Early on, a lot of observers predicted that Russia, with it’s vast store of Soviet-era aircraft, would quickly achieve air-superiority over Ukraine. That hasn’t been the case.
This video from the British Imperial War Museum lists some reasons why.
Takeaways:
They failed to hit Ukrainian aircraft on the ground in the opening phases of the war.
A “great deal of mismanagement, kleptocracy, you know, favored projects over some kind of strategic effect.” Note how Putin is always announcing some sort of awesome wonderwaffen while neglecting basic needs like logistics.
“The level of corruption in Russia itself has had an impact on its ability to have a tactical or even strategic effect without support from the air. Russia’s ground forces have been largely unable to mount effective combined arms operations.”
“The key reason for Russia’s inability to effectively use its air force has been its failure to take out Ukraine’s mobile surface to air missile systems. They have been unable to suppress enemy air defenses.”
Ukraine made an early effort to obtain SAM systems from the west.
Both mobile tracked systems like S-300 and MANPADS have been used.
Failure to achieve air superiority has both sides investing in drones.
“What you do is you flood the airspace, almost like a denial of service attack, as we see on the Internet. As you attack a server, for instance, by having so many pings against it, it essentially shuts down the server. And what we see in the case of Russia is that it’s doing the same thing. It’s trying to flood the air defense systems.”
“The relatively low cost of these drones is one of the main reasons for Russia to deploy them, and in such numbers. Each drone reportedly costs around $20,000. And so losing an expensive advance guided missile to these drones is not an ideal strategy for Ukraine.”
One reason not covered: Russia seems to have used up a good portion of it’s high tech weapons in the opening phases of the war, and western sanctions mean that it can’t easily replace them. Sophisticated fighter bombers are a whole lot less effective when they’re reduced to dropping gravity bombs rather than guided munitions.