Jets Downed Shows Ukraine Effectively Adapts New Weapons Better Than Russians
Whether it was stealthily deployed Patriot missile batteries or - even more remarkable, if true - the secret activation of a NATO-supplied and trained Ukrainian F-16 squadron, Ukraine has repeatedly demonstrated that it is more adaptive, effective and smarter than the much larger Russian military. JL
Phillips O'Brien reports in his substack, image Bulent Kilic, AFP, Getty:
The destruction of Russia’s most advanced aircraft brought home a salient point of this war that the
Ukrainian military is more adaptive and effective than the Russians. It showed again when given advanced systems,
Ukraine uses them to great effect. The Ukrainians laid a trap for the Russians, secretly moving
one of their new Patriot batteries close to the Russian border in Kharkiv oblast where Ukraine could reach into Russia and ambush the
unsuspecting Russians.
Ukraine out-thinks, out-plans and out-executes the Russians. The SU-34s had been used recently
by the Russians to launch glide bombs against Ukrainian troops. The SU-34s were so close
to Ukrainian lines might mean they were launching glides. If
the Russians pull back on this it would be another benefit for
Ukraine,
This week the most interesting story, the rapid-fire destruction of three of Russia’s most advanced aircraft, once again, brought home the salient point of this war that the Ukrainian military is more adaptive and effective than the Russian military. Futhermore it showed again that when given advanced systems, Ukraine uses them to great effect against the Russians. Its a lesson that has been demonstrated time and again, which is both heartening for those of us who support Ukraine, but terribly depressing too—as it points out the limitations of the support with which Ukraine has been provided.
Indeed this one engagement, which involved Ukrainians (almost certainly) firing Patriot anti-aircraft missiles against Russian SU-34 fighter-bombers, some of the best Russian aircraft, summarizes so much of how aid for Ukraine has been given (or often not given) and how pre-war assumptions of Russian strength and escalation threats remain just as strong as they were.
For this weekend update, I thought it would be worthwhile to provide you with a detailed case study on this one case, as it did happen this week, but reveals so much about the war and how it develops. Also, if you do want to hear more of an overview of the war this weekend, Mykola Bielieskov and I released our latest Ukraine-Russia War Podcast on Friday (recorded Thursday before this news came out). In it we actually discussed how Ukrainian air defense was improving and how crucial it is for the war—and then Ukraine goes and pulls of this operation which makes the point far better than we ever could.
The way news gets out in this war can be fascinating. This story, one of the most important of the week, exploded out of nowhere, when the Ukrainian General Staff, yesterday morning, tweeted out this rather remarkable claim with no fanfare.
It set off a bit of a frenzy of claims before it seemed that, yes indeed, the Ukrainians had shot down 3 Russian SU-34s in one engagement. Soon the Ukrainian government was confirming the story and then President Zelensky mentioned it in his evening address.1Zelensky even provided some details of where the operation took place:
I am grateful to our warriors for downing three Russian “Su” aircraft over our Kherson region today in Ukraine's south. This is the result of our Air Forces, specifically the Anti-Aircraft Artillery Brigade of Odesa. Thank you, warriors! Every Russian pilot must know that every Russian murderer will get our response, and none of them will escape justice.
That the Ukrainians pulled off such a successful mission is both surprising and at the same time unsurprising. Surprising in that the Russians were caught using three of their most valuable assets in areas that made them so vulnerable, unsurprising in that the Ukrainians devised a plan and used their equipment effectively to take advantage of the Russians taking such a risk.
The location of the shooting down was also interesting. As President Zelensky stated, the troops involved with the success came from Odessa Oblast, and that confirmed other evidence that the SU-34s were shot down somewhere over occupied western Ukraine. Here is one attempt to map it.
What the Ukrainians used has not yet been confirmed, but the evidence points extremely strongly towards the use of Patriot Anti-Air missiles. This system is the most effective that the Ukrainians possess, and, moreover, the Ukrainians had used the Patriots in the Spring of 2023, not long after they got their hands on them, to do something similar. On May 12, 2023, stories came out that the Ukrainians had shot down 4 valuable Russian aircraft that were actually flying in Russian airspace (and probably thought themselves safe).2
What later emerged is that the Ukrainians had laid a trap for the Russians. They had secretly moved one of their new Patriot batteries (they had just become functional in Ukraine) very close to the Russian border in Kharkiv oblast. From there, the Ukrainians could reach into Russia itself and ambush the unsuspecting Russians.
Smoke rising from the successful shooting down of Russian aircraft over Russia in May 2023.
For the Ukrainians it was a calculated risk. Patriots are some of the most important equipment they possess, and they had only been given two systems for the entire country (one of which seems permanently based around the capital Kyiv to provide protection there). In the case this week odds are that this earlier attack was repeated. The Ukrainians seem to have sent one of their Patriot systems down south, probably noticed a pattern of Russian flying which left the SU-34s vulnerable, then taken another calculated risk of pushing the Patriots close enough to the Dnipro River front where it could hit the Russian aircraft. The result was the destruction of more than $100million of valuable Russian military equipment in a matter of minutes/seconds.
Once again, Ukraine has shown what it could accomplish with advanced weaponry—it regularly out-thinks, out-plans and out-executes the Russians. Indeed this operation should be doubly effective. The SU-34s had been used recently by the Russians to launch glide bombs against Ukrainian troops.3These glide bombs have caused the Ukrainians real trouble for a while, as they are stealthy and accurate. That the SU-34s were so relatively close to Ukrainian lines might mean that they were launching glide bombs. If the Russians now pull back on this—it would be another real benefit for Ukraine, above and beyond the destruction of the planes themselves.
The tragedy is that even with this evidence, its been such a long and uneven road to get here. In many ways the story of the Patriots and the SU-34s is a story of the war in a nutshell.
Lets turn our minds back to February 2022. At that time both the Patriots and S-34s were discussed as possible systems that could interact in any Russian full-scale invasion, but very very differently.
The Patriots were an older US designed (think 1980s and 1990s) anti-air system that has been continually upgraded to be one of the most reliable systems in the US arsenal. The Ukrainians, not surprisingly, desperately wanted and needed them. Indeed, the Ukrainians had been asking for Patriots for years—reaching back to 2016. Clever analysts, however, always attacked this idea as both dangerously escalatory but also something that would be bound to be ineffective. Basically, they argued, the Ukrainians were so weak and the Russians so strong, that even if the US sent Ukrainians Patriots, they would prove ineffective against the might Russian war machine and, anyway, they were such complex systems that there would be no time to train the Ukrainians to use them properly. Just a few examples, so you can get a flavor of how widespread this was.
Writing inThe National Interest, Sebastien Roblin in December 2021 presented both major arguments.4First, Patriots could not really help Ukraine against the mighty Russians. As he says in the opening section of the piece:
It's fully understandable that Kiev wants modern air defenses to mitigate the damage of such a scenario. But the risk of renewed war with Russia is dangerously near—and Patriot missiles cannot help Ukraine in such a timeframe.
However, he goes on to say, not only could Patriots not help Ukraine, they would needlessly antagonize Putin and make a Russian invasion more likely (ho-ho) or, as Roblin claimed later;”Moscow might use a move by Washington to give Patriot missiles or other strategically impactful weapons to Ukraine as a pretext to justify invasion.”
This kind of argument had been repeated loudly for years, and the upshot was that when the Russians did launch their full scale invasion, Ukrainian air defense was considered so weak (and without Patriots) that Ukraine was given no chance of resisting. In an NBC article published just a day before the full scale invasion, and entitled:Why didn't the U.S. and allies provide Ukraine with a better air defense system?the same two basic points were repeated.5First that fear of provoking Russia meant that Patriots were not sent and that anyway, Ukraine could not use them in time. The article started:
A confluence of concerns — fear of provoking Russia, worries the technology could fall into Russian hands, doubts Ukraine could operate the systems — prevented the U.S. and its allies from granting Ukrainian requests for sophisticated surface-to-air missiles in the years after Russia seized Crimea in 2014, current and former American officials and defense experts told NBC News.
Those calculations seemed reasonable at the time, yet they all but ensured Ukraine would be largely defenseless against what experts say would be an overwhelming display of air power should Russia mount a full-scale invasion. American officials are scrambling to find waysto help Ukrainian forcespreserve themselves, but there are few good options.
The real BS above was that the arguments seemed reasonable at the time. Its just that so many analysts were arguing not to arm Ukraine (so wrongly as it turned out) that they tried to create a narrative where there arguments were right.
The article was also full of well-known analysts oohing and aahing over Russian military power which was supposed to be able to crush Ukraine—go ahead and read it if you want.
Now, as the article makes clear, Russian air power was considered so powerful, that giving Ukrainians Patriots would be ineffective. And a key part of the awesomeness of Russian air power was the SU-34 fighter-bomber.
SU-34 in flight. https://www.airforce-technology.com/projects/su34/?cf-view
The SU-34 was considered an equal to the best western aircraft, and one of the great success stories (if that word can be used here) of the Russian air force in Syria. Whole articles were written about what a powerful aircraft it was, such as this piece inThe National interestby Mark Episkopos which was entitled:The Su-34’s Syria Performance Proves That Its a ‘Fifth-Generation’ Fighter Jet.6The title says it all, the SU-34 was a very impressive aircraft that was battle tested in Syria and would be a great element of Russian air-power going forward. As the article started:
The Sukhoi Su-34 (NATO reporting name Fullback) is among Russia’s most capable strike fighters, blending a time-proven airframe design with a raft of modern performance features.
So before February 24, 2022, the arguments about these systems were widespread. The SU-34 was a great aircraft and would help overwhelm Ukraine from the air, whereas Ukraine should not receive Patriots as that would only antagonize Putin and, regardless they would not make any difference as Russia was so strong and Ukraine could never learn to use them fast enough.
Patriots and Ukraine after Feb 24, 2022.
The failure of the initial phase of the Russian full-scale invasion, remarkably, did not upend what had clearly been a deeply flawed analysis before Feb 24, 2022. In particular, when it came to supplying Ukraine with Patriots, alot of the earlier shibboleths remained in place.
Though Ukraine, not surprisingly, started begging for Patriots immediately after the invasion, at first they were met with really pathetic obfuscations and outright lies. In early March, one of the most disingenuous of these was given, when an unnamed US defense official said that there was no chance that Ukraine would get Patriots, as the system could not possibly be deployed in Ukraine without the deployment of US forces into Ukraine.7
“There's no discussion about putting a Patriot battery in Ukraine. In order to do that you have to put U.S. troops with it to operate it,” a senior defense official said Thursday. “It is not a system that the Ukrainians are familiar with and as we have made very clear, there will be no U.S. troops fighting in Ukraine.”
Its hard to tell if this was an outright lie (the Patriots were eventually deployed without US troops on the ground) or outright stupidity. It had to be one of the two.
Anyway, this kind of ducking and weaving went on for months and months, almost until the end of 2022. As the US hemmed and hawed about the Patriots, the Russians started their campaign in the Autumn of 2022 to bombard Ukrainian cities and degrade Ukrainian infrastructure. They did enormous damage, and the Ukrainians, coping with decent but still inferior air defense systems, struggled to defend their homeland. Still, when the prospect of sending Patriots started being discussed again in earnestness in the Autumn, the US response was to throw even more cold-water on the prospect. One of the most common things was to stress how long it would take to get them active.
Patriot
Thismedium- to long-range U.S. systemis the gold standard for air and missile defense. Used by a dozen countries, it has been continuously upgraded since first introduced in the 1960s and proven successful in multiple combat operations. Because it is currently in production and withover a thousand launchers produced for the United States and global customers, it would be a natural system for Ukrainian air defense. The obstacle is that Patriot is highly complex, with a sophisticated radar and command center in addition to the launcher. To give a sense of the complexity,the Patriot system repairer course is 53 weeks.Patriot would be well-suited for postwar reconstruction of the Ukrainian military. However, because training operators and establishing a maintenance system would take years, it would not be suitable for near-term transfer.8
Patriots after April 2023
Lo and behold, in December 2022, all the BS arguments against Ukraine getting Patriots were put aside, and the US government confirmed that it had agreed to transfer a Patriot system to Ukraine.9The toll of Russia’s campaign against Ukrainian infrastructure seemed to jolt the US into action and the administration okayed the transfer. At that point many of the earlier arguments were shown to be shams. Patriots no longer required US personnel to go to Ukraine, nor did they require the Ukrainians to spend a year learning how to operate and maintain their systems. Ukrainians were trained in Patriot usage outside of Ukraine (as they always could have been) and they learned very rapidly (a few months) how to use and maintain them.
People seemed to forget that under the pressure of war, peacetime operations can be sped up a great deal. Anyway, in reality it took about 4 months for the Ukrainians to be trained, the Patriots to be delivered and the systems to be put into operation. The Ukrainian defense ministry confirmed in April 2023 that the first Patriot system was in Ukraine.10By May the Ukrainians were so competent in their usage, that they pulled off the first surprise massacre of Russian aircraft.
Since then the Patriots have proven their great worth in protecting Kyiv and other parts of Ukraine (it seems that there is always one Patriot somewhere near Kyiv and the other is more mobile). One of the reasons that the Russian campaign this winter against Ukrainian cities and infrastructure has been less effective than last year’s, has been the Patriots. I will write more on this later, but so far there have not been the major power cuts of last winter. And as long as Ukraine continues getting anti-air ammo, there should not be.
And then there was this week, when the Ukrainians once again showed what they could do. Do you see what I mean about this being heartening and depressing at the same time? Ukraine, once again, has shown what it can do when armed properly—and at the same time it reveals the shortfalls in what Ukraine has received. All the same kids of arguments about the Patriots have been used repeatedly about other systems both before Feb 24, 2022 and after. Maybe now, the administration will see what Ukraine can do when properly armed.
As a Partner and Co-Founder of Predictiv and PredictivAsia, Jon specializes in management performance and organizational effectiveness for both domestic and international clients. He is an editor and author whose works include Invisible Advantage: How Intangilbles are Driving Business Performance. Learn more...
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