Ukraine’s air force is desperately short of ammunition, including US-made Patriot air defense missiles. But anyway, they rarely waste shells and don’t miss when they shoot. Proof of this is that in the last three days, the Air Force of Ukraine managed to shoot down six Russian fighter-bombers – a level of losses that the Russians cannot bear, writes American expert David Ax in an article for Forbes magazine.
“Russian planes continue to fall!” Ukraine’s Defense Ministry announced on Monday. The announced number of downed machines included four two-seat Su-34 fighter-bombers and two single-seat Su-35s.
The Su-34 is the best supersonic attack aircraft of the Russian Air Force. Lately, they’ve mostly been performing close air support missions – flying high and fast to the front line, dropping precision-guided bombs.
The supersonic Su-35s are air superiority fighters: they usually escort Su-34s.
The Ukrainians shot down the first three Sukhoi jets on Saturday as they were flying east of Avdeevka in the Donetsk region and lining up to attack Ukrainian units withdrawing from the city.
The Ukrainian military claimed to have shot down a fourth Sukhoi on Sunday and two more on Monday, the latest over the Sea of Azov.
It is possible – even likely – that Ukrainian Patriot missile batteries, three of which Kiev received from the US and Germany, were responsible for all six hits.
The Ukrainian Air Force has deployed one Patriot battery in Kiev and one each in the south and east of the country. Battery launchers mounted on trucks can move while still connected to the battery radars.
The Russian Air Force will not be without the Sukhoi. In two years of heavy fighting, according to Oryx, the Russians have lost 25 of their 150 Su-34s and six of their 120 Su-35s.
But the recent rate of losses – six planes in three days – will be unacceptable to Moscow if it continues. The Russian Air Force has lost 95 aircraft since February 2022, or four per month. In the past week, however, Moscow’s military has been decommissioning fighter jets at a rate of 60 per month. These indicators could be disastrous for Russia. Even more serious could be the loss of experienced crews,
For an air force that only has a thousand fast jets, losing 60 in one month would be catastrophic. The loss of experienced aircrew could be even more serious, according to a recent report by the London-based think tank Royal United Services Institute.
Russian air operations “are constrained by the availability of pilots with sufficient experience to carry out key missions,” wrote RUSI analysts Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds.
But it is highly unlikely that the Ukrainian Air Force will continue to shoot down Russian planes at a rate of two per day. Four months after Republicans began blocking US aid to Ukraine, Patriot stockpiles in Ukraine are “falling to a critical level,” according to Anton Gerashchenko, a former adviser to Ukraine’s interior ministry.
And it’s not like the Ukrainians are devoting all their missiles to shooting down the Sukhoi. They also rely on them to intercept Russian ballistic missiles aimed at Kiev, Kharkiv and Odessa.
So expect the Sukhoi carnage to taper off in the coming days as the missile shortage severely impacts Ukraine’s capabilities, but not those to shoot down Russia’s best warplanes.
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2024-02-20 21:23:00
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