Better Than Shooting Russian Jets Down? Destroying Them Before They Take Off

Hitting Russian planes on the ground turns out to be more effective than striking them in the air, so that is what Ukraine is doing. 

And the Russians are feeling it. JL  

David Axe reports in Forbes:

Ukraine is deploying its best deep-strike systems - its homemade long-range drones - to strike at Russia’s own most important deep-strike systems, its Sukhoi fighter-bombers. The Ukrainians've targeted the remaining 200 Sukhois on the ground at one of their biggest bases. Russia’s air defenses are spread thin protecting front-line units while also safeguarding dozens of oil refineries and arms factories.

Ukrainian air defenses shot down a lot of Russian warplanes in late February and early March, mostly in eastern Ukraine. If you believe Kyiv’s claims, the shoot-downs included 11 Sukhoi Su-34 fighter-bombers, two Sukhoi Su-35 fighters and a rare Beriev A-50 radar plane.

But if the potentially extreme losses in planes and crews deterred the Russian air force, they didn’t deter it for long. So now the Ukrainians are trying something different: they’ve targeted the remaining 200 or so Sukhois on the ground at one of their biggest bases.

Late Thursday night or early Friday morning, a flight of one-way explosive drones swarmed the Russian air base in Morozovsk, in western Russia 190 miles from the front line in eastern Ukraine.

Videos from around the base depict drones zooming overhead and explosions rocking the base, which is home to the 559th Bomber Aviation Regiment. At the time of the attack, as many as 26 of the two-seat Su-34s as well as three single-seat jets, seemingly Su-35s, were parked on the aprons around the base.

Kyiv claimed it wrecked six Russian jets, but it’s impossible to confirm that claim right now. Low-resolution satellite imagery of Morozovsk from Friday is inconclusive. Whether the Ukrainians destroyed any Sukhois, and how many they may have destroyed, is beside the point, however. What’s important is that they tried—and almost certainly will keep trying.

Ukraine is deploying its best deep-strike systems—its many homemade long-range drones—to strike back at Russia’s own most important deep-strike systems, its Sukhoi fighter-bombers.

It’s part of a widening campaign of Ukrainian drone raids deep inside Russia’s borders. A campaign that has targeted Russian oil refineries and, in one especially dramatic attack carried out by an explosives-laden robotic sport-plane, a Russian drone factory.

 

It makes sense for the Sukhois to be at the top of list of potential targets. Su-34s lobbing 1,100-, 2,200- or 3,300-pound “KAB” precision-guided glide-bombs are, at present, the decisive weapons in Russia’s 26-month wider war on Ukraine. Dropped from 25 miles away or farther, “these bombs completely destroy any position,” wrote Egor Sugar, a trooper with the Ukrainian 3rd Assault Brigade.

At the height of the battle for the eastern city of Avdiivka in mid-February, the Russians lobbed 250 KABs in just two days, rendering the city indefensible and compelling the ammunition-starved Ukrainian garrison to retreat.

 

The Avdiivka glide-bombing campaign could “herald a change in Russian operations elsewhere along the front line,” the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, D.C., warned as Avdiivka fell.

Sure enough, Su-34s now are dropping as many as 100 KABs every day, and concentrating the bombs on whichever town or village the Russian army aims to occupy next.

Desperate to blunt the glide-bombing campaign, the Ukrainian air force took a big risk. After Avdiivka fell, Kyiv’s air force deployed one of its three Patriot air defense batteries—its best air defenses—within just 20 miles of the eastern from. From there, the 90-mile-range Patriots could reach the Sukhois as they lined up for the glide-bombing runs, tens of miles behind the line of contact.

 

It was this mobile Patriot unit that may have hit most of those 13 Sukhois the Ukrainian defense ministry claimed it shot down in a heady 13 days starting on Feb. 19.

It was risky work for the Ukrainian crews. And on March 9, the risk caught up to them. A Russian drone spotted the Patriot team on the move near Pokrovsk. A Russian Iskander rocket streaked down, blowing up at least two of the precious Patriot launchers and killing some of their crews.

Considering that the United States—alongside Germany—is the main source of Ukraine’s Patriots, and also considering the United States hasn’t provided much aid to Ukraine since Russia-friendly Republicans in the U.S. Congress refused to vote on further war funding starting in October, the Ukrainians can’t afford to risk more Patriots near the front line.

So the surviving Ukrainian air-defenders pulled back, and the surviving Russian aircrews resumed their relentless glide-bombing. Seemingly conceding that it can’t shoot down enough Sukhois to cure the Russians’ 100-KAB-a-day bombing habit, Ukraine is changing up its tactics. It’s going after the bombers while the bombers are on the ground.

Russia air defenses could shoot down the slow-flying Ukrainian drones, of course. But Russia’s air defenses are spread thin protecting front-line units while also safeguarding dozens of oil refineries and arms factories. “You can’t defend everywhere,” retired U.S. Army general Mark Hertling noted.

Maybe the Russians got lucky and no Sukhois burned in the recent drone raid. Don’t expect that luck to hold as more drones buzz in.