Something interesting is unfolding in the skies over Ukraine’s south-central front. Over the last ten days, Ukraine has managed to shoot down no less than 12 Russian military aircraft:
First the shootdown list:
For what it’s worth, Livemap says that Ukraine shot down two Su-34s today.
David Axe at Forbes suggests that Russia’s air arm is dangerously close to collapse.
The Russian air force lost another Sukhoi Su-34 fighter-bomber on Thursday, the Ukrainian air force claimed. If confirmed, the Thursday shoot-down would extend an unprecedented hot streak for Ukrainian air-defenses.
The Ukrainian claim they’ve shot down 11 Russian planes in 11 days: eight Su-34s, two Sukhoi Su-35 fighters and a rare Beriev A-50 radar plane.
But those 11 claimed losses are worse than they might seem for the increasingly stressed Russian air force. In theory, the air arm has plenty more planes. In practice, the service is dangerously close to collapse.
Exactly how the Ukrainians are shooting down so many jets is unclear. It’s possible the Ukrainian air force has assigned some of its American-made Patriot missile launchers to mobile air-defense groups that move quickly in close proximity to the 600-mile front line of Russia’s two-year wider war on Ukraine, ambushing Russian jets with 90-mile-range PAC-2 missiles then swiftly relocating to avoid counterattack.
But the distance at which the Ukrainians shot down that A-50 on Friday—120 miles or so—hints that a longer-range missile system was involved. Perhaps a Cold War-vintage S-200 that the Ukrainian air force pulled out of long-term storage.
It also is apparent the Ukrainians have moved some of their two-dozen or so 25-mile-range NASAMS surface-to-air missile batteries closer to the front line. After all, the Russians found—and destroyed with a missile—their first NASAMS launcher near the southern city of Zaporizhzhia on or before Monday.
He also suggests Russia may be flying more sorties close to the lines to follow-up on its costly victory in Avdiivka.
This surge in Russian sorties presents Ukrainian air-defenders with more targets. So of course they’re shooting down more Russian planes.
It helps the Ukrainian effort that Russian pilots increasingly are blind to Ukrainian missile-launches. The Russian air force once counted on its nine or so active A-50 radar planes—organized into three, three-plane “orbits” in the south, east and north—to extend sensor coverage across Ukraine.
In damaging one A-50 in a drone strike last year and shooting down two more A-50s this year, the Ukrainians have eliminated a third of this sensor coverage, and created blind spots where Russian pilots might struggle to spot approaching missiles.
In any event, the consequences of the Ukrainians’ recent kills, for the Russians, are dire. The Russian air force is losing warplanes far, far faster than it can afford to lose them. Russia’s sanctions-throttled aerospace industry is struggling to build more than a couple of dozen new planes a year.
Escalating losses, exacerbated by anemic plane-production, almost certainly are increasing the stress on the surviving planes and crews. The Russian air arm isn’t yet in an organizational death spiral. But it’s getting closer.
The numbers tell the story. On paper, the Russian air force has acquired 140 of the twin-engine, two-seat, supersonic Su-34s. Counting this year’s unconfirmed losses, the air force has lost 31 of the Su-34s.
But 109 Su-34s still is a lot of Su-34s, right?
Wrong, according to Michael Bohnert, an engineer with the RAND Corporation in California. Shoot-downs represent “only a portion of total losses” of Russian fighters, Bohnert wrote back in August. “Overuse of these aircraft is also costing Russia as the war drags on.”
“In a protracted war, where one force tries to exhaust the other, it’s the total longevity of the military force that matters,” Bohnert added. “And that’s where the VKS”—the Russian air force—“finds itself now.”
Bohnert assumed the air force went to war two years ago with around 900 fighters and attack planes and, in the first 18 months of fighting, lost around 100 of them to Ukrainian action. The problem for the Russians—besides the losses—is that the requirement for fighter and attack sorties hasn’t decreased even as the fighter and attack inventory has decreased.
So those 800 remaining planes are flying more frequently in order to handle taskings the Kremlin once assigned to 900 planes. And that means more wear and tear, deepening maintenance needs and a growing hunger for increasingly hard-to-find spare parts—imperatives that effectively remove airframes from the front-line force.
Given what we know of lax Russian maintenance practices, it’s probably safe to assume that considerably less of those 100 Su-34s are mission capable than would be the case in, say, the U.S. Air Force, which have mission-ready goals of 75-80%, but frequently falls short.
A few more weeks of disasterous losses like this and Russia will be at dire risk of having what remains of it’s air campaign collapse.
And Ukraine still has F-16s due to enter service this year.
Tags: A-50, Avdiivka, David Axe, Michael Bohnert, Military, Patriot Missiles, Russia, Russo-Ukrainian War, Su-34, Su-35, Ukraine, video
so the north Koreans finally have a way to get rid of the MiG 15s and 17s, and AN2s…
“And Ukraine still has F-16s due to enter service this year.”
The point! F-16s will enjoy free reign over an airspace that has been swept clean of Russian opposition. This will allow precise targeting of logistic nodes, using JDAM strikes to cripple resupply efforts. LJDAMS’ airburst capability will effectively end meat wave tactics.
Tanks don’t run on empty fuel tanks. Vatniks don’t advance against a steel curtain.
Russia’s invasion is at high tide. Receding meat waves will be borne upon the falling crest of Russia’s neo-Imperial ambitions. It couldn’t happen to a more deserving people.
With air superiority, the Ukes could get some nice CAS from A-10 Warthogs. I heard there may be some available soon. :)
Not that I want to increase our military presence in Eastern Europe’s ongoing territorial disputes, but just imagine what a single pair of F-22s and an E-3 Sentry (AWACS) could do to the Rooskies.
NATO is flying AWACS over countries and the Black Sea, sending information to Ukraine and providing real-time information to their killchain, so there would only be marginal gains (and much risk) if Ukraine had their own AWACS.
The F-22 is congressionally forbidden from being exported. So that’s not going to happen.
The longer Russia persists in this folly, the longer and harder the fall is going to be.
I don’t think the bullshit being broadcast about Avdiivka really catches the reality of it: They expended about 40,000+ soldiers and God alone knows how many of their combat vehicles. For what? A mid-level city with very little strategic value?
They basically just inflicted Stalingrad or the Somme on themselves, and are crowing about the victory. Where does this leave them, going after the rest of their goals? What are they going to achieve them with? The rapidity with which the Ukrainians are relieving them of their very expensive air assets is instructive… They wouldn’t be risking those SU-34s the way they are unless they were desperate.
Russia has, as they say in the exercises, culminated. All that’s really left is for them to recognize that fact, and act accordingly. Putin is going to have some very hard questions to answer, particularly once the Ukrainians get let off their leashes. One of the things I don’t think the Biden administration has recognized is that once they’re no longer on the list of major providers, then the Ukrainians don’t have to take their “advice” about limitations on strike targets in Russia. Get the drone factories churning out enough of those cheap-and-nasties, and you won’t see too many Russian transformers or transfer stations left, followed by the total collapse of their transportation network, which is far too reliant on electric traction for a nation like theirs. Once Ukraine has nothing left to lose, it will get very ugly.
Still not too sure why everyone seems to think that Biden and his criminal coterie are on Ukraine’s side in all this… The war could have been ended a year ago, with the full cooperation of the administration. All they had to do was say “Yeah, we guaranteed Ukraine’s borders back when they gave up their nukes…” and then open the taps for all the long-range weaponry. In the face of that sort of opposition, Russian forces would have been forced to withdraw, or lose everything. ATACMS on all the logistics points and electrical distribution centers? No more Russian Army in Ukraine.
All they’ve really managed to do here is force the development and proliferation of drone warfare. Which is fully consonant with the ahistorical idiocy of most of these people we have running things, just like they didn’t pay attention to the fact that by doing Khadafy the way they did, they basically shivved nuclear non-proliferation…
Just what, do you suppose, is going to happen once this current conflict is over? Ya think those drone operators and manufacturers are just going to evaporate? Or, are they going to be looking for work, as well as carrying grudges? It’ll be about like the aftermath of the Thirty Years War, with all those veteran unemployed soldiers… Look for decades of disruption to ensue.
I give it to the end of this decade, and we’ll start to see the drone assassinations of various actors in various situations. Some will be political, some will be like Elon Musk, some will be innocent bystanders.
All I can say is, we’re led by idiots. This ain’t ending well, either.
U.S. and allies slow-walking aide has also done one other thing: It’s destroyed a huge amount of Russian and legacy Soviet war material. Russia has seriously depleted (possibly exhausted) it’s vast stockpiles of artillery shells, used up a whole lot of planes, tanks and BMPs, and lost a significant chunk of it’s Black Sea fleet.
All of that greatly helps frontline NATO states like Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. (Not to mention new members Finland and Sweden.) The longer the war continues, the more defanged the Russian bear becomes.
That sucks for Ukraine, but is a huge benefit to the other NATO states at what is essentially a very nominal cost.
It’s also effectively destroying the cadre that the Russians would need to even start rebuilding their forces…
This is what happens when you put people in charge who don’t understand or value the lower echelons in an enterprise, particularly the military. Most of those Russian soldiers you see dying in all the video seen are doing so because there isn’t any one there to get them moving and “get off the X”, which is where you first begin to feel the pain of not having mid-level leadership. Observe all the Russians that just lay there, under the drones, or the ones who debark the infantry carriers and promptly just sit there, waiting. They don’t disperse; they don’t start digging in; they basically take zero actions to get anything done which might have tactical effect or enhance the chances of their survival.
The first thing that comes to mind when watching these video clips is just how ‘effing inept these poor bastards really are. “To lead an untrained people to war is to throw them away…” is attributed to Confucius, but that’s an eternal truism. What Russia is doing is criminal; there are no mid-level leaders there to keep these kids alive and functional under fire.
What strikes me as particularly noticeable is the continuity demonstrated here between the old Communist regime and the current lot of idiots: There isn’t any real “rise from below” leadership permitted in those systems because those people are really, really dangerous to the regime’s stability. All the leadership has to come from “above” and be properly vetted and indoctrinated at some academy. They even did this in their factories; you didn’t ever have a guy just work his way up from the factory floor through work experience. They had to be “good party members” and properly indoctrinated at some party-run school or other program before they’d get those jobs. You just don’t have the mid-level NCO types in their system, and that was deliberately done because of their observation about how dangerous the old Tsarist NCO corps had been to the Tsar’s system when they turned on the regime.
You’re seeing the effect of this right now, in real time. Given how much dispersion has been forced on the forces at the points of contact…? It’s deadly. You can’t put poorly-trained junior troops into contact zones without decent “adult supervision” and expect anything good to happen.
Yeah, it occurred to me that if one was computer-gaming this, deliberately drip-feeding the assistance to drag out the war as long as possible so as to maximize casualties without ever bumping the enemy AI’s morale below the critical trigger level could definitely be a workable approach.
Not that I think anyone inside DC is that smart. Nor would I expect the Ukrainians to be particularly happy about being used that way. But it’s an interesting result all the same.
There’s a lot we’re unaware of, that we haven’t been told.
Ukraine has been a long-time catspaw of the American establishment… That much was obvious back in the early 2000s. I don’t know what the exact deal was, but none of what’s gone on has been exactly what we have been told. The Obama admin was deep into the whole thing, and the fact that the US oligarchy was using Ukraine as an ATM is telling.
Burisma, the company Biden’s kid was involved with, was a Russian front run by a Russian oligarch. If I’m inferring properly, Zelensky really screwed over the entire program back in 2022 when he refused to evacuate. I suspect that the plan was that the US would offer him his “Golden Path”, and he and other Ukrainian figures would get out with everything intact while the Russians went ahead and looted Ukraine and got back ahold of its industrial base, without which they’ve been crippled. I’m going to say that there must have been something that Zelensky had to hold over the idiots, because that’s about all that would explain everything since then. Including the “slow-walk” of really effective weapons: The Biden Krime Krewe doesn’t really want Ukraine to win, or even exist. They want a strong Russia, ‘cos Russia has been paying their bribes since Uranium One days.
And, the canard that Trump is a Russian asset? LOL… He’s far from that, based just on the things he did in office. Remember, when he sent the Javelins and all that to Ukraine? The ones that were crucial to beating the Russian’s thrusts towards Kyiv? Those were the first weapons sent to Ukraine, and it happened on his authority. Were he a Russian asset, I don’t think that would have happened. Ever.
This whole thing is a shadow-game, and we’re only seeing the shadows on the wall that the players want us to. There’s a bunch of data we simply don’t have, and if we ever get it? I don’t think that the average American is going to be very happy with what their government has been up to, or who got rich off of it. Look at the bank accounts of the Biden and the Pelosi families, and ask how they got that wealthy merely through “public service” where the salaries aren’t all that high.
We need forensic accountants to go through every politicians finances every single year they’re in office, and then again when they retire. If they can’t explain where those massive bank accounts came from? Prison, in literal “pound-them-in-the-ass” Federal pens with all the low-life scum the rest of us have to put up with…
I’m dead serious about that: There is no way these scumbags have gotten this rich honestly. What services are the Biden family members offering, to be worth that compensation? What did Hunter do for Burisma, an oil/natural gas company? Is he a geologist, as well as an artist?
Kirk says:
If I’m inferring properly, Zelensky really screwed over the entire program back in 2022 when he refused to evacuate. I suspect that the plan was that the US would offer him his “Golden Path”, and he and other Ukrainian figures would get out with everything intact while the Russians went ahead and looted Ukraine and got back ahold of its industrial base, without which they’ve been crippled.
Yes, I’ve been saying that for over a year. In a previous post you wrote:
Still not too sure why everyone seems to think that Biden and his criminal coterie are on Ukraine’s side in all this…
Their plan was as you state. Zelensky decided he wanted to be an actual leader, refused to bug out, and blackmailed Biden et. al. with the promise to release to the public information about all their payoffs, unless they ponied up.
So they look like they support Ukraine, when what they actually “support” is not going to jail for all the corruption they took part in. Because documents from Busima board members writing “Talked with Hunter. He promised to get his father to get Shokin fired” nuke all of Biden’s deniability, and all the “but Shokin was bad” story lines.
Hell, Zelensky didn’t’t even have to have the documents, in order to threaten to release them if Joe didn’t play ball
Over the last ten days, Ukraine has managed to shoot down no less than 12 Russian military aircraft:
As someone who grew up reading stories about WWII battles, the idea of losing 12 aircraft in 10 days being “Unsustainable Losses” just blows my mind.
I’m fairly certain the 2024 US military could beat the 1941 Wehrmacht.
But short of nuking most of Central Europe, I don’t believe the current Russian Army could stop the 1941 Wehrmacht from doing whatever it wanted.
And that’s pretty pitiful
I wouldn’t be so sure about that 2024 US military… After the fancy munitions ran out? With the numbers we’ve got? LOL… Not to mention, the incompetent senior leadership?
These idiots are the ones that screwed up the withdrawal from Afghanistan, don’t forget. Something that a good corporal could have managed better, if only because he’d have kept Bagram open to do the evac through, rather than the convenient-to-the-State Department airport that we did keep…
Most of the root problem is the leadership. Russia has reverted to type; the short interregnum of ruthless competence directed by Beria and Stalin only interrupted the corruption. Russia was always famous for that; read the 18th and 19th Century accounts of the British traders that worked there. And, they’ve always been inept as hell, militarily… The only reason that Catherine the Great managed her conquests in the Caucasus the way she did was with the sheer mass of the troops she could bring to bear, and that mass isn’t there, any more. Putin operates as though it were, but… Nope. The demographics have shifted, but he hasn’t figured that out yet.
The real story of the next hundred years is going to be the sudden stop to all this crap that will stem from the demographic collapses coming. The elites have their little fantasies about “you will own nothing, and like it…” but what they forget is that there are corollaries to it all, reciprocals: What happens when those proles stop breeding, and your labor suddenly isn’t there, any more? They predicate their worldview and plans on an ever-increasing mass of the lower classes, but what the hell are they going to do when said lower classes aren’t there…? What’s the birth rate in the industrialized West, these days? All well below replacement.
The Bible says something to the effect of “Bind not the mouths of the kine that tread the grain” in 1 Corinthians 9:9. This isn’t just quaint advice about how to manage your livestock; this is an actual truth that the elites of this world are about to learn. Why should any of us participate in a rigged game? What incentive does anyone have, to raise kids for these assholes to exploit?
The Putins and Klaus Schwabs of the world live in the past, where the elites had endless numbers of peasants to call on and abuse to their heart’s content. Those days are gone; this coming era is going to be more like the days right after the Black Death, when the serfs stopped playing the game that supported everyone else in society. Labor is going to get so damn expensive that it’s not even funny, and that’s just not physical labor, either.
It’ll be darkly amusing to observe the Klaus Schwab types having to do their own laundry and dishes, while they wonder how it all went so very wrong.
Can’t be an Indian chief if you ain’t got no tribe, baby…
Mykola Vladyslavovych Zlochevskiy, the founder of Burisma Holdings, is a Ukrainian oligarch. Zlochevskiy was Ukraine’s Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources, then their deputy secretary of the National Security and Defense Council.
Zlochevskiy was targeted by the American led coup d’etat in 2014, so he sold his shares to another Ukrainian oligarch, Ihor Valeriyovych Kolomoyskyi. Kolomoyskyi is the leading Ukrainian oligarch and he – almost exclusively – financed Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s 2019 presidential election campaign. Zlochevskiy was the single most prominent opponent of the pro-Russian Party of Regions, which Zelenskiy banned after taking office.
Oh, really?
Fascinating. So, his position as one of Yanukovych’s leading supporters and beneficiaries is of no import? Yanukovych, who fled to Moscow and has been maintained there ever since in luxury?
I don’t think you know as much as you think you do.
Burisma was a front; the parties involved in it were Russian agents and tied in with Russian oligarchs. Part of why Putin is so dead-set against Zelensky is because Zelensky seized a whole lot of stuff belonging to them, which the invasion was supposed to repossess.
Of course, trying to work out precisely who did what to whom at this point, from this perspective, absent all the information you’d need to tease out reality? Good luck.
Burisma did nothing to benefit Ukraine; from the actions taken, you can only see benefit to the Russians and Russian oligarchs. As well, the entire thrust of Obama’s administration was enabling the looting of Ukraine, or you wouldn’t have seen all the minor little details like Uranium One going through or the “Reset” with Russia. Do remember who got so thoroughly mocked by Obama when he rightly pointed out that Russia was a geopolitical problem for the US…
Obama, Biden, and Hillary were never looking out for Ukraine’s best interests. Ever.
10x25mm says:
Zlochevskiy was targeted by the American led coup d’etat in 2014
You are such a delusional lunatic.
The people of Ukraine, who wanted to be closer to the West, not slaves of Russia, rose up against Yanukovych after he tried to force them into Russian slavery.
It’s amazing the number of people who are convinced that no one in Ukraine has any agency, they’re all just tools of the CIA
News flash: Ukrainians remember the Holodomor. None of hte sane ones want it again, which is why none of the sane ones want to be under Russia aver again.
THAT is what drove 2014, not the Obama CIA
“Burisma was a front; the parties involved in it were Russian agents and tied in with Russian oligarchs. Part of why Putin is so dead-set against Zelensky is because Zelensky seized a whole lot of stuff belonging to them, which the invasion was supposed to repossess.”
Putin hates both Mykola Vladyslavovych Zlochevskiy and Ihor Valeriyovych Kolomoyskyi. Zlochevskiy is the single most important financier of Ukraine’s military drone program. Kolomoyskyi spent $10 million to create the Dnipro Battalion and provided the funds which created the Aidar, Azov, and Donbas neoNazi battalions.
Putin referred to Kolomoyskyi as a “unique crook” in 2014. Kolomoyskyi ripped off Russian oligarch Roman Arkadyevich Abramovich to the tune of $ 4.5 billion dollars. Roman Abramovich is a close confidant of Putin.
Burisma produced 1.3 billion cubic meters of natural gas in Ukraine in 2018. That was about 10% of Ukraine’s total supply at a time when Russia was throttling deliveries due to Ukraine’s non payment of GazProm invoices.
So Burisma was an entirely Ukrainian criminal operation well hated by Russia and well loved by Ukrainian and American politicians of a certain stripe.
Do you get any sense of NON-combat losses in the Russian Air Force?
Remember, we are talking about world-class screwups when it comes to maintenance, PLUS, if you are correct, world-class pilot fatigue from overuse.
You could think of other factors, but I’d be curious as to your opinion.
TANSTAAFL