to the definition, and this is how it called everyday in Ukraine and Baltic countries.
>Neither is calling people propagandists.
Low moral peddling of pure Russian propaganda makes a person not just propagandist, it makes that person a "propagandon" - used in Russian combination of "propagandist" and an offensive for "condom". The guy has no shame with his "we could be bombing civilians more". The people like him is the base of Russian public support of that genocide, and thus they are actually willing participants in it. There is no "level of discussion" here. They are killing people right now. If anything HN should probably like the rest of the world block Russia.
>If this is the level of discussion you want r/worldnews is the place to be nowadays.
try it yourself as your post contains mostly empty incorrect charges without any factual/references/etc support.
This is a place for having genuine discussions. If you don’t want that… the rest of the internet is currently a Russian bash-fest. So you’re welcome to partake, but remember that those that splash around in mud get dirty.
600 civilians and 1200 soldiers killed doesn’t satisfy anybody’s definition of genocide. Especially since the average HN user doesn’t know under which conditions those deaths happened. This might yet turn into a genocide, but that seems unlikely.
Finally, Russia is an authoritarian state. It is not totalitarian, although it could become so as a consequence of this war.
you'd be right if it were a typical "culture war". Unfortunately a "culture war" stops being just a "culture" one and the discussion doesn't exist anymore when one side starts to actually kill people based on their ideological viewpoint they had expressed in the "culture war". Since the moment killing starts advancing the supporting viewpoint is materially supporting the killing.
>600 civilians and 1200 soldiers killed doesn’t satisfy anybody’s definition of genocide.
Only in Mariupol 2200 people have already been killed.
Anyway, I already shown that the situation satisfies UN definition of genocide https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30678544 . As well as other people shown it too, for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30645290 .
As you insist on your personal number based definition - i'll repeat the request, just for argument sake, for you to please state the numbers required according to your definition.
No. Those are just confirmed. The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights says:
> OHCHR believes that the actual figures are considerably higher, especially in Government-controlled territory and especially in recent days, as the receipt of information from some locations where intense hostilities have been going on has been delayed and many reports are still pending corroboration. This concerns, for example, Izium (Kharkiv region), and Mariupol and Volnovakha (Donetsk region) where there are allegations of hundreds of civilian casualties. These figures are being further corroborated and are not included in the above statistics.
https://reliefweb.int/report/ukraine/ukraine-civilian-casual...
All signs so far indicate that it’s a war of conquest with the aim on putting space between Russia and NATO and potentially controlling additional natural resources.
You seem to have failed to check the genocide definition https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml . Let me copy it here :
" Article II
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
Killing members of the group;
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; "
Putin explicitly announced that the main goal of that war is his final solution to "Ukrainian question" - anybody not displaced is either to be converted/subjugated by stripping off their ethical and national identity or to be killed for resistance. That is exactly by the book of the Hitler's solution for Slavic people on USSR territories back then.
Flinging accusation of being "pro-Russian" at people who acknowledge the fog of war and the indisputable fact that there is propaganda coming out from all sides of this war doesn't bolster your position.
>The propaganda comes only from Russia
The Ghost of Kiev begs to differ.
It is you who are creating additional fog of war by raising unfounded doubts about reasonable sources of information and by attempting thus to decrease the doubt about the sources of total disinformation like the official Russian propaganda. It isn't an academical debate. That fog of war is one of the tools employed by Russia in their genocidal war in Ukraine and by building it up you're directly participating in it.
>The Ghost of Kiev begs to differ.
That is all you could come up with ?! Looks to me like a profound lack of compassion and lack of basic humanity on your side. Somehow you're able to suggest that it is 2 comparable things:
- outright denying of, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and thus providing material support for, committing of the war crimes of the massive bombing of cities
- people being bombed in their city inventing a legend that it is the same plane with the same pilot who saves them again and again by shooting down the bombing planes.
On Feb 24 Putin started a new war, not related to the Donbass war. The main goal of the new war was explicitly proclaimed by Putin as "Ukraine doesn't exist. Ukrainians don't exist. Anybody resisting to that is to be killed."
The theory of "genozide on Ukrainians" sounds very implausible to me, given that there are several possible real motives for the war.
Mind you, I am not saying it is justified, I don't know enough about it. Personally I would guess more is going on than just "Ukraine becoming Democratic is a threat" or "Putin has become crazy".
Looking at comment history, so is most of what the account posts.
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.
The biggest difference is that the cities are much bigger, so it takes more time to completely level them.
Constant aerial bombardment and complete immediate domination would massively increase the civilian casualty count and its clear from Crimea, Odessa, and other cities in the Donbas region, that Russians have a large Ukrainian support base that are anti-banderite and consider Zelensky's cooperation with Nazi groups a betrayal.
Btw, applying Occam's razor here does not automatically make one a Putin supporter regardless of what some western media outlets might claim. Sad that many smart people voluntarily or involuntarily turn their brains off when jingoism is back in vogue.
For someone not interested in harming civilians, they're doing an amazing job at it.
> Btw, applying Occam's razor here does not automatically make one a Putin supporter
Certainly not, but applying Occam's Razor to such a trivially debunked argument might?
> For someone not interested in harming civilians, they're doing an amazing job at it.
Please do post your sources for civilian casualty counts so we can better understand this gradient.
My understanding is conflicts in population centers of similar size and density elsewhere in the world (parts of Libya, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan), the civilian casualty counts are much higher than we are seeing in Ukraine.
Also this 'post your sources' for stuff that you know is going to be impossible to do accurately is not in good faith, either someone posts their sources and you will attack them or they won't, either case 'you win'. But it doesn't contribute at all.
This is wrong, there is a casualty count timeline over the course of each of the listed conflicts. They are not exact but the range is worth comparing.
>Also this 'post your sources' for stuff that you know is going to be impossible to do accurately is not in good faith.
It's not impossible, they made a claim and I want to see the sources that led them to the conclusion. This is pretty normal in fact based discourse.
Oh that would work so well for World War II. Really, this is meaningless.
> It's not impossible, they made a claim and I want to see the sources that led them to the conclusion. This is pretty normal in fact based discourse.
It's pretty normal for things where such sources are available, such as discussions about scientific subjects or other things that are easy to quantify in an exact manner. When talking about a war in progress it is just a way to throw shade.
For example, NATO bombings of Yugoslavia are estimated to have caused ~500 civilian deaths according to Human Rights Watch (Yugoslav estimates are higher) in the whole 2+ months.
By comparison, Russian attacks have caused ~600 civilian deaths according to UN (Ukrainian estimates are higher) in 2 weeks so far.
Originally I wrote it does not look like a directed murder of Ukrainian civilians by Russian military, i.e. the cases were true casualties of attacks on military targets. I am less certain it remains so clear-cut in recent days though, my impression through the fog of war is that civilian infrastructure destruction and by extension casualties have become more acceptable as a means to put pressure on Ukrainian government. If true, this would be a turn for the worse for ordinary people on the ground.
It's not "applying Occam's razor" to insist that the reason Russia failed to take out the Ukrainian air force on day one and didn't start levelling cities in earnest until its ground based units were in range is due to Ukrainian enthusiasm for being invaded. The simplest possible explanation for Russia flying few air sorties doesn't involve Ukrainian attitudes towards the Azov battalion, it simply requires looking at their aircraft attrition rate.
> "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.
You don't eat your bargaining chips.
Like I'm sure they have them somewhere, but not in large enough quantities to reliably cover fat, slow bombers on regular sorties. They took down at least 2 transports full of VDV, for example.
>Images of it ruined by Russian bombardment would be impossible to square with Russia's propaganda position.
You underestimate Russian propaganda and people brainwashed state there. Probably you're lucky to not speak Russian and thus not being familiar with their propaganda, for example with that big hit inside Russia (obviously not much success outside) of how Zelensky was using right hand to make a nuke to attack Russia while using left hand he was making chemical weapons also to attack Russia :) In case of Kiev unfortunately they would just declare that all those destroyed buildings were used as fighting positions, or may be even directly destroyed, by those Ukrainian "nazi and banderovtsy".
Sounds like quote directly from Orwell, tbh.
One doesn't even need to interact with "Russian propaganda" to watch Zelensky's Munich speech and make up one's own opinion.
Given
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=foverzar
that's pretty rich.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-300_missile_system
Edit: It looks like Greece ( a NATO member) also has S300 ( How did that happen !!?? ) and Turkey ( also NATO member) has the S400. Not sure if Turkey would allow close examination of their S400 capabilities, even as a NATO member.
It was a compromise after Cyprus got them, but choose not receive them after threats from Turkey (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypriot_S-300_crisis)
Greece also has a number of other Russian SAM they bought after the 90s in the lull of the tensions with Russia.
Plus, if you choose the next-gen AA over the next-gen fighter, there is an implication as to what you'll be shooting at. And since NATO chose the next-gen fighters...
The systems operated by Greece and inherited by the Soviet Union in the cases of other Nato members are rather old with limited computational resources and limited software developed back in the 80s-90s.
In the case of the S-400 we are probably talking about millions of lines of code developed only years ago and potentially with an update schedule, there is absolutely no way to be sure there is no cutting edge malware that could either infiltrate the rest of the air-defense network, or just ship radar data back to Russia about the signatures of friendly f-35s, that's the real reason the US does not want to sell f-35s to Turkey.
It's one thing to pick up a return from an f-35 on your radar and another to be getting a return and also it's actual position along with IFF information. This data would be invaluable to the Russians and could actually undermine the f-35s stealth performance in a potential conflict in the future.
The Greek S-300s come from Cyprus (which AFAIK is not a NATO member). They were handed over as a way to resolve the crisis with Turkey about the system itself [1]
> Not sure if Turkey would allow close examination of their S400 capabilities, even as a NATO member.
These days Turkey is a NATO member more de jure than de facto, so who knows. Since the acquisition of S400 caused the expulsion of Turkey from the F-35 program, maybe that could be a bargaining chip to re-enter it in some form ?
They already do:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-300_missile_system#Evaluatio...:
> Evaluation-only operators
> United States – S-300P purchased from Belarus (1994). The system was devoid of electronics.[147] S300V was purchased in Russia officially in the 1990s[clarification needed] (complete set (except for 9S32 GRILL PAN multi-channel guidance radar)).[148]
> 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.
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.
Shelling a city with Grad and artillery is far cheaper.
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).
I could not find the source article I read, and I guess there's a non trivial chance it might even have been based on Russian propaganda... as usual, take everything with a grain of salt. I just find it hard (and reassuring) to imagine that Russia's army and air force are in such a terrible state.
Maybe that's what parent comment is concerned about when saying "I do hope Western militaries are not counting on Russia's 'incompetence and inexperience'"
First as a doctrine, it would be a stupid one - they tend to use paratroopers for surprise taking of advanced positions, and air support is vital to help them keep their position until reinforcements can arrive. Point in case, the failure at Hostomel. Their doctrine emphasises anti-air defenses because air superiority against a superior enemy ( NATO) isn't certain, but that doesn't mean the Air Force shouldn't be used at all, especially against an inferior enemy
Second, they don't seem to be even doing that - there are small scale ( 1-2 planes) raids deep in Ukrainian territory, and neither their planes nor their SAMs can deal with the drones Ukraine fields, even over Russian held territory
This is not a reason to relax, but one can certainly observe that.
I would take the (sadly looks more like wishful thinking) incompetence over the current destruction.
But yeah let's hope they keep like that
Mass bombings is almost the bluntest last-resort weapon you can use. A bloodless coup followed by a (probably quite bloody) purge would have been the best outcome for the Russians.
You get me wrong there. The current destruction is a result of the incompetence, not an alternative to it.
If they were a well organized well maintained troup going full Blitzkrieg they would have overwhelmed the Ukrainian forces so fast they already would have taken the capital more than a week ago. This is what they intended to do.
Now if they can't get forward because the majority of their transport can only happen on roads they are definitely in dire need of air superiority, because air superiority would keep the convoys safer. They started shelling civilian infrastructure because they want to break the unexpected fighting spirit and they have no other ways to do it. But this was definitly not what the leading heads in Russia would have preferred, they thought they would go in full Blitzkrieg and after 3 days the capital would have fallen due to overwhelming force.
Does "Fallujah" ring a bell? The mirage of the clean, surgical war was created by the Clinton administration for the first war in Iraq. Such a thing does not exist and has never been observed accept in carefully manufactured narrative.
If there's any thing I'm taking away from this, it's that Pacifism is dead. You need serious deterrence. Pacifism is what let Putin get this bad.
Come on, now. The mirage of a clean and easy war is probably as old as war itself. Hell, just look at the media just when WWI was getting started. I can criticise American imperialism as well as anyone but this is ridiculous. Besides the fact that the first Gulf war was under Bush.
A small dictatorship like NK can be controlled by a handful of people, often relatives. The family model also works for mafias, up to a certain size. But grow your association of lawlessness beyond a point and you’ll find yourself in desperate need for the protection of the law.
Consider USA where there is a mismanagement problem with healthcare -- onerous regulations, rent-seeking, gatekeepers, state capitalism, crony capitalism, corrupt bureaucracies, anti-trust issues, and insufficient investment in training and development.
If healthcare is unnecessarily expensive by 10% -- then that's 2% of the American economy misallocated. Also, the lost human potential because of worse healthcare outcomes is another drain.
Now imagine if that was par for the course everywhere you look.
This is an interesting observation because it is the opposite of Alexis de Tocqueville‘s observation that democracy was well-suited to small states like Athens and Britain but large states like Russia needed autocracy.
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.
The fact that this has clearly failed to happen indicates that the war is not going as planned.
For comparison, it took the US three weeks total from launching their invasion of Iraq to taking over Baghdad, despite there being approximately 5x more distance to cover and Iraq fielding an army twice as large as Ukraine.
Maybe we (and the Russians) actually underestimated the Ukrainians a lot more than overestimated Russians...
So it is both: Russians doing fat worse than expected and Ukrainians are doing much better than I feared they would do.
That is somewhat of a fiasco for someone who is supposed to have deployed order of magnitude more soldiers, tanks and airplanes than their opponent, and claimed they will win in few days.
EDIT: thanks for the correction, got the cities mixed up.
You are probably thinking of Kherson (a much smaller city, population 300k, in southern Ukraine).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Russian_invasion_of_Ukrai...
The only way to spin a false narrative is thorough censorship and control of the internet and public media, and we just don't have that in the west. We do have high levels of surveillance, and a tiny amount of editorialising on social media compared to Russia and China, but not state censorship and suppression capable of obstructing public discourse.
Easy: The war is still going on. There is a lot information that is indeed very unreliable, but undeniable Russia has not yet won the war. A thing that Putin himself said on Russian television could be easily done within two weeks. We are now way past that and there is no end in sight.
Now if we take that indicator of bad performance seriously we can wonder what got into the way of the Russians. And there are some suggestions like badly maintained vehicles, lack of logistics (fuel trucks), vehicles that are unable to drive offroad, bad morale, lack of airsupport and so on.
Now we can take all these theories and try the ones that fit the perceived reality most — not looking at individual instances but on trends — and the theories that fit that picture best win (for now).
The fact is, that Russian explainations don't square with what can be observed long term. Ukrainian explainations are propagandistic (and sometimes lies), but they fit what can be observed if you look onto the bigger arcs of development much better.
What makes you say they are unquestioning? There's a lot of evidence of Russian military incompetence, including that they are struggling against a much smaller, much less-funded and less-equipped military.
Other than in the US where russian Oil is like 3% of the used oil and russian gas is basically not used, in Europe no russian gas means cold houses and problems in the industry.
Similarly, if NATO starts politely performing military exercises near any of the other borders of Russia, Russia needs to be able to demonstrate that they have an army guarding said border.
It's more likely the russians are a) incompetent, or b) saving the bulk of the air force for a potential escalation of the current hostilities. One does not have to exclude the other.
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.
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.
> less payload capacity
Not much is needed with precision guided muntions (which the Russians don't seem to be using, if they have enough).
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).
I mean how do you accidentally destroy maternity ward of a hospital? How likely is that to be an accident and opposed to deliberate terror bombing?
And then there's the kidnapping of Ukrainian officials and replacing them with collaborants. That is deliberate terror tactics as well. Watching them in action makes me thing their approach didn't really change since their Katyn days.
But I live in a place Russians visited in 1968 leaving in the 90's so you could say I'm biased.
The largest difference is scale (well, and perception in the media, though that is to be expected). The US may have bombed 1 or 2 hospitals in, say, Afghanistan, while the Russians seem to be on track for bombing 10 or more as this war drags on.
An army that uses un-ecrypted radio communicatuon and pins artillery targets on google maps labelled as 'farm' probably doesn't have the best targeting.
US has far better targetting, and they bomb two weddings or a funerals a year.
What we do know for sure two facts: the demoralised, corrupt and lying system goes all the day through soldiers, officers, generals, there is probably no accountability.
And that putin came to power by blowing up apartment blocks while his own people were asleep in them, so he is largely capable of anything
That's actually fairly easy without precision munitions or with bad targeting info. Stuff like that happens in war sometimes.
What makes it clear that it is not just that is (1) the frequency of repetitions, and (2) the explanations.
In Mariupol, which was a maternity and children's hospital, not the maternity ward of a hospital, that was destroyed, Russia first claimed they didn't do it at all and that it was Ukrainian propaganda, and that they probably did it to themselves, the claimed they (Russia) did attack it intentionally but that it had not been used as a hospital for years and was an Azov Battalion base and the women and children shown as victims were crisis actors, then finally (last story I heard) claimed they didn't know what happened and were investigating the incident.
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
>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.
[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.
They are indeed hard to find in war, if that's what you mean, but there are good sources - intercepted communications, for example; anonymous interviews with current Russian soldiers; interviews with people they talk to; etc etc
> It’s a cellphone video from someone in the warzone, it’s raw footage from the source.
Raw footage is less credible. It lacks the fact-checking around it. The NY Times, for example, has put dozens of reporters in Ukraine to corroborate, fact-check, etc. - that's the value of actual journalists compared to some video on the Internet.
> they’re all saying the same shit.
I have seen that but it could be that Ukrainian messaging is consistent, and spreading messages that enemy morale is low is a very common, basic tactic. However, there seems to be other evidence of low morale.
However true it is, I'm glad Ukraine is doing it effectively!
Why would we believe that?
No army has ever lost a war because they overestimated the strength of the enemy army.